Driver in Uber Self-Driving Car Crash Was Streaming TV Show
Apparently, self-driving cars can’t save us from ourselves. Not yet, anyway.
Police in Tempe, Arizona now claim that the “safety driver” in an Uber self-driving car crash was streaming a TV show, and the incident was “deemed entirely avoidable.” The driver, Rafaela Vasquez, had her head down for 5.3 seconds prior to the crash, and she looked up .5 seconds before her vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who’d wandered into the street.
At the time of the accident, the self-driving car was in "computer mode," which disables automatic emergency braking to “prevent erratic driving behavior.” And while the system detected that braking was necessary 1.3 seconds before the crash, it doesn’t provide an alert to the driver – though the Tesla autonomous car crash proved that drivers can easily ignore such warnings.
According to the police report, Vasquez was streaming “The Voice” until 9:59 p.m., which “coincides with the approximate time of the collision.” Vasquez could face vehicular manslaughter charges.
Like Tesla’s semi-autonomous “Autopilot,” Uber’s “computer mode” is more like a “driver assistance” feature – not fully autonomous, and clearly not able to fully account for human error. The company prohibits the use of mobile devices while its self-driving cars are in operation, and the “safety driver” must maintain control at all times.
But the incident in March made one thing abundantly clear – the current crop of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems isn’t sophisticated enough to save us from ourselves. In theory, a network of autonomous vehicles should communicate with itself at superhuman speed, preventing collisions. Until then, self-driving cars will struggle to account for erratic human behavior – behind the wheel and in front of it.
Vasquez initially told federal investigators that she was monitoring the self-driving interface, and her phone wasn’t in use prior to the crash. But Vasquez didn’t apply the brakes until a half-second after the crash. And video from inside the car shows the entire sordid affair, including a very distracted driver.
Uber has currently suspended its self-driving car testing.
