The company left out some key details regarding the incident involving one of its robotaxis and a pedestrian.
On October 2, 2023, a woman was run over and pinned to the ground by a Cruise robotaxi. Given the recent string of very public malfunctions the robotaxis have been experiencing in San Francisco, it was only a matter of time until a pedestrian was hurt by the self-driving cars. New reports, though, suggest that Cruise held back one of the most horrifying pieces of information: that the woman was dragged 20 feet by the robotaxi after being pushed into its path.
The LA Times reports:
A car with a human behind the wheel hit a woman who was crossing the street against a red light at the intersection of 5th and Market Streets. The pedestrian slid over the hood and into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, with no human driver. She was pinned under the car, and was taken to a hospital.
But this is what Cruise left out:
What Cruise did not say, and what the DMV revealed Tuesday, is that after sitting still for an unspecified period of time, the robotaxi began moving forward at about 7 mph, dragging the woman with it for 20 feet.
read more: https://jalopnik.com/woman-hit-by-cruise-robotaxi-was-dragged-20-feet-1850963884
archive link: https://archive.ph/8ENHu
I remember someone here chiding others for critizing Cruise. They were talking up the “fact” that the car stopped and let emergency services dictate what to do instead of risk harming her further. It was GOOD that the car stopped on her.
No matter what happens, anything or anywhere. There will always be people defending it. I wonder if that person is glad to hear the car heroically dragged her out of traffic?
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Tell that self driving car "experts. Because there is a silicon chip controlling they think it’s automatically better than a human. Said experts have never heard of random failures (that’s besides bugs).
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The question isn’t whether they’re infallible, just whether they’re less fallible then humans, which is a far lower bar when it comes to driving.
A bold argument to make on a thread about a car dragging a woman stuck under it for 20 feet and then the company covering it up. The one story contains both the technical problems that people like me have been warning about since day one (bad at edge cases) and the structural and political problem of corporate control over infrastructure.
Yeah but you don’t have to look far to see humans doing way worse with cars. Even in this case the most reckless, irresponsible actor wasn’t the AV, or the company but the person who did the initial hit and run in the first place.
Ideally we’d get all cars off the streets, there use is dangerous in and of itself. But after being around these things for 3 years now I’d take them over the human drivers who I repeatedly see speeding through intersections.
As far as I know, there doesn’t exist a single shred of actual, empirical evidence that we can make self driving cars actually better than humans, outside of our faith in technological improvement. Companies used to publish their data on simulated injury rates for their internal testing, and they were way way way worse than professional human drivers, like taxi drivers, which is what Cruise is trying to replace.
I don’t want to be right. I want self-driving cars that work. It’d be personally very convenient for me, so much so that I would buy a brand new car for the first time in my life (I’m in my mid thirties) if I had actual, robust, empirical reason to believe that they work as advertised.
That article was written over a year ago and since then a lot has changed. Both waymo and cruise have now been approved for av taxis in San Francisco. This decision seems to not have been motivated by hype but a good track record with less incidents then a human driver. Cruise claims it’s greater than 50% better then a comparable human driver and while that may be just their own flawed study this article also agrees that they’re about even if not better then human drivers.
You’ll probably have to wait a while to buy one though as these are decked out with a larger assortment of sensors compared to a Tesla and probably cost a couple hundred thousand all said and done. They are also specifically trained on the surface streets of San Francisco, so they probably won’t be able to take you on your commute any time soon. Hell id give it another 5 years before their even able to take you to the airport 10 miles south of the city since it would have to get on the freeway. But in this relatively limited problem space they do quite well.
Both of those links rely on the same self-reported data by Cruise… We’ll see, I suppose! Happy to be proven wrong. I live on a frozen hilly dirt road, so realistically, for me, it’s not going to happen.
Maybe instead of robo card we could invest in public transit which.
But how will tech companies profit off public transit?
Boring Company: “hold my beer”
Honestly they’ll probably figure out a way :(
That’s why we have grade-separated rails, and stations with barriers and doors to the train. Trains also have a fraction of the deaths per passenger mile vs cars.
Public transit has a variety of benefits. For one thing, the natural enemy of the driver is literally other drivers. Cars are very space intensive, so car-centric cities tend to sprawl.
Public transit supports walkable/bikeable density, because it does better with a good walkshed around stations and also has really good passenger throughput. That’s good for people’s health - people living in walkable areas are on average less sedentary, and have lower rates of obesity and diabetes. It also tends to be good for the creation of third spaces, and seems to be good for social engagement on average.
The reason to oppose self-driving cars is really the same reason to oppose car-centric infrastructure broadly: the alternatives are way better.
I didn’t know Cruise was a company and at first envisioned this happening aboard a large ship.
Better than what my brain suggested… “Tom Cruise has finally lost it, then.”
That ship has sailed.
self driving cars are the answer to the question what if public transport was expensive and dangerous
The pedestrian slid over the hood and into the path of a Cruise robotaxi, with no human driver. She was pinned under the car, and was taken to a hospital.
That’s one way to do it.
Reddit techbros insisted that this was the future and I was being a luddite for saying that something like this was going to happen too often.
I was being a luddite
As we all should be. Oppose capitalist control over technology!
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Anyone with even a hobby level of coding knowledge knows it’s solving the edge cases that’s the real issue with resolving software problems. In this case I wouldn’t be surprised if automation reaches similar or lesser levels of traffic incidents, but the real shitty part is gonna be how much harder it is to get justice from a large corporate entity owning these robotaxi fleets versus nailing the little guy driving his Uber/taxi.
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These cars should be monitored by human beings until their AI evolves enough to be actually more secure than human professional by-the-law pilots. If a human was monitoring the car, they probably could have stopped it immediately, or even hold it before it starts dragging that poor woman.
Only if these cars can do the same or better than the human overseeing their activity, these cars will be safe enough to be offering a public service. Also, as shameful as it could be, this incident must get the most publicity because other competitors should test their AI against this specific situation as soon as possible.
I mean, humans are perfectly capable of not knowing someone is trapped under the car and doing something like this. It’s awful, but it happens pretty regularly. Pulling over to the side after an accident is a pretty heavily ingrained thing.
In this case, it’s not the technology that scares me, but the company developing it not being honest.
The car could have a safety record vastly better than any human, but if the company making it isn’t transparent about incidents it entirely undermines our ability to trust that safety record.
They need to be sued into nonexistence. As well as the fuckers who voted to authorize them to operate these deathtraps.
I don’t fully disagree but they have clearly tried to jump to market without fully investigating the problems. Things like this need serious regulation and that doesn’t exist right now.
Anyone who legalizes fully driverless vehicles should be forced to use them for the rest of their life.
Probably safer in them.
Damn, he sure ramps things up for his new movies.
I worked in this industry as a safety driver and various other positions for over 6 years in AZ, first with a company that also made national headlines, and then with the company that has connections with a certain search engine. From the inside it’s easy to see these outcomes happening more and more frequently, these companies are concerned with getting as many driverless miles as they can because that’s where their data comes from, the data is where the money comes from and that’s all that matters. Drivers are typically subcontracted, forced to work long and stressful hours with few breaks. Safety is emphasized, but even dealing with fatigue in the appropriate ways can lead to disciplinary action if you’re fatigued too often, so it goes unreported. I left the company specifically for safety concerns and despite making double there what I make now I won’t be going back.
