An Uber self-driving car collided with another vehicle in Pittsburgh on February 24 in an incident first reported by Pittsburgh’s channel 11 last week. No one was seriously injured, but the incident caused serious damage to the vehicles. Uber and the driver disagree on exactly what happened in the seconds before the crash.
Source: arstechnica.com
I’ve spent the past few months working on a 10,000-word special report on AVs for The Economist, which was published in this week’s issue. The focus of my report is mostly on the long-term implications of AVs, based on the assumption (a reasonable one, I think) that the technology can be made to work reliably in the next few years. Rather than focusing on the minutiae of things like the ever-changing industry alliances, or who is suing who, I concentrated instead on the impact on urban planning, the transformation of retailing and the broader social and political implications of cars that can drive themselves.
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Starsky Robotics engineers tested and developed the autonomous-driving system, which has been installed in the Freightliner Cascadia for more than a year, and had spent a full week conducting dry runs on the stretch of County Road 833 in southern Florida, just north of the Everglades. They had plotted every conceivable contingency and every imaginable edge-case scenario.
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