Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Monday March 27 2017, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-everybody-else-you-have-to-watch-out-for dept.

More bad news for Uber: one of the ride-hailing giant's self-driving Volvo SUVs has been involved in a crash in Arizona — apparently leaving the vehicle flipped onto its side, and with damage to at least two other human-driven cars in the vicinity.

The aftermath of the accident is pictured in photos and a video posted to Twitter by a user of @FrescoNews, a service for selling content to news outlets. According to the company's tweets, the collision happened in Tempe, Arizona, and no injuries have yet been reported.

Uber has also confirmed the accident and the veracity of the photos to Bloomberg. We've reached out to the company with questions and will update this story with any response. Update: Uber has now provided us with the following statement: "We are continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle."

TechCrunch understands Uber's self-driving fleet in Arizona has been grounded, following the incident, while an investigation is undertaken. The company has confirmed the vehicle involved in the incident was in self-driving mode. We're told no one was seriously injured.

Local newspaper reports suggest another car failed to yield to Uber's SUV, hitting it and resulting in the autonomous vehicle flipping onto its side. Presumably the Uber driver was unable to take over the controls in time to prevent the accident.

Source: TechCrunch


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by weeds on Monday March 27 2017, @03:10PM (1 child)

    by weeds (611) on Monday March 27 2017, @03:10PM (#484636) Journal

    Indeed, but it's not like he was asleep in the back seat. It seems he was behind the wheel and could not react in time. Now not having your hands on the wheel does take some time to react and maybe he isn't as engaged in the driving as you would be if you were actually driving. I have to agree from my experience (not a statistic, just my experience) that it is possible to determine that some other driver is a dingbat and likely to cause an accident.
    As I drive down mainstreet in very icy conditions, each time I come up to a light and carefully apply the brakes with a gentle pumping action in plenty of time to stop (yea, this was before those fancy antilock systems) I watch the hoser next to me slam on the brakes and slide half way into the intersection three times. I lost track of him and came to the next light to stop when I was slammed from behind. Destroyed the car, sent glass flying everywhere, and pushed me through the intersection. Guess who it was?
    I can imagine it would take a lot of computer power to assess the actions of all of the nearby cars and determine who was not a really good driver. I didn't give that guy a high enough priority myself. If all the cars were self driving, we could agree upon a set of rules and then only have accidents when failures happened.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday March 27 2017, @07:52PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday March 27 2017, @07:52PM (#484826) Journal

    Yeah, there are times when you can recognize a bad driver and hopefully avoid them, but in other cases (like this one), where someone simply fails to yield, you don't get a chance to size up their driving before the accident.