First hit by an autonomous car

No, I didn’t say ‘by self-contained car’, that of those There have already been several cases of drivers who have relied too much on Tesla’s self-pilot when the road conditions did not recommend it.… I said ‘by self-contained car’, and it’s that these days we have had the sad news of the first hit by an autonomous car of Uber, in this case it is also a fatal hit: (

There are several things that we can highlight from this accident. First, that It’s a HISTORIC fact. This is the first case we see and will surely be cited as a reference in the next studies and progress in this area. Second, that as an autonomous car has several cameras and sensors, we can see exactly what happened both inside and outside the vehicle in the seconds before the accident which can provide a lot of information to clarify accidents in the future.

Evidence of the accident: the video of the car cameras

If you want to watch the video (it’s nothing creepy, the video stops before the hit) is available through the Tempe police in charge of investigating the event.

In the video we see several things to investigate:

– According to the law, the safety driver must be paying attention to the road in order to take control at any time… and as you can see in the video he’s looking down, probably cracking with his cell phone.

– The woman crossed without looking, at night and without using any zebra steps a two-lane road for each sense and speed limited to 70 km / h (45 miles / h) that the car was respecting at all times.

– It is possible that the car cameras were not able to detect that person crossing as it was

night and so… but the autonomous cars carry a system called Lidar (the kind of siren on the roof) that works with a laser beam and * is supposed to * be able to detect everything around the car in any weather situation (e.g. fog) or luminosity (night closed in the middle of an unlit road)…

– Who will be responsible for the accident? Well, it looks like charges will be filed against the security driver who wasn’t on the road… but if you’ve seen the video, you’ll have realized that It was impossible to see, stop or dodge that

pedestrian, not by a human or an autonomous car.

Too many data generated…

Based on this, I read the other day a news about how BMW will start using the technology the car connected to get advanced reports with the vehicle data… the worrying thing about the news is that it says that then you can share this data with third parties such as insurance companies to ‘clarify’ accidents and rule out liability (!!!!)… but it makes me think that insurance companies can use this data to check that if the last

year you have gone too fast without respecting the speed limits, they may not – renew or increase your policy premium even if you have not had any sinister! It’s not that cool.