Uber’s self-driving car could not detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk
&gt; <i>5.6 seconds before impact, it classified her as a vehicle. Then it changed its mind to “other,” then to vehicle again, back to “other,” then to bicycle, then to “other” again, and finally back to bicycle.</i><p>System can&#x27;t decide what&#x27;s happening.<p>&gt; <i>It wasn’t until 1.2 seconds before the impact that the system recognized that the SUV was going to hit Herzberg</i><p>System is too slow to realize something serious is happening.<p>&gt; <i>That triggered what Uber called “action suppression,” in which the system held off braking for one second</i><p>A hardcoded 1 second delay during a potential emergency situation. Horrifying.<p>I bet they added it because the system kept randomly thinking something serious was going to happen for a few milliseconds when everything was going fine. If you ever find yourself doing that for a safety critical piece of software, you should stop and reconsider what you are doing. This is a hacky patch over a serious underlying classification issue. You need to fix the underlying problem, not hackily patch over it.<p>How is this not the title of the story? This is so much worse than the &quot;it couldn&#x27;t see her as a person, only as a bicycle&quot;. At least the car would still try to avoid a bicycle, in principle, instead of blindly gliding into it while hoping for the best.<p>&gt; <i>with 0.2 seconds left before impact, the car sounded an audio alarm, and Vasquez took the steering wheel, disengaging the autonomous system. Nearly a full second after striking Herzberg, Vasquez hit the brakes.</i><p>And then top it off with systemic issues around the backup driver not actually being ready to react.