Are we completely sure that this person didn't leap and strike the car in just the same way that bollards and telephone poles do - allegedly?
In Soviet California, pedestrian hits you! Bloke throws himself in front of self-driving car
While commuter buses ferrying Apple and Google employees have been rerouted to avoid being shot at – reportedly with a pellet gun – GM Cruise has had less success keeping one of its self-driving cars out of harm's way. Earlier this week, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of automaker General Motors (GM) said that one of its …
COMMENTS
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Friday 19th January 2018 23:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
This happened to my parents who were lucky to live through the experience. A lamppost fell over and went through the windscreen of their car and went between them. A second earlier and it would have speared the engine and driven it up into the passenger compartment killing them both. A second later it would have directly hit one or both of them with the end result at those speeds being much the same.
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Sunday 21st January 2018 00:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Its America
Yep. Americans. Fucking numb-nuts the lot of 'em. And no, I am not generalising (with an s as it ought to be), it's all of 'em. The shit-holiest country there is currently led by the shittiest presidentI have ever had the misfortune to be alive in the era of (who would have thought they would manage to continue the logarithmic scale of stupidity starting with Reagan and then Bush Jr, to Trump??? I re-watch "Idiocracy" these days with a reverence to its accuracy at foretelling the shit-hole it has become.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2018 07:31 GMT Dodgy Geezer
Re: Its America
...The shit-holiest country there is currently led by the shittiest presidentI have ever had the misfortune to be alive in the era of (who would have thought they would manage to continue the logarithmic scale of stupidity starting with Reagan and then Bush Jr, to Trump???...
In fact, the only thing worse would have been to have elcted that career criminal Hillary..
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Saturday 20th January 2018 09:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Two sets of doorhandles on the nuts was the result."
Came very close to that one day in the UK. Driver stopped at a pedestrian crossing. As soon as the person crossing had cleared his path - he accelerated away***. He had not checked that someone else had started to cross. Luckily I saw his mistake in time to stop as he rolled in front of me with a few inches clearance. He had an instantaneous sheepish look on his face.
***In the UK a driver is not allowed to go forward if anyone is anywhere on the crossing. In Sweden we used to stop to let a pedestrian cross - and wondered why they stopped and peeked past us before completing the crossing. Apparently you were allowed to drive over the crossing if a pedestrian was not in your direct path. An Israeli visitor to London was amazed that all the traffic stopped as soon as she stepped onto the crossing - even taxis. Enjoying the novelty she recrossed a couple of times until she was persuaded to let the traffic flow.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 16:58 GMT Mark York 3
Pedestrians - The Right Of Way
Pedestrians in Canada do have the right of way & look somewhat amazed if they get hit for stepping out without looking (& a 99% of them don't, you can tell who the Brits are as they actually look from left to right or vice versa as they cross).
Also get fined for not using a crosswalk\jaywalking, even with nothing coming even I have found myself (after 9 years) semi conditioned to wait for the "walk" sign even when it's -25C outside (Hence the icon).
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Saturday 20th January 2018 19:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Pedestrians - The Right Of Way
"[...] you can tell who the Brits are as they actually look from left to right or vice versa as they cross)"
People sometimes tell me off for looking both ways before crossing a one-way street. My standard reply is "You know it is one way - I know it is one way - a car coming the wrong way obviously doesn't".
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Sunday 21st January 2018 11:52 GMT Wensleydale Cheese
My first taxi ride in Paris
"You know it is one way - I know it is one way - a car coming the wrong way obviously doesn't".
On my first taxi ride in Paris we got to the end of the desired street, but there was a no entry sign and we were obviously supposed to go around the block and enter it from the other end.
The taxi driver instead reversed the 200 metres up the street to deliver me to the right address.
Logical , in a very Gallic way, the car was honouring the one way system by facing in the correct direction at all times.
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Sunday 21st January 2018 18:35 GMT Michael Thibault
Re: My first taxi ride in Paris
"Logical , in a very Gallic way, the car was honouring the one way system by facing in the correct direction at all times."
Not particularly Gallic; it's called "plausible deniability" almost everywhere. As in: "I was backing into a parking spot that was there once but isn't anymore... apparently".
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Sunday 21st January 2018 23:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: My first taxi ride in Paris
"As in: "I was backing into a parking spot that was there once but isn't anymore... apparently"."
The one empty parking slot was temptingly just the other side of the No Entry sign. After going round the block and not finding the permitted entry point to the road it was still there...
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Sunday 21st January 2018 23:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: My first taxi ride in Paris
"The taxi driver instead reversed the 200 metres up the street to deliver me to the right address."
IIRC in England there used to be a restriction on how far you were allowed to reverse on a road - something like 75 feet. The current version says "only as far as is necessary" - which sound like something for a proverbial horse and coach hole.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 14:34 GMT NXM
Re: Pedestrians - The Right Of Way
Viz comic had a Top Tip years ago which went something like,'save time when crossing one-way streets by only looking in the direction the traffic is coming from.'
On the opposite page was another one which said 'when crossing one-way streets, always look both ways to avoid being run over by a car going in the wrong direction.' It was addressed from Fulchester Hospital.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 09:37 GMT tiggity
Re: Pedestrians - The Right Of Way
On my only US visit (work not leisure) I got lots if strange looks for crossing roads in UK manner - which would be "Jay Walking" to a US person.
i.e. road is "empty" of traffic, therefore I will cross it, as I'm human
No way could I live in US, I would be bankrupt from fines for crossing empty roads at non approved points and not paying due deference to automobile overlords.
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Sunday 21st January 2018 20:52 GMT Montreal Sean
Re: Pedestrians - The Right Of Way
In Montreal, Quebec, the highway code says that pedestrians have the right of way at crosswalks.
Most people don't look both ways before stepping off the curb, and most drivers don't pay attention to crosswalks.
Montreal is a dangerous place to be a pedestrian, especially in winter.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 19:34 GMT Geoffrey W
Re: It's San Francisco
There's a school of thought that says Californians are weird because they live on an active tectonic fault, and they are all living under the effects of the geo-magnetic fields created by the stresses. It has been noted that active fault zones seem to attract a lot of strange phenomena of all kinds, including UFO sightings.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 11:10 GMT SVV
He moved his face rapidly towards my fist, your honour....
Aaaah, that good old time-honoured defence... However, it's good that these contraptions are being developed and tested in San Francisco, a place full of wasted droolers, as the software requirements should just have increased dramatically in size following this incident as they begin to realise just what they're going to have to cope with in the real world, rather than their imagined tech utopia. Once they're safe to use there, I might concede that they should be able to cope with other less challenging environments.
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Sunday 21st January 2018 19:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: He moved his face rapidly towards my fist, your honour....
+1 on this, because it's not often brought up. It's one thing to drive an autonomous vehicle in Arizona, or on an interstate highway. But San Francisco? New York? Or (shudders from the memory) Dhaka, Jakarta, Naples?
Even high way driving is radically different between, say, Colorado and New Jersey. The highways around Newark for example appear to have been expressly designed to foster a sort of Thunderdome driving style.
I'm really looking forward to not having to drive myself, but I think I'm in for a very long wait.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 17:35 GMT tim292stro
Haven't been to SF El Reg?
"...Drugs or alcohol could just as well explain things..."
I propose rather than drugs or alcohol being a factor, it was just a typical Wednesday morning... I'll bet they didn't call the police because that person after striking the car immediately returned to the sidewalk, removed their shirt, and began yelling at a trash can for being an ar**hole.
Really, the locals in SF are sometimes a sight to behold.
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Sunday 21st January 2018 19:51 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Here to help
This horrific accident is prof that humans need autonomous limbs to protect themselves from dangerous lapses of attention. Now here's the hMotion product - a little back-pack like device that serves as your personal assistant via broadband nerve interface. Don't be afraid. It has gigabit 5G, AR, and all your favorite selfie filters. There, that's it. Scroll to the end of the disclaimer and hit "OK."
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Monday 22nd January 2018 05:06 GMT Muncher23
SF ain't the only place
I've been sitting in a taxi stopped in traffic in Sydney's Kings Cross (back when it was truely a red light / night club district) and a guy came running out of the old Bourbon and Beefsteak night club smack into the side of the taxi, got up and began swearing, yelling and spitting at us until the taxi could drive-off and this was at 10 am in the morning. So SF ain't the only place for this type of behaviour.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 11:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sounds about right for America
Was once a passenger in a car in Vegas where, when turning left, a local decided to run across the crossing. The driver stopped in plenty of time, but the local decided to jump onto the bonnet and then feign injury, requiring the local ambulance services to take him to hospital, while his friend shouted at us telling us how we were going to jail and we were going to be sued for every penny we had.
Absolutely a con both here and in the case in the article.
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Monday 22nd January 2018 12:50 GMT DropBear
Re: Sounds about right for America
There's a clip on YouTube somewhere with a car stopping at a traffic light - then two youngsters rapidly drag a moped in front of it, get on it, back it forcefully into the car's bonnet with the "passenger" slamming himself onto it as well. On the other hand the clip is on YouTube - so the young Thespians noticed the dash cam and scuppered away in a real hurry right after that...
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Monday 22nd January 2018 12:21 GMT James Hughes 1
In Ely a few months ago, in a queue of cars waiting at a T junction. Car in front drives away, I start moving up to the stop line. Some guy in full on lycra running gear runs straight across the junction in front of me. Because there are houses on each side of the junction and he was at speed there was no way I could see him before he ran out. He rolls along the front the car. Then gave me an earful*. He hadn't even slowed down or looked as he ran across the road. He did slow down as he slid over the car. I was doing about 3mph at the most, which is not a huge speed, he was running faster than I was moving, yet he was still unable to avoid the incident.
If you are reading this you wankpuffin, you will, in all likelihood, die through behaviour like this. Cars are heavier than people, and somewhat more robust.
* I did return the earful.