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
I remember when the first articles about this accident came out I immediately matched one of the photos with the location on Google Maps and thought “huh, that’s pretty far away from the intersection”.
Meanwhile Cruise has the video of the moment of collision and doesn’t put two and two together until hours and hours later? Like car stopped on pedestrian being 20 feet away from initial collision should make most people think bad news bears pretty fast, but according to that report they were too hyper focused on blaming the other other driver to think that maybe just maybe they did anything wrong.
And then deliberately omitted this information from the media once they did learn it, letting their older innacurate press release stand (a.k.a. lying).
And then oopsied showing a bunch of regulators the most important part, or even mentioning it, y’know using words. They were too busy trying to figure out how to present stuff to put them in the best possible light. a.k.a either actively lying (absolutely, but good luck proving this) or gross self-serving incompetence, probably both.
It sounds like their incidence response was getting a few hundred people typing furiously in a chatroom about how to talk to regulators rather than some orderly process to actually figure stuff out.
The one person who figured things out first was on the scene, but apparently they never bothered asking him.
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.
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.
I’ll be honest I can’t even imagine how their business could have been ruled legal without clear corruption
yeah the thing that’s so utterly absurd is that those vehicles are literally fucking telemetry++++ on wheels.
I refuse to believe, on rational (hue hue) presumption alone, that they didn’t have the facility to detect this. and there are plenty of other indications that they knew, and that they intentionally obscured this
how this thing is handled makes me hate that legal system (from afar), doubly so because of how much hegemony means it has impact elsewhere