Brian Kaufman
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2020
0:43 · 185K views · Mar 22, 2018
A one-minute night drive along Mill Ave in Tempe, Arizona, filmed to show that the crash site looked much brighter than Uber's released dashcam video suggested. It was made in response to the fatal 2018 Uber self-driving crash.
Used as evidence that Uber's dashcam footage misrepresented how well lit the road was.
3 comments from Hacker News
These facts are only relevant if you disregard LIDAR and you believe that the camera showed what the human eye would see. Videos on youtube ( this video and also [LINK] ) and ABC news footage ( [LINK] ) at the scene of the crash paint a much brighter picture. The street lights in the footage appear to be distinct while the background is dark, indicating the gain of the sensor would appear to be reduced. Try taking a picture of streetlights at night, if the street is visible, they will appear as stars. Additionally, the safety driver was not paying attention. EDIT: In my opinion, the more you think about this crash the worse Uber looks. The LIDAR should have worked, the lighting was likely brighter than the video shows, the weather was good, no obvious distractor objects, the road was straight, no parties were impaired. The pedestrian had a big bulky bike and crossed at right angles to the car. This is nearly the most basic test of self-driving cars and it failed. The only way Uber would look worse is if it had happened in day time. On top of that, Uber disabled the Volvo auto-braking safety system. ( [LINK] )
It seems like the dash cam video released is very misleading there's been a couple people who've driven through the same area at night and it is well lit. [0] From the Uber cam it seems like the light is still on because there's a bright glow about where streetlights are in the other videos. It's kind of shocking just how bad the dash cam of the incident actually is unless the lights were recently (because there's still the glow) off for some reason before dawn (poorly implemented scheduling maybe?). The difference between the Uber dash cam [1] and the one posted to youtube is stark [2]. It's certainly darker where she comes from but no where near impossible. Source the ArsTechnica article [3] [0] this video [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
The video released by Uber was extremely misleading. Here is a video on YouTube of the same stretch of road taken by someone with an ordinary phone camera shortly after Elaine’s death: this video It’s clear that a) the road is well lit and b) visibility is far, far better than the Uber video would suggest. An ordinary human driver would have seen Elaine & taken evasive action. This death is absolutely Uber’s responsibility.