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Wed, 28 Mar 2018

Arizona Bans Self-Driving Car Tests; Still Ignores How Many Pedestrians Get Killed
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By now, most folks have read about the fact that Uber (surprise) was responsible for the first ever pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car in the United States. Investigators in the case have found plenty of blame to go around, including a pedestrian who didn't cross at a crosswalk, an Uber driver who wasn't paying attention to the road (and therefore didn't take control in time), and Uber self-driving tech that pretty clearly wasn't ready for prime time compared to its competitors:

"Uber's robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz.The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber's human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects."
All of the companies that contribute tech to Uber's test vehicle have been rushing to distance themselves from Uber's failures here. Many of them are laying the blame at the feet of Uber, including one company making it clear that Uber had disabled some standard safety features on the Volvo XC90 test car in question:
"Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle's radar and camera.We don't want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the technology that we supply for Volvo, because that's not the case, Zach Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90's standard advanced driver-assistance system has nothing to do with the Uber test vehicle's autonomous driving system, he said."
Mobileye, the company that makes the collision-avoidance technology behind Aptiv's tech, was also quick to pile on, noting that if implemented correctly, their technology should have been able to detect the pedestrian in time:
"Intel Corp.'s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision-avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv, said Monday that it tested its own software after the crash by playing a video of the Uber incident on a television monitor. Mobileye said it was able to detect Herzberg one second before impact in its internal tests, despite the poor second-hand quality of the video relative to a direct connection to cameras equipped to the car."
In response to Uber's tragic self-driving face plant, Arizona this week announced that it will be suspending Uber's self-driving testing technology in the state indefinitely:

NEW: In light of the fatal Uber crash in Tempe, Governor Ducey sends this letter to Uber ordering the company to suspend its testing of autonomous vehicles in Arizona indefinitely #12News pic.twitter.com/gO5BZB9P2e— Bianca Buono (@BiancaBuono) March 27, 2018

Plenty have justly pointed out that Arizona also has plenty of culpability here, given the regulatory oversight of Uber's testing was arguably nonexistent. That said, Waymo (considered by most to be way ahead of the curve on self-driving tech) hasn't had similar problems, and there's every indication that a higher quality implementation of self-driving technology (as the various vendors above attest) may have avoided this unnecessary tragedy.Still somehow lost in the finger pointing (including Governor Doug Ducey's "unequivocal commitment to public safety") is the fact that Arizona already had some of the highest pedestrian fatalities in the nation (of the human-caused variety). There were ten other pedestrian fatalities the same week as the Uber accident in the Phoenix area alone, and Arizona had the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities in the nation last year, clearly illustrating that Arizona has some major civil design and engineering questions of its own that need to be answered as the investigation continues.Again, there's plenty of blame to go around here, and hopefully everybody in the chain of dysfunction learns some hard lessons from the experience. But it's still important to remember that human-piloted counterparts cause 33,000 fatalities annually, a number that should be dramatically lower when self-driving car technology is inevitably implemented (correctly).

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