Pedestrian Struck And Killed By Uber Autonomous Car
Uber has halted its North American autonomous testing programme following a fatality involving one of the ride-sharing firm’s specially-adapted Volvo XC90s.
While running in autonomous mode - with a safety operator behind the wheel - the vehicle hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was pushing a bicycle across the road in Tempe, Arizona on Sunday night. She was taken to hospital, but later died from her injuries. It’s thought to be the first fatal accident involving an autonomous car and a pedestrian.
According to local police, Herzberg was not using a pedestrian crossing at the time of the accident. Uber says that it is “fully cooperating” with authorities, while CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: “We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened.”
This isn’t the first time Uber has temporarily taken its autonomous cars - which are also tested in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto - off the road. In March last year, the company temporarily suspended the test programme after one of the modified XC90s crashed into anther car and flipped onto its side in Tempe. The other vehicle had failed to yield, highlighting one of the problems with testing autonomous vehicles amidst regular traffic.
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
So the problem is with Tempe. Anyway deepest sympathies to the family
I know it’s not just about pointing fingers, but who’s going to take the blame for this?
There was an “operator” behind the wheel, who is supposed to take control over the car when things go haywire
So I would imagine, he’s largely (not fully I guess) to blame
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I read another article about this and it said that the accident would have been pretty much unavoidable because you couldn’t see the woman until it was already to late. There is video of the accident but it’s probably not gonna be published on the internet for obvious reason.
It’s when people ask questions like this right away that conclusions are jumped to, let them finnish the investigation before speculations are drawn.
Of course uber thought its a great idea to make autonamous tanks smh
If not the autonomus vehicles, it would most likely not happened. Yes, there would be a possibility, but if there were only good drivers on the roads, then accidents would be way less common. That’s why they should make driving tests 100x harder with some racing driver techniques like drifting just to ensure that every driver knows what he’s doing behind a wheel. And they should be driving an car with max 100hp, no power steering, no abs, no TC, and only manual gearbox. Driving should be a privilage…
Good luck teaching drift to average people haha
What are you gonna do with drifting while driving 100hp fwd car on the street ? Not every car is a small hatchback 100hp in a jeep grand cherokee or s-class good luck with that . Power steering dosen’t make you any less of a driver f1,wec,nascar etc drivers all use power steering. Abs and tc are safety features . In case you didn’t notice not everyone is called jimmie johnson or michael schumacher . You’re eliminating 90% of drivers on the road and killing the auto industry. Jenson button failed his first driving test . Lewis hamilton crashed in monaco in his street car .
You couldn’t see the woman until it was already to late, this accident was not the car malfunctioning
If it was 100x harder no one would not pass the test.
Check mate autonomy bullshit
I read another article that said that the woman appeared in the road so suddently that nothing could be doen to avoid her, even if it was a person driving.
This is desperately sad and it highlights just how far autonomous vehicles have still got to go before becoming a viable mode of transport.
Humans are unpredictable and you can’t program spontaneity.
Autonomous cars dont have to be perfect, of course, they just have to be as good or better than humans. So I do wonder how human drivers and autonomous cars compare if you look at accidents per distance driven.
We’re trying to get into autonomous cars way too fast… It is still way off it will probably not even happen in our lives. Companies are competing to be the first in this industry and that’s not helping at all.
By the way, you wrote “anther” instead of “an other” in the last paragraph.
I’ve never been so happy that someone had died before. They were a casualty in the war against autonomous cars. RIP my hero
Someone died.
“Autonomous cars are the future”, they say, and yet someone’s already been killed.
thats not a bad statistic if you take into account the amount of miles the autonomous vehicles have driven then compare that to the miles driven by people it statistically works out safer to have an autonomous car than 1 driven by people. The issue is they werent be able to make them safer until there are more of them on the road. It can’t into account the stupidity of some people.
just in the US alone there were over 34.000 deaths last year from automotive accidents. This is still a mass improvement.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview
People might see this as something really bad. Which of course it is. But the really good part about it is that it is taken seriously. If a plane crashes, there will always be an investigation to help fix whatever caused the plane to crash. But with car crashes, we just swipe it under the rug and ask people to drive slowly and carefully and various other bullshit. But not anymore, I’m really glad at least in some part of the world, they are taking car crashes seriously. And if this is the future, sign me the f up.
P.S. I’m not being an AV fanboy, just pointing out the good here. Of course, if they decided that normal car crashes are just as critical as plane crashes, I wouldn’t have any issues.
the problem with autonomous cars is assuming we can create an algorithm to predict the total chaos that is humanity.