Nvidia halts tests of self-driving cars after Uber accident

Tell me again why we need driverless vehicles?

 

Because while you read this article, tens if not hundreds of fatal car crashes caused by humans happened all around the world?

http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/en/

To reiterate: if this article took you 5 minutes to read, 11-12 people have died globally due to human error in the meantime.

 

^^You missed my point completly, WHY do we need driverless vehicles, i have yet to see one good reason that explains this almost insane rush towards them by various companies.

 

I've just come back from a 2-hour walk outside, while looking at random people on the street (Netherlands)

- Bikers riding with one hand, the other one holding their phone (reading something? probably facebook updates)
- People walking and crossing streets casually while also texting or doing whatever on their phone, completely ignoring the world around them. I could have punched any of them in the face without them noticing a fist is coming until it's literally between their eyes.
- Was able to spot at least 3-4 drivers who had their eyesight down in their cars (and not forward), presumably also texting while driving
- A few people crossing the street (on the crosswalk.. well), but looking ONLY forward, not left, not right. Nothing can happen, right?
- Two bikes almost hit each other in a lane merge because both of them had their attention captivated by a phone (the guy on the right didn't notice whatsoever that a girl was also approaching from the left)
- Old man crossing the street at an arbitrary place looking ONLY down to his feet. A car stopped waiting for him to finish crossing... what if the driver was also texting or something?

I think the number of victims has increased significantly since 2013, this smartphone age is zombifying everyone.
The way people behave today on the street is a disaster ! Sad times.

 

It's her damn fault: it's called JAYWALKING! She should use the standard procedure for pedestrian to cross the traffic by using the pedestrian crosswalk with signal flashers on. It's ENTIRELY her FAULT!

I see people do this EVERYDAY and doesn't give a damn. Only lawsuit because.. $$ and get away with it.

 

The most disturbing thing to me is it seems the car didn't even respond. It could have tried to stop, but I think it would have still hit the pedestrian. These cars will work best when most if not all cars are auto-drive. They will all be on a traffic grid. I am skeptical.

 

Yep, every time I am waiting on buss stop, I see people with eyes glued to cellphones (90% of ppl of age below 30). But when they cross street here, they still pay attention.

 

Saving lives is not a good enough reason?

I don't understand what your asking.. You're saying it's an insane rush but Nvidia has been testing these vehicles in NJ, very close to where I live in Red Bank, for about 5 years now and they still claim they won't be ready until ~2021 for full level 5 autonomy. In the meantime they plan on enabling driver assistance features like auto braking/collision avoidance in lane changing/lane keeping/etc which has already been shown to significantly reduce fatalities in other systems like AutoLiv and Mobileye. So I'm not sure what response you want. It's actively saving lives now and only getting better with each iteration. Why isn't that a good enough reason?

 

And how exactly will driverless vehicles make the roads safer because as far as i can see they are not 100% guaranteed to not kill anybody, so what is the point of them, if they cannot guarantee 100% passenger and pedestrian safety then what is the point of them, we have enough human drivers killing people so why are we adding to that pool with driverless vehicles that can also kill people, are we saying well they are quite safe so it is ok if they happen to kill a few people every week, month or year, is that what we are saying, because it sure sounds like it, they won't kill as many as a human driver so that's better.

 

Uh, because you aren't adding to the pool, you're replacing the pool with a safer pool? Plus it's like asking why bother adding seatbelts if people die with them anyway..

If you have 1000 people in 1000 cars and 50% of them are likely to get into a crash and kill those people onboard, that's 500 deaths. If you replace 500 of those 1000 cars with autopilot cars that only have a 25% chance of killing people it's only 250 deaths. That's a net improvement of 250 lives saved. Obviously 50% accidents and 100% fatality rate is wack but i figured I'd boil it down to basic math. A self driving car is less likely to be in a fatal accident than a human piloted car and self driving cars are replacing human ones thus the overall fatality rate drops. This isn't a theoretical thing - numbers exist on current models with collision avoidance features - they all show a decrease in fatalities.

Also you're arguably decreasing the pool size compared to a future where they don't exist, as most of the companies demonstrating self driving cars envision service based auto-taxi networks, reducing the total number of cars on the road.

 

I would say that it's ALREADY a few thousand times better. And only getting even better.

You have to remember, this is THE FIRST CASE EVER where such an accident happened, and most likely it was a malfunction of that particular car, not a general technology problem.
Google's cars have been on the street for a long time already with millions of kilometers done, others are actively testing this tech in many places with many cars.

And yes, this time, crap happened.

But ask yourself. How many other people HUMANS have killed with reckless driving in all this time ?

 

Nvidia further distances itself from Uber in wake of fatal self-driving crash

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176552/nvidia-uber-self-driving-fatal-crash-huang
Edit: Noted @Denial found similar post on previous page.

 

beat me to it
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/chi...use-its-self-driving-processing-solution.html

 

I believe he is angling the same way that I am with this auto driving car non sense, that when you combine this tech with a competent driver who is not only aware of what they are doing but the state of their vehicle and the vehicles around them then you end up with a much safer overall package. That what you currently have now are not safety systems that augment a competent driver but systems that act as a license for piss poor drivers to think they can get away with being even worse drivers, exactly what happened in this video. Driver thought the car would get her out of any sh*t so she wasn't even paying the most basic level of attention to what was going on around her and we all saw the results and as the systems become more and more autonomous the awareness of what's happening around the 'driver' by piss poor drivers will only drop.

See this is quite an annoying comparative, the automobile has been a thing for 150 years as a mass produced product it has been a thing for what 70 maybe 80 years with upwards of 1billion vehicles on the planet as of 2010. Now auto driving cars how long have they been about and what fraction of that 1 billion vehicle are actually auto driving cars and on truly busy roads day in and day out? according to this article

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/23/16510696/self-driving-cars-map-testing-bloomberg-aspen

as of 2017 only 35 cities have any kind of AV testing in process which in the grand scale of things means the true number of AVs on the road must be tiny, so yeah the number of accidents is involving or caused by AVs is small but is that because they ARE actually safer or is it because of the number of vehicles on the road is so small?

 

This is not the first death, the tesla vehicle in 2016 that killed the driver by taking the car under a 18 wheeler, and an google vehicle that aimed and drove towards a group of people, or the one that rammed into a bus, and dozens of other accident these cars have been involved in, and that is just the google cars, Uber has had similar array of accidents and incidents with their cars culminating in this womens death, so colour me very skeptical when i look at these, it will take a 100% recored of no accident or deaths before i ever change my mind about these, and 99% simply won't cut it because some poor buggers are going to have to be that 1%.

 

Also, to point out, self driving cars if they become truly self driving open them to a whole new market of people that do not know how to drive

You will very much need to provide sources for the multitude of incidents you've just paraphrased.

A tesla vehicle killing someone does not equal self driving killing someone

 

By that logic most folk could fly a plane, I doubt capability of vehicle will be the issue, it will rather be government and local laws that will determine who can and cannot use these vehicles, I am also willing to bet that the guys selling the cars will happily distance their blame when it comes to self driving cars being involved in accidents where the occupant is a totally unqualified driver.

Allow me

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...illed-autopilot-self-driving-car-harry-potter

 

Not seen that incident before, thank you for providing a source.

RE: airplanes, very much more complex than a vehicle grounded to 2 dimensions. But anyway airplanes do have autopilot and pilots largely deal with take off/landing.

I'm talking very much future btw, automated taxis, not particularly personal cars. Then again when a car can become truly automated there's little need for a personal car and you could rent your car out at night to become automated.

 

Well, I took the time to read every post in this thread. What I learned was that some people prefer avoidable deaths caused by stupid people operating motor vehicles while completely distracted from the task at hand. While I was reading this thread, roughly 44-48 people died (thanks for the numbers yasamoka)....sad to think, but yes, it took me roughly 20 minutes to read through this thread (probably another 44-48 deaths if not more while I'm typing this response since I'm also watching Terminator: Genisys). I also learned that someone is ignorant enough to think that it's possible for automobiles to exist without having a single fatal accident.

Some simple facts: As long as automobiles and people share the road, there will be fatal accidents. There is no possible way to reduce the number of fatal accidents to zero. Every mode of transportation has had fatalities. There will always be someone too stupid to look before crossing the road or that runs out in front of a moving vehicle for whatever reason. No collision avoidance system is perfect. They ALL fail at some point. Autonomous Vehicles WILL get better but they will never have feelings or be perfect. They will however, be more predictable and safer than human drivers.

 

Ewww imagine the kinda stuff that could be happening in the back of your car, especially if their is no driver to... uh keep the occupants in check. The car better be self cleaning as well is all I can say.