Tragedy

Uber Turned Off Braking System in Fatal 2018 Autonomous Driving Test

NTSB concludes that had Volvo’s native system not been deactivated by Uber, an Arizona pedestrian would probably not have been killed in 2018.

Uber switched off the emergency braking function in an SUV it had adapted to drive autonomously, but the native system would probably have prevented the vehicle from killing a pedestrian, had it not been deactivated, federal investigators said. When Uber retrofitted the Volvo XC90 with sensors and computers for autonomous driving, they switched off the car’s own emergency braking system to keep it from interfering with its tests. However, documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board show Uber’s self-driving system failed to accurately classify 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as a pedestrian or to understand she was pushing her bike across lanes of traffic on a Tempe street. Volvo ran a host of tests reproducing the circumstances of the March 18, 2018, accident and found its system would have been effective in preventing it or massively lessening its impact. Dash-cam footage also suggests the vehicle’s back-up driver, Rafaela Vasquez, took her eyes off the road right before the accident, while Hulu records suggested she had been streaming a television talent show on a phone at the time of the crash.