USA TODAY US Edition

Uber saw pedestrian before fatal crash but didn’t brake

- Nathan Bomey

Uber’s self-driving car system detected an Arizona pedestrian about six seconds before the vehicle it was in killed the woman in March. But the system never took action to prevent the incident, according to the preliminar­y results of a National Transporta­tion Safety Board investigat­ion.

Uber engineers had intentiona­lly disabled the Volvo’s emergency braking system “to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior” but did not program the system to alert the human operator to manually brake the vehicle, NTSB reported Thursday.

If the emergency braking system had been activated, it would have been triggered 1.3 seconds before the car hit the pedestrian, according to the probe.

The revelation­s came a day after Uber announced it would shutter its Arizona self-driving car operations.

NTSB said Uber’s system was “operating normally” on the 2017 Volvo XC90 with “no faults or diagnostic messages.”

But “according to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior,” NTSB said. “The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.”

The woman behind the wheel, an Uber employee, noticed a woman pushing a bicycle across the road in the dark and grabbed the steering wheel “less than a second before impact,” NTSB said.

In a video released publicly after the crash, the operator was shown looking down at times. According to the NTSB probe, she told investigat­ors that she was “monitoring the self-driving interface and that while her personal and business phones were in the vehicle, neither were in use until after the crash.”

She began braking “less than second after impact” with the victim, Elaine Herzberg, the NTSB said.

NTSB said it had not yet reached a conclusion on the “probable cause” of the incident. Uber said it is cooperatin­g closely with NTSB investigat­ors.

 ?? USA TODAY NETWORK ?? The NTSB says the Uber driver had about six seconds to react.
USA TODAY NETWORK The NTSB says the Uber driver had about six seconds to react.

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