This is just a sensationalist snippet from the long read from the New Yorker that was on hacker news yesterday. The engineer responsible was fired from Google for forming his own company and eventually went to Uber which was the cause of the massive lawsuit between the two, he's now close to unemployable. Since that incident 4 years ago it's pretty clear a lot has changed -but one thing that hasn't changed is Google's constant misrepresentation of their safety record.
It has been reported that it was a constant struggle to get Urmson (the lead in Project Chauffeur) and Levandowski (who wanted to just launch) to work together because they had such a contradictory approach on safety. Urmson left in 2016, shortly before Chauffeur spawned into Waymo.
Did Google pay off the Camry driver? If I was pushed into an accident by a car with company decals and a sensor suite on top [1], I'd definitely include this when reporting the accident. It's an incredible story, and I'm not sure whether I say that in it's literal or figurative meaning. (Note that the author of the article is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer-price winning journalist - so it's not just a story posted by some dude on his blog).
The Camry driver was either absolutely or co-equally required to yield (TIL that despite the DMV Driver Handbook saying the former about freeway merges, there's signficant debate over whether that or equal responsibility is a correct interpretation of the Vehicle Code.)
> Note that the author of the article is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer-price winning journalist
No, it's Nicole Karlis, a Salon staff writer on tech, health, and gender politics who has not won a Pulitzer.
Now, the article is a sensationalized rehash of an incident from of a New Yorker article by Charles Duhigg, but he is not the author of the article directly at issue.
“unlicensed”, per the article. “undocumented” in US parlance, referring to an individual, usually refers to immigration status; the article only indicates this driver had no driver's license.
> The other driver was undocumented and he also preferred not to report.
I don't live in the US, so I don't know - but is that common? To me, it sounds like a significant accident, and I fail to understand why it wouldn't be reported.
The undocumented person may have not had insurance which would be one set of problems, or might have thought they would be at fault to some degree - being in an accident with someone injured would have involved police - both circumstances leading to contact with authorities could have led to deportation. It is not common to not have insurance but even in the case of people here legally, those without insurance commonly run from accidents because of the penalties for not having insurance. There is also the case of people with insurance but having a lot of driving penalty points (for speeding/running stop signs or lights) running or attempting to pay cash to avoid involving insurance because they have very expensive insurance due to driving history and do not want to get forced into an even higher insurance bracket.
Playing the devils advocate here: There was (apparently) no physical contact between the cars, so one could just tell a different story about the type of accident, or just leave out that the Camry then pinwheeled into the median. (Reason for lying about it could be that they drove the car in autonomous mode on 'forbidden routes' and feared repercussions).
Having said that - I doubt that's how things happened.
It doesn't sound like the cars collided. The original story [1] includes more details, but it definitely sounds like a collision was avoided, and that avoidance caused the spine injury and the Camry pinwheeling.
> The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries.
> The Prius regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving the Camry behind.
Everyone games the mandatory safety reporting. Mostly by doing testing under the radar and/or outside California. Google has taken that a step further by counting disengagements (meaning instances of the system failing and having to be overriden by the driver) only when the system would definitely have crashed.
All the tech aside (because I suppose they'll kind of get it done sooner or later), what I really want to know on this subject is: who's legally responsible in the case of an accident?
