They will not be able to circulate in Arizona, something happened with the Lidar.
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Last week’s tragic accident was rated an “unquestionable failure” by the governor of the state of Arizona, Doug Ducey.
His office has sent Uber a letter informing the company that “Uber’s capacity is suspended to test and operate autonomous cars on the public streets of Arizona. “The investigation, meanwhile, continues, and it remains unclear what happened to the Lidar of these cars.
No more Uber testing in Arizona
Uber had been testing its cars in Arizona since late 2016 thanks to fairly lax regulation. The consumer rights protection organization Consumer Watchdog rated this state as “the wild west“in this matter.
NEW: In light of the fatal Uber crash in Tempe, Governor Ducey sends this letter to Uber ordering the company to suspend its testing of autonomous vehicles in Arizona indefinitely # 12News pic.twitter.com/gO5BZB9P2e
– Bianca Buono (@BiancaBuono) March 27, 2018
The company also tested its autonomous cars in San FranciscoBut their Department of Motor Vehicles forced Uber to remove them from its streets until they got the proper permits.
The problems for Uber’s autonomous cars accumulate after the fatal accident on March 18. For Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, the video that was posted was “disturbing and alarming, and it raises a lot of questions about Uber’s ability to continue testing its autonomous cars in Arizona. ”
For Ducey the incident is “an unquestionable failure” of Uber when it comes to meeting the safety expectations of its autonomous cars, which has caused the decision to suspend testing its autonomous cars indefinitely. Quite a blow for Uber’s advance in this area.
The Lidar sees everything both day and night
In the video posted by the Tempe police investigating the case yields virtually no conclusive data about the reasons for an accident that those interior cameras weren’t even meant to avoid.
Of that theoretically the Lidar would be in charge, the powerful radar system capable of detecting objects up to 200 meters away even in the dark.
For some reason it did not work or did not activate the autonomous car’s braking systems, but those responsible for the design of that Lidar, the Velodyne company, claim that do not believe “that the accident was due to the Lidar. Our Lidar can see perfectly in the dark, as well as in daylight, producing millions of information points. “
Velodyne president Martha Hall explained to the BBC how the problem could be precisely in Uber’s proprietary software that controls the autonomous car: “It is the rest of the system that must interpret and use this data to make decisions. We don’t know how Uber’s decision-making system works.”
Uber’s autonomous cars in trouble
Some analyzes suggest that Uber’s autonomous driving system could have had problems in these tests and developments. According to The New York Times, in March Uber security drivers took back control of those cars once every 21 kilometers.
This data contrasts with the times that for example that happens in Waymo cars, where security drivers take control once every 9,000 kilometers.
In Uber they indicate that this is not an indication of the safety of their autonomous driving systems, but the truth is that the lack of data by Uber it does nothing more than add indications that put the company and its autonomous driving systems between a rock and a hard place.
In Engadget | Silence and caution: this is how the world is reacting after the fatal accident of Uber’s autonomous car
