Backup driver for self-driving Uber that killed Arizona pedestrian pleads guilty
The backup Uber driver for a selfdriving vehicle that killed a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in 2018 pleaded guilty on Friday to endangerment in the first deadly crash involving a fully autonomous car.
Arizona state judge David Garbarino, who accepted the plea agreement, sentenced Rafaela Vasquez to three years of supervised probation for the crash that killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. Vasquez, 49, told police that Herzberg “came out of nowhere” and that she didn’t see Herzberg before hitting her on a darkened Tempe street on 18 March 2018.
Vasquez had been charged with felony negligent homicide. The charge to which she pleaded could be reclassified as a misdemeanor if she completes probation.
Authorities say Vasquez was streaming the television show The Voice on a phone and looking down in the moments before Uber’s Volvo XC-90 SUV struck Herzberg, who was crossing with her bicycle.
Vasquez’s attorneys said she was looking at a messaging program used by Uber employees on a work cellphone that was on her right knee. They said the TV show was playing on her personal cellphone, which was on the passenger seat.
Defense attorney Albert Jaynes Morrison told Garbarino that Uber should share some blame for the crash as he asked the judge to sentence Vasquez
to six months of unsupervised probation.
“There were steps that Uber failed to take,” he said. By putting Vasquez in the vehicle without a second employee, he said, “it was not a question of if – but when – it was going to happen.”
Prosecutors previously declined to file criminal charges against Uber as a corporation. Federal transportation safety officials concluded Vasquez’s failure to monitor the road was the main cause of the crash.
“The defendant had one job and one job only,” prosecutor Tiffany Brady told the judge. “And that was to keep her eyes in the road.”
Contributing factors cited by investigators included Uber’s inadequate safety procedures and ineffective oversight of its drivers, Herzberg’s decision to cross the street outside of a crosswalk, and the Arizona transportation department’s insufficient oversight of autonomous vehicle testing.
Safety inspectors also concluded Uber’s deactivation of its automatic emergency braking system increased the risks associated with testing automated vehicles on public roads. Instead
of the system, Uber relied on the human backup driver to intervene.
Herzberg’s death was not the first crash involving an Uber autonomous test vehicle. In March 2017, an Uber SUV flipped on to its side, also in Tempe, when it collided with another vehicle. No serious injuries were reported, and the driver of the other car was cited for a violation.
Herzberg’s death was the first involving an autonomous test vehicle but not the first in a car with some self-driving features. The driver of a Tesla Model S was killed in 2016 when his car, operating on its autopilot system, crashed into a semitrailer in Florida.
Nine months after Herzberg’s death, in December 2019, two people were killed in California when a Tesla on autopilot ran a red light and slammed into another car. That driver was charged in 2022 with vehicular manslaughter in what was believed to be the first felony case against a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system.
In Arizona, the Uber system detected Herzberg 5.6 seconds before the crash. But it failed to determine whether she was a bicyclist, pedestrian or unknown object, or that she was headed into the vehicle’s path, US transportation safety officials said.
The backup driver was there to take over the vehicle if systems failed.
The death reverberated throughout the auto industry and Silicon Valley and forced other companies to slow what had been a fast march toward autonomous ride-hailing services. Uber pulled its self-driving cars out of Arizona, and then Governor Doug Ducey prohibited the company from continuing its tests of self-driving cars.
Vasquez had previously spent more than four years in prison for two felony convictions – making false statements when obtaining unemployment benefits and attempted armed robbery – before starting work as an Uber driver, according to court records.