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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

I found this part quite notable:

> 10-02, 9:29pm: accident occurs

> 10-03, 1:30am: AV back at Cruise facility

I don't think the police would let an ordinary driver have their car back 4 hours after they ran over a pedestrian! I think they'd keep it for some time to aid their investigation. Is Cruise treated differently here, or am I just wrong?

I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality.

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Presumably the reasons why police want to retain a car in a investigation don't apply here. They know who (what) the driver was, and with the telemetry from the vehicle, they can know exactly what happened. They don't need to collect evidence to prove which human was behind the wheel. There's no point searching for drugs or alcohol. They don't need to dust for fingerprints. They don't need to confirm that damage to the vehicle corroborates eyewitness accounts about what collided where.

Still doesn't make any sense. NTSB doesn't let airline take custody of plane immediately.

You want time to recover data, investigate the physical condition of the aircraft/vehicle, etc.

How thorough of the job can the police do in the dark from 9:30pm-1:30am?

This completely looks like a special snowflake exception that Cruise, given its behavior afterwards, should not have had... and at this point, should not be trusted to have again.

I think you hinted at the real reason but didn’t spell it out. There are no protocols to follow, lists of checkboxes to check, or “perpetrators” to harass in a self-driving car collision (I have to remind myself to avoid the word accident). At least that is my guess.

It is important to remember I think that to the police officers this is just a day in their job they are clocking in and out. They are just following their instructions. It might be life changing for someone who got hit but the world just keeps spinning.

How do you check the basic mechanicals of the car at that hour? So that the driver (automated or human) cannot later claim "oh there was a mechanical failure" ?

What's to stop Cruise or other bad actors to take possession of the car and then clip the brake lines to claim it was actually an OEM vanilla car mechanical fault and not their AV hardware/software?

It's not that outlandish. You already have them doing a whole bunch of lies of omission and smoke screening their video evidence, enough so to trigger a wave of resignation/firings.

> no “perpetrators” to harass

And just like that they lost all interest in the situation.

No police department in the world has the resource or staff to properly do an investigation of these incidents.

Unrealistic take: The police should have kept the vehicle and demanded the source code be released so that it may be investigated if proper safety mechanisms have been implemented and if any errors in the systems may have caused it to hit the pedestrian. In the meantime the vehicles running on the same hardware and software should be put on probation.

Realistically: Police cannot investigate this and as long as these vehicles are classified more like computers and less as an aircraft these incidents are "glitches".

Car accidents are taken orders of magnitude less seriously then plane accidents, it's not surprise that they released the vehicle that quickly.

> NTSB doesn't let airline take custody of plane immediately.

Presumably that happens because the NTSB want to examine the airplane. In this case there was no equivalent organization to the NTSB run by the Police and nothing about the car that needed to be examined by the Police to establish what had happened.

It's not like Chase the company is going to run away, or Chase the company will get away with destroying their data logs if the police asks for it later. Keeping the car serves no benefit.

>... with the telemetry from the vehicle, they can know exactly what happened.

The telemetry would be coming from Cruise, who is not a trustworthy source. This incident is a perfect example of why we shouldn't rely solely on telemetry - whether you believe they were just an innocent victim of bad internet connections or actively trying to downplay the dragging, it's clear they were not a wholly reliable source of information.

> The telemetry would be coming from Cruise, who is not a trustworthy source

Right, but they didn’t know that then.

There is rarely any doubt about who was behind the wheel and police is not collecting evidence about that. Also, alcohol and drug use is determined by breath or blood test.

Car crashes never lead to dusting for fingerprints.

> I'm also surprised they seem to be sharing video by starting a video call and then screen-sharing while it plays?? I'm struggling to come up with a better strategy for degrading the quality.

It's a very effective way to prevent the video from being spread through the entire Internet faster than anyone can reasonably act.

Usually subjects of investigation don't get to choose the mode in which they share evidence

Investigations should happen blameless, behind closed doors, not with stuff being spread all over the internet and armchair experts negatively impacting the investigation with completely unfounded speculations.

That's at least the way aeronautic and European railway investigations happen, and for good reasons - you don't want people holding back evidence for fear of repercussions.

In the US people on the Internet will have ATC recordings almost immediately. The government's accountable to the people, not the other way around.

That's true - without excusing Cruise, the investigators really dropped the ball by accepting that way of a video being shared with them.

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