Politics

One Of Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Just Killed A Pedestrian, Raising Urgent Questions

Are self-driving cars ready for roads? How do we know?

by Sam Langford  20 March 2018
self-driving cars death

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Overnight in Arizona, one of Uber’s self-driving cars collided with and killed a woman who was crossing the road. It’s believed to be the first death involving a self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian, though not the first death caused by a self-driving vehicle, and it’s reignited an uncomfortable debate about whether self-driving cars are ready for the roads.

Details of what exactly happened are still pretty thin. We know there was a person supervising inside the car — meaning they sit at the wheel ready to take over if there’s a problem — but their presence didn’t prevent the death. We also know that the pedestrian killed was 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the road with a bike at the time.

Uber responded to the incident by suspending testing of its autonomous vehicles, and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tweeted that “we’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened”.

We don’t know whether the death was the fault of the self-driving car, or whether it would have been unavoidable even with a driver at the wheel. The incident has sparked an uncomfortable debate, though, about the many self-driving cars already on roads and whether they’re ready to be there.

And if this is the first time you’re hearing that self-driving cars are already on roads, consider this a pretty important heads up.

Quite a few cities in the US already have self-driving cars in on-road trials, and while in many cases these are strictly regulated, there have also been more than a few reports of tech companies rushing trials forward in an attempt to beat their competitors to various milestones.

In 2016, Uber was trialling self-driving cars in San Francisco without a permit. They argued that because there was technically a person behind the wheel, there was no need to acquire a permit (regulators disagreed, and after several cars were spotted running red lights Uber was ordered to take the cars off the road). Australia also has self-driving vehicles in trials on public roads, though not as many — in Perth, the RAC Intellibus has been running driverless since 2016.

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And while today’s death is being described as the first of its kind, it’s important to note that it’s only the first pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle — in 2016, a passenger in one of Tesla’s autonomous vehicles was killed when the sensors failed to identify a semi-trailer crossing an intersection ahead, and the car drove straight through the trailer at high speed.

In the wake of today’s accident, many people are questioning whether driverless cars are actually ready for public roads. Proponents of driverless cars are arguing that they’re safer than having a person behind the wheel, but it can be hard to know whether to trust this when CEOs of companies developing autonomous vehicles have literally described the rush to get them on roads as “a race”.

We’ll have to wait for the investigation into this case to actually know what went wrong. But the question on people’s minds right now is whether the “race” to develop self-driving cars will wait for that investigation, and whether we can trust tech companies who say they are.