Collision course: why are cars killing more and more pedestrians?

For drivers, roads are safer than ever – but for people on foot, they are getting deadlier. Car companies and Silicon Valley claim that they have the solution. But is that too good to be true?

Lately, our cultural conversation about road safety has been dominated by visions, sold by Silicon Valley, of vehicles that minimize or even eliminate the need for input from a fallible human driver. Every year, more cars come armed with “pedestrian detection and avoidance” systems; soon, these systems will likely be standard issue. And not long after that, we are promised, sensors and self-improving algorithms will take over the driving process altogether, eliminating human error from roads and ushering in a new golden age of safety for all their users, whether or not they’re cocooned by a car’s steel frame. Since 2017, General Motors, the US’s largest car manufacturer, has claimed that it is developing self-driving vehicles in the service of a “triple-zero” world: zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.

The possibility of making pedestrians safer is a welcome one, not least because walking is so undeniably good. Walking boosts physical and mental health, draws communities together and produces no carbon emissions. But there are good reasons to be skeptical about the promises made by the proselytizers of the high-tech car future. Car companies swear they are here to help – by selling us products that hardly ever hit anyone or anything. But the truth is that this promise is, at best, a distraction. In fact, much of our discourse around cars, self-driving or otherwise, is less about transforming the status quo than maintaining it, obscuring paths to progress exactly when we need them most, and leaving pedestrians right in the line of fire. read more »

High-Tech Sensors May Be the Key to Autonomous Cars

In a year when the autonomous vehicle business has hit a big reset button, consensus is growing among designers that self-driving cars just aren’t perceptive enough to make them sufficiently safe.

The primary issue is that autonomous cars still can’t see well enough to safely maneuver in heavy traffic or see far enough ahead to handle highway conditions in any kind of weather.

Video cameras can be foiled by glare. Standard radar can judge the relative speed of objects but has Mr. Magoo-like vision. Ultrasonic sensors can sense only nearby objects — and not very clearly. Lidar (formally, light detection and ranging), while able to create 3-D images of people and street signs, has distance limitations and can be stymied in heavy rain. And even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence software can’t help if it doesn’t have the perceptual data to begin with. read more »

NHTSA reviewing claims 2,000 Tesla vehicles should have been recalled

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Friday it is reviewing a defect petition that claims Tesla Inc failed to issue a recall when it issued a software in 2,000 Model S and Model X vehicles in May.

The vehicles from the 2012 through 2019 model years received a battery management software upgrade in response to a potential defect that could result in non-crash fires, the petition said, adding it believes the update reduces the driving range of the affected vehicles. NHTSA said Friday it had opened a formal review to evaluate the petition’s claims. read more »