On: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

[lhorie]

Isn't that the exact same video in poorer quality?

I think the question now is how well a LIDAR is supposed to work in the dark. I keep hearing people saying that the hardware should've "seen" her, but speaking purely in terms of physics, how exactly is that supposed to work? Doesn't night vision still require a minimum threshold of light in order to work? How much light?

[brokenmachine → lhorie]

LIDAR sends out pulsed laser beams to measure the distance to things.

It should work in complete darkness.

[lhorie → brokenmachine]

> It should work in complete darkness

If that's true, this would certainly suggest a big failure from the LIDAR system in this incident. I wonder how that claim is tested. Would city lights interfere with testing (similar to how you can't see stars in the middle of cities)?

[brokenmachine → lhorie]

Someone in another comment rightly mentioned that LIDAR might just be one input with visual/radar being others.

So it may have ignored the LIDAR because of whatever was coming from the other inputs.

It will be interesting to find out what actually happened. It is clearly a major malfunction or deficiency in the sensors, no doubt.

For a self-driving car to not even apply the brakes at all in this situation is inexcusable.