Blame the driver... of course the driver was told that the car drove itself... he was watching a show on his phone when it happened so Uber is putting the blame on him.
I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system. Is the fault lying with him or is Uber just trying to lay the blame on him to avoid paying anything.
The car detected an obstacle, but had emergency breaking disabled by Uber, so it didn't stop. According to the article, the system didn't alert the driver of an obstacle despite detecting it.
Note the emergency breaking system isn't part of the Uber self driving system, rather it came from the car manufacturer. Uber simply disabled all the settings, including all the safety features.
Right. They disabled Volvo’s system and their own emergency braking didn’t work (apparently created too many false positives). It was criminal negligence to put the car on the road in that situation.
Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%, 90% of the time. It's not reasonable to me to expect someone to be at peak alertness while doing nothing at all.
It is reasonable, however, that they not be watching a cell phone when they're being paid to be a backup driver.
The optics for the driver were really bad. They weren't just not paying attention, they weren't "just" eating and drinking (something accepted in American driving for the last 60 years), they weren't staring blankly into the desert, they didn't fall asleep. No, they were doing the one thing that has received the most public messaging for the last decade.
Oh don't get me wrong. I don't feel like the driver is blameless. I just mean that people not paying attention when they don't have to do anything isn't a new problem or one without what seems to be an adequate solution.
I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system. Is the fault lying with him or is Uber just trying to lay the blame on him to avoid paying anything.