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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Is this the SF accident you mean? I hadn’t heard of it, but this seems not at all worrisome:

> At approximately 9:30 p.m. on October 2, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian while traveling in the lane immediately to the left of a Cruise AV. The initial impact was severe and launched the pedestrian directly in front of the AV. The AV then braked aggressively to minimize the impact. The driver of the other vehicle fled the scene, and at the request of the police the AV was kept in place.

Why was cruise under fire for this?

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Weird - this leaves out the most worrying part of the incident; the woman was pinned under the cruise vehicle and ended up being dragged under the vehicle as the vehicle started moving again.

Furthermore, Cruise attempted to cover up the fact that the car dragged the woman. Now that I refresh myself on the details of the situation, it seems you have the "cleaned" PR statement that was pushed by Cruise and had omitted the above details

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-26/cruise-rob...

The accident was one thing, but Cruise's response to regulators about the accident escalated the heat. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-...

I don’t understand, but I suppose I’ll have to accept not understanding. The article vaguely gestures towards some sort of misrepresentation, but doesn’t elaborate. Thank you for pointing it out though.

They cut the video they first showed the DMV of the accident to remove the last error made by the car, which was arguably the worst aspect of the accident as far as Cruise's default behavior failures. The DMV found out about the cut segment from the news.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-c...

Ah, thank you. Them not disclosing the full video from the outset was a mistake, but it’s surprising that it escalated so much. A human driver could’ve easily made the same mistake — pulling over isn’t uncommon after an accident, and there’s no way to detect someone under your car other than getting out, which is usually not very safe.

Oh well. Maybe next decade.

Witholding the footage was more than just a mistake. If they are being this dishonest over something that wasn't even entirely their fault, what else could they be hiding?

And no, most human drivers would easily detect a human being stuck under their vehicle within seconds.

A human driver would have probably been driving over the speed limit in this accident. All of these roads are 25 mph, and yet it's not uncommon to see traffic at 40 mph.

There's a good chance the woman would have been _killed outright_ if it hadn't been a Cruise. Are we willing to accept strange and inhuman failure modes if they overall lead to better safety than human drivers?

Please just read on exactly what happened in the accident before making comments about irrelevant frill like the speed limit:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...

I am pretty familiar with the accident. The speed limit is not irrelevant; the question should not be "did the car behave as a perfect human driver would have?"

It should be "was the eventual outcome better than what a human driver would have achieved in the same situation?"

It's not actually clear that a human driver would have done better, and given that the human driver in this incident did a hit-and-run and still hasn't been caught, assuming that is... questionable.

The safety record of these cars is actually quite good when you consider the environment and times of day they operate in.

The escalation is perhaps less surprising given that it happened while Cruise had many (much smaller) traffic issues and CPUC was already significantly limiting Cruise. They were on very thin ice.

You are missing what happened next, which Cruise tried to cover up.

Dig deeper, dude. I'm not sure if you're serious or being disingenuous, but the fallout over that incident has been in tech news including several HN threads for the past 6+ weeks.

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