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Uber to Stop Testing Self-Driving Cars in Arizona, Continue Elsewhere

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL dept.

takyon writes:

Uber ends self-driving operation in Arizona

Uber has shuttered its self-driving testing program in Arizona and laid off close to 300 workers there — most of them test drivers, or "vehicle operators" — two months after one of its autonomous cars killed a pedestrian, the company said on Wednesday. The company had been testing its self-driving technology in the state since 2016, but halted operations in the wake of the March crash. The company's testing was also indefinitely suspended by the Arizona governor's office.

[...] Uber says it still plans to restart its self-driving operations in other locations (like Pittsburgh or San Francisco) once the investigations into the Arizona crash are complete. But in those locations, Uber will "drive in a much more limited way," according to an internal email obtained by ArsTechnica.

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 25 2018, @11:22AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Friday May 25 2018, @11:22AM (#683962) Journal

    For a good test environment, let the website programmers know the CEO is going to be given a random system and plain old consumer grade ISP line and he's going to evaluate the site. It may or may not have ad blockers, or any combination of same a consumer is apt to have on his system.

    If it does not load, the programmer does not get paid. If it loads slow, the programmer agrees to a cut of 1% of pay per second.

    Won't happen though. I do not know a single CEO that will give up his high-speed direct connection to his corporate system, and I know very few programmers that can still write really clean minimal code without involving a lot of "agile" programming that saves programmer time, but burns bandwidth, memory, and resources like crazy to do it.

    Very few CEO's seem to see their site the way their customers see their site. Maybe its a good thing to keep the CEO ignorant of the customer experience, as it keeps his company from expanding too fast and keeps the goal of getting X percent of market share always below what he wants, so he will spend more, in much the same vein that coupon printers love to use the word "Expires" so that the business has to constantly print new coupons, while the recipients are trained to simply toss the coupon instead of saving it.

    Businessmen just love to spend money to do the same thing over and over and over. Makes 'em feel important, I suppose.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @12:06PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @12:06PM (#683977) Journal
    This brings up an important point. You appear to be saying that testing environments will evolve to favor the convenience of the executives. So even if it were possible today to quickly develop a sufficient testing environment for self-driving cars, this dynamic would be a force that could cripple that testing environment. This would require require real world testing anyway, to make sure that a company or other organization hadn't strayed into this particular minefield.