Not that I remember. I am sorry to hear about both losses though.
Thanks. Both examples of people who you see one day, and never see again. I wasn’t close to my co-worker but she was an interesting woman. Born in China and raised in Malaysia. Spoke with a very interesting accent.
We must all walk more predictably.
Might make you safer from cars, but you’re going to attract sandworms. I don’t know if that’s a fair trade at all.
Hahaha, I was trying to think of a way to work sandwords in myself. You’re the man(worm).
Good point; you probably increase your risk of Christopher Walken as well.
The dashcam video of the self-driving car fatality makes it pretty obvious that there’s no way a human driver could have done much more than slam the brakes at the very, very last millisecond, and certainly not in time to have saved the pedestrian. Heck, in the time it takes you to realize that there’s someone in the road and process that into the action of slamming brakes…I think it would be too late.
It’s a clear stretch of road on a dark night and it isn’t well lit and the car is kind of cresting a rise or gradual hill that doesn’t provide any silhouette…and all of a sudden she’s there in the road carrying her bike. Headlights of the vehicle were on. If it was moving within speed limits on that stretch of road…I’m not sure what else could’ve been done here to avoid a pedestrian jaywalking across a darkened road at night as a car crests a rise.
FYI, here is a link to the dashboard video Uber released to news agencies.
It stops immediately before the impact, but still viewer discretion is strongly advised.
No it doesn’t. It just makes it pretty obvious that she’s hard for the camera to see. The operator wasn’t paying attention, and that dashcam video isn’t an accurate representation of how we would seemthat scene in real life, just a close approximation.
She’s wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans, crossing a street in a pool of darkness between any streetlights.
No shit, Sherlock. The video works here too.
And her scarf obscures her peripheral vision.
What I’m seeing, she’s not “asking for it”. She’s just walking her bike across a road; has probably done it a hundred times before with no problem. As @kerzain indicates, it’s really hard for me to put much blame on her right now, as that video is so far removed from actually being there. It appears to be an unfortunate accident, nothing more. Except to say that, had it not been a self-driving vehicle, that operator would have (hopefully) been paying far more attention than he was.
As a professional driver, however, I am noticing that more and more pedestrians these days seem far too trusting that drivers will see them and stop for them.
On the other hand, I am also seeing more and more drivers that drive like complete morons, and that’s not even counting the texters, which make up more that 50% of the idiots I have to watch out for. These days, if I can’t see what the driver is doing because it’s night, or because of his tinted windows, I just assume that he/she is texting.
EDIT: If anything, this video greatly reminds me of when a deer suddenly appears in front of your car on a country road. Out here in ND, this happens a lot. In all my years of driving, I have never yet hit one, but I attribute that solely to luck, because I have had many close calls with deer. Unlit roads require your absolute full concentration at all times. Well, all driving does actually, but especially at night. Night driving terrifies me, especially out in the country on a two-lane road.
I’m not sure anyone posited that she was “asking for it”, just that this set of circumstances made would make it difficult for any driver–human or otherwise–to react in time to avoid an accident with awful consequences. Sometimes bad accidents happen, sadly.
Things we (or at least I) don’t know is how Volvo’s SDC radar and tracking works in comparison to Tesla’s (which I’ve heard is supposed to be the best in class) or other on the ground guidance systems that are in use by other manufacturers. And I’d be curious what the speed limit is on that stretch of road, and if the Volvo used limiting tech on that.
Yeah, sorry, I should have worded that less strongly.
From the CNN article linked to above:
Interesting. I’m not sure 5mph makes a large difference here…but maybe it does for a human driver in that situation? Like perhaps when the headlights catch the pedestrian, it gives enough time to swerve?
Why doesn’t the car appear to slam the breaks though? I am not saying it would have helped but it doesn’t seem like it tried to stop, at least not in the video. Once the headlights hit her shouldn’t it “see” her?
I dunno. She appeared awfully quickly. It’s so difficult to tell these kinds of things from that video.
5 mph can make a huge difference in some cases. It’s hard to tell in this case. It’s entirely possible that an impact at 5 mph less would have been enough difference that it wouldn’t have killed her. But there are so many variables involved in an accident (and in avoiding an accident) that we can speculate things a million different ways.