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Law firm hired by Cruise says Cruise didn't mislead regulators, they just had trouble using the internet. Verge proceeds to repeat the claim uncritically (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Actual framing:

Cruise wasn’t hiding the pedestrian-dragging video from regulators — it just had bad internet / An independent review of an incident in which a driverless Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet concludes the company has connectivity issues.

My expectations for journalists are low but goddamn

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240126195607/https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050791/cruise-pedestrian-dragging-video-driverless-report

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Also while I'm here,

A self driving car dragging a victim is the silicon valley ethos of "move fast and break things" applied to human.

Self-driving cars require a strong engineering culture to do right, one that is clear was entirely absent at Cruise from this report.

Did they even consider the possibility of a pedestrian being dragged / run over when designing their software? Because that sounds like kiiinda an obvious thing to consider. The most fundamental rule of the road is not to drive where you can't see, and it seems like Cruise violated this by designing a car completely unaware of what is beneath it.

Even toddlers have object permanence.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Did they even consider the possibility of a pedestrian being dragged / run over when designing their software?

From the report (pp 83 of the appendix), it seems like there's no camera to monitor the undercarriage: it detected it was part of an accident and tried to find a side of the road to stop at, but then further detected something fucky (technical term) with one of the wheels so it just stopped. But at no point did it directly detect a whole human underneath it. It looks like it took ~4.5s to decide to stop after travelling ~20ft at 7.7 mph.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I'll be honest I can't even imagine how their business could have been ruled legal without clear corruption