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
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday March 27 2017, @05:53PM (5 children)
I suspect that software is now complex enough that carefully designed, and validated software will get to market faster than software developed ah-hoc.
The reason is abstraction leakage. Nobody knows modern systems top-to-bottom. Coding to an interface is hard enough, but when you run into undefined behaviour because you did something the original programmer did not expect: suddenly you are chasing rabbits.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Monday March 27 2017, @06:47PM (4 children)
Nobody knows modern systems top-to-bottom.
Another reason a "modern system" cannot be reliable. You can't even predict what it is going to do under all permutations of inputs.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 27 2017, @07:12PM (3 children)
So just to be clear, are you saying z/OS isn't "modern" or isn't "reliable?"
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday March 27 2017, @07:30PM
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
IBM releases ... corrections ... (a.k.a. PTFs) for z/OS.... IBM labels critical PTFs as "HIPER" (High Impact PERvasive). IBM also "rolls up" multiple patches into a Recommended Service Update (RSU).
So yeah, maybe like Microsoft, today's version is perfect, but all those previous versions apparently were not reliable.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:08AM (1 child)
Really Arik? You made me a foe because I looked up your precious z/OS in Wikipedia, and discovered it wasn't perfect after all?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Arik on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:42AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?