Cops: Victim stepped before self-driving car
Police say a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly, a factor that investigators are likely to focus on as they assess the performance of the technology in the first pedestrian fatality involving an autonomous vehicle.
The Uber had a forward-facing video recorder, which showed the woman was walking a bike at about 10 p.m. and moved into traffic from a dark center median.
“It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said, referring to the backup driver who was behind the wheel but not operating the vehicle.
The chief’s account raises new questions in the investigation, which holds importance to the future of the burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry. Uber halted autonomous vehicle tests in the wake of the collision.
It’s too soon to draw any conclusions from the preliminary information that has emerged, said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied autonomous vehicle liability.
“It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email.
“I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”