While the rush to get autonomous vehicles onto the road and testing has meant that many jurisdictions have relaxed their requirements, The New York Times has reported that there has been challenges with Uber’s robotic vehicle project for months before the killing of a pedestrian in Tempe Arizona. It appears that the autonomous vehicles (AV) were having challenges driving through construction zones and next to big scale vehicles, with Uber drivers intervening frequently. And now the numbers are starting to come out~Waymo says that their self-driving cars go an average of 5,600 miles before drivers needed to steer out of trouble, while “Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company’s operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it.”
In November there were unfortunate remarks of Dara Khorowshahi, Uber’s chief executive who made a case for complete separation of this AV technology from other active transportation road users stating “With autonomy, the edge cases kill you, so you’ve got to build out for all the edge cases.Which makes it a very, very difficult problem.” Tricky road situations include cyclists and pedestrians, “edge cases” that are hard to predict. Mr. Khorowshahi visited Phoenix to ride in an Uber car without “human intervention” to demonstrate that the cars could handle the edge cases.
The state of Arizona had previously taken a hands-off attitude to AV’s and did not require any disclosure on the cars’ performance. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Arizona Governor has now halted all Uber tests in the state calling the killing of the pedestrian “an unquestionable failure”. This was not helped along by the auto-parts maker which supplied the Volvo SUV’s radar and camera stating that Uber had “disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the vehicle.”
As an automotive analyst for Garner observed “The collection of bad news around Uber creates a reputation in people’s minds. Every other company would get a black eye, too, but they might be forgiven. For Uber, it’s going to be hard to shake.”
According to CBC, Uber may have turned off safety system. If so, somebody should be charged with criminal negligence. This would explain why the vehicle never slowed.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/uber-arizona-crash-1.4594939
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
To some urbanists the hard push for AVs seems like just another way to avoid addressing the central problem with our cities: An outrageous dependency on cars and fossil fuels and the stupendous public resources that underpin them.
What do AVs have to do with fossil fuels?
Some AVs will be electric, other will use organic oil (aka fossil fuels) !
SkyTrain and CanadaLine are AVs today !
Many future bus routes will use AVs of various sizes. TransLink may operate the largest AV fleet in MetroVan one day (say 2040 or 2045) !
AVs do not apply to construction equipment or making asphalt, nor do they stop needing huge land assemblies for roads. The gasoline vehicles that will remain will still need gas until there is enough electrical generating capacity to convert them to AEVs. That means tens of billions spent on building more dams or renewables and transmission corridors just to continue to prop up the private car and its attendant infrastructure. AVs do have the capacity to limit the number of SOVs, but I suspect that will be limited to people’s social acceptance of sharing rides. Many people will never give up the privacy of SOVs for sharing or transit.
Public transit moves orders of magnitude more people using fewer public resources like land and energy, and its power to reshape cities for the better is huge.
I though Gregor said we can get all the electricity we need by composting our waste.