Driverless Ubers halted after pedestrian’s death in US
An Uber Technologies, Inc. selfdriving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in the first known fatality involving an autonomous vehicle, an accident that could stir regulators to action and damage the public perception of the young industry.
In response, Uber on Monday temporarily pulled its self-driving cars off the roads where it has been testing them in four cities. An Uber spokeswoman said the company is investigating the incident and cooperating with authorities.
Police in Tempe, Ariz., said the Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety operator at the wheel when it hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg on Sunday night while she was walking her bicycle outside of a crosswalk. The woman later died from her injuries, according to a police statement.
While it isn’t clear yet whether Uber’s vehicle was at fault in the accident, the fatality confirmed the fears of those who have warned for several years that someone would eventually die from driverless cars. Tempe Police at a news conference Monday said the vehicle was traveling nearly 40 mph at the time of the accident in a 35 mile-per-hour zone and didn’t initially show any signs of slowing; the Uber operator in the car wasn’t impaired, they said.
Auto makers and technology giants have braced for this inevitability but contend that the technology will ultimately save thousands of lives by eliminating human error.
The biggest auto makers, including General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., along with a slew of technology giants such as Uber and Alphabet, Inc., are collectively spending billions of dollars in their historic pursuit to replace the human driver with essentially a computer on wheels. While they tout the safety benefits, the introduction also holds promise of upending the automotive business and potentially crowning new transportation giants.
Uber has called its self-driving efforts “existential” and just wrapped up a costly lawsuit from rival Alphabet’s self-driving unit, Waymo, over allegedly stolen trade secrets; Uber denied the claims. Uber, which has logged 3 million test miles, has been racing to keep up with Waymo, which has conducted more than 5 million miles on public roads and billions more in computer simulation.
The accident comes at a pivotal time for the industry. Mainstream car makers are already incorporating semiautonomous systems in their vehicles that allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel for periods of time. Waymo, which has been testing vehicles in the Phoenix metro area without humans behind the wheel, plans to begin commercial robot taxi services there this year.
The fully-autonomous technology is still unproven, yet federal and state regulators have allowed these companies to test the robot cars on public roads. More than 50 companies are licensed in California alone to test self-driving vehicles there, as long as they have human operators in the car.
Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they were dispatching teams to Tempe to investigate the accident. NHTSA said it was in contact with Uber, state and local authorities as well as Volvo, the car maker Uber relies on for its self-driving vehicles.
Volvo, a unit of China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., said in a statement: “We are aware of this incident and our thoughts are with the family of the woman involved.”
Industry observers pointed to the fatal accident as evidence that the nascent technology needs more time to be fully developed before being deployed on public roads.
Missy Cummings, a professor of mechanical engineering and material science at Duke University, cautioned Congress in 2016 about companies rushing to put systems into widespread deployment and warned that a death could set back development of the potentially lifesaving technology.
“There is no question that someone is going to die in this technology,” she said to Congress in 2016. “The question is when and what can we do to minimize that?” (WSJ)