DAVID FICKLING: When 'self-driving' cars actually need human pilots
The automated braking that might have prevented the death of pedestrian Elaine Herzberg had been switched off “to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior”
What is an autonomous car –and more to the point, has Uber Technologies Inc. been operating them at all? From its public statements, you’d certainly think that its vehicles can more or less drive themselves, with humans required only as a safety back-up while the system is in trial mode. Take this video from Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, posted in April 2017, showing the company’s self-driving cars cruising smoothly around Pittsburgh. Or this one from October 2017: “We have hundreds of self-driving vehicles out in the world,” the narrator says. The car’s autonomous systems “make sure the vehicle’s aware of everything around it, like the stop sign up ahead, that woman crossing the street, and the cyclist coming up behind them.” The preliminary report released Thursday by the US National Transportation Safety Board into a fatal Uber crash in Tempe, Arizona casts those statements in an awkward light. As it turns out, while the vehicle was indeed aware of its surroundings, it was ...
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