> Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust - Elon Musk

The major car companies have even developed the technology to also allow LiDAR to see through snow/rain without the previous refraction problems: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi...

My question is given it could detect the jaywalking object (regardless of visible light) within the very very short timeframe at those speeds, on what looks like a highway, I'm curious if it's rational to expect even the future ideal machines (say 5yrs from now) to have been able to react in that situation.

It's not as obvious as people here are pretending it is.

Yet even then we now have a previously unknown model to test our machines on to prevent it from happening again. Given a human would 99%+ of the time not have seen this woman in time, then I believe we'll at a very minimum be better off as a society as a result of this... as wrong as that sounds, because it's now a high-priority dataset, not just a sad story in the local news (if even) we'll forget about tomorrow as it would be with a human driver.

I'm far from convinced that a human would not have seen this woman in time.

See all the comments in this thread about how the dashcam footage is much worse than reality, and even one person who drives that road regularly saying it's not that bad visibility-wise.

I think if I had seen that lady slowly walking her bike onto the road in my adjacent lane, I would have slowed down for sure. And from seeing my own nighttime dashcam videos, I think I would have seen her. She's the only object nearby, on a fairly straight road with no adverse weather conditions. I would have seen someone pushing a bike onto the next lane.

Maybe I would have hit her still, but I would have slowed down for sure.

If an autonomous vehicle cannot detect pedestrians crossing a slower-than-typical road with enough time to at least not kill them, it shouldn’t be on the road. If that means uber can’t drive autonously at night, too bad for them.

To be fair, the law currently is very permissive to drivers, and a human may not have been deemed at fault. Despite going 40 in a 35 zone, when (due to reduced visibility) they actually should have been going 25. You are supposed to go only as fast as you can stop, given current visibility. Regardless of the speed limit.

If you can't see far enough to be able to avoid something in the road, you're simply going too fast. That should apply to machines, but it already applies to humans.

I believe it's entirely possible for a robot to solve this problem with proper Radar and maybe LiDAR going forward. But I would be extremely skeptical about anyone claiming a human would have been at fault...

If you can't see where you're going, you need to slow down. Does that seem so unreasonable?

http://www.zacharlawblog.com/2015/11/whos-at-fault-in-an-acc...

> So, should an accident occur between a jaywalker and a car---if shown that the driver could have/should have seen the person and could have/should have been able to avoid, then without question the driver can be held responsible.

https://www.nicoletlaw.com/blog/2015/07/what-happens-if-a-ja...

> To a large degree, it comes down to the driver's ability to avoid the accident. If a jaywalker steps right out into the car's path and is instantly hit, the driver will usually not be held responsible. It will be determined that the pedestrian caused the accident.

> However, if the jaywalker strolls into the street a few hundred yards ahead of the car and the driver does not slow down or swerve, the driver could be held responsible. Even though jaywalking is illegal, drivers are expected to take reasonable action to avoid crashes when they can, even if they feel they have the right of way.

> Negligence also comes into play if the driver should have seen the pedestrian but did not. For instance, a driver who is texting and driving may look away from the road and not see someone step into the street, hitting them with the car. The driver could argue that the road was clear and that the person shouldn't have been there. While that may be true, he or she could still face charges.

However, if the jaywalker strolls into the street a few hundred yards ahead of the car and the driver does not slow down or swerve, the driver could be held responsible.

This was clearly not a case of "someone stepping out right in front of the car", since they were more than halfway across the rightmost lane, walking a bicycle.

Edit: This rule is merely a variation on the universally accepted one that says that if you rear-end someone in another vehicle, you're almost universally at fault (unless it can be proven that they acted in such a way that the collision was unavoidable.) The logic being that if you could not avoid a collision, you were going too fast for the distance you had to the vehicles in front of you.

Are you suggesting that drivers should be less liable for running into stationary objects than they are for running into other vehicles? That seems absurd to me.

The LIDAR sensor[1] being used here can pick up targets up to 120m away. I'm not sure about the RADAR or vision systems also in place, but even LIDAR alone should have been able to easily pick out the pedestrian with plenty of time to come to a full stop.

This is clearly poorly designed autonomous driving software, not a sensory deficiency.

I've also read that the last speed sign was 45mph before this accident. I used 40mph as it was between the 35mph sign that was coming up before the hit and the 45mph one before it.

There's also a steering wheel. (Why is everybody here missing this?!) I could totally see it having moved out of the way.

Of course, the Uber vehicle did not take any action at all. It doesn't seem to have ever realized that there was a solid object in front of it. Without that, collision avoidance is impossible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xITOqlBCM

also check out the one at 1:06 - pilot detects slightly before than the autopilot but the dashcam is still pitch black