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Uber killing progress for autonomous driving?

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Here is a recent article for autonomous driving:
Uber offers self-driving car rides in San Francisco — and California threatens legal action

While I am excited I see more and more autonomous driving happening I am upset that some companies aren't following the intention of guidelines. What does everyone think about this? Uber in my mind really goes out of their way to avoid following the law by sidestepping it. People in SF seeing their cars running red lights will probably cause people to not wanting this passed in legislation.

In addition they are blaming the drivers and my roommate in college has a PhD in fault tolerant software development and he thinks that you shouldn't rely on the person behind the wheel to stop the car. Uber is blaming the person but isn't at the same time stating if the self-driving software ran the light and the driver failed to stop it or if the driver was actually driving the car at the time. I could imagine sitting there and the car decides to go and you stop it. The car could be a full car length into the intersection before you react.

On the other side of the coin the person who posted the video of the car running the red light is a taxi driver who has an incentive to be against the self-driving cars.
 
Uber's grasping to be relevant. If they don't win the race to autonomous cars the risk of losing market share is huge and they lose money on their current business model. They basically have spent years spending billions to develope market penetration and could very well lose it all by mid 2018
 
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Reactions: Jaff and ggies07
Uber's grasping to be relevant. If they don't win the race to autonomous cars the risk of losing market share is huge and they lose money on their current business model. They basically have spent years spending billions to develope market penetration and could very well lose it all by mid 2018

I agree on their motivation for doing this. The problem is they don't want to abide by what every other company who is running test vehicles is abiding by. I wouldn't mind if they lose their relevancy based on their behavior. In past experience living in Austin if they don't get their way they threaten and pull the service out of the city all together.
 
It's quite annoying to me as well. The only one making a sensible, well thought out lead-way on this topic is Tesla. It really does just look like everyone wants to be "first" to this new field.......
 
Regardless of the other driver's possible motivation for posting the video, it does clearly show the Uber vehicle driving through a red light.

Agreed. I am sure you can find Google cars making mistakes time and again. It is a matter of statistics. Kind of like the media blowing up the two Tesla autopilot crashes huge when that happened. Statistically they are still much safer than your actual driver. Maybe statistically the cars are better than the average driver in SF. Who knows.

The major problem is that Uber is not following the guidelines for self driving cars in California because of a "loop hole". When Google cars make a mistake they have to properly document and report it. Uber isn't under such requirements because they aren't following the guidelines. I don't see any interest on their part to want to follow the guidelines either. Same thing when Austin wanted to do background checks on their drivers. They refused and even tried to get the voters to change the requirements but failed. As a result they threw a temper tantrum and left.
 
It's quite annoying to me as well. The only one making a sensible, well thought out lead-way on this topic is Tesla. It really does just look like everyone wants to be "first" to this new field.......

I am pretty sure that Google is also deserving of credit for making sensible, well thought out lead-way on this. Even if I don't agree with the big lidar wart on the top of their cars.
 
Correct me if I am wrong, pretty sure that was a cop car no?
If it were a cop car doing the filming, wouldn't the officer behind the wheel have turned on the lights and siren and chased down the offending Uber vehicle? It waited at the red light instead. Anyway, whether it's a taxi cab or police car capturing the traffic violation on video is irrelevant.
 
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