Uber Was Warned Before Self-Driving Car Crash That Killed Woman Walking Bicycle
An Uber employee warned executives about the dangers of the company’s self-driving test program just days before a crash that killed a woman walking her bike, according to internal emails.
A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bike across a street in Tempe, Arizona, last March. Five days prior to the crash, a manager with the company’s test team had raised concerns about both the software powering the self-driving prototypes and what he described as inadequate training for test drivers.
In a nearly 900-word email sent to seven Uber execs-which tech website The Information obtained and published last week-manager Robbie Miller sounded the alarm about the test program’s high crash rate. He said Uber’s test fleet of self-driving Volvo SUVs, which had been on the streets in Arizona since February 2017 after California banned them over safety concerns, “routinely” caused crashes that resulted in damage.
“This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the [autonomous vehicle] technology,” wrote Miller, who has since left the company. “A car was damaged nearly every other day in February. We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles.”
Miller also said Uber failed to discipline test drivers who performed poorly on the job. “Repeated infractions for poor driving rarely result in termination,” he wrote. “Several of the drivers appear to not have been properly vetted or trained.”
According to Tempe police, the test driver in the car that struck Herzberg was watching TV on her phone until just moments before the fatal collision. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the car’s sensors had detected Herzberg six seconds before the crash, but had trouble classifying her as a pedestrian and were delayed in deciding on a course of action.
The NTSB also found that Uber had disabled the car’s emergency brakes during test drives to prevent “erratic vehicle behavior,” instead relying on human drivers to take over as needed. Investigators found that the test driver in this case didn’t look up at the road until half a second before the crash, and didn’t hit the brakes until less than a second after impact.
The car struck Herzberg at nearly 40 mph. She later died of her injuries at the hospital, becoming the first known pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car. Police called the crash “entirely avoidable” in a June report and said the test driver could still face charges of vehicular manslaughter.
Uber suspended its on-road test operations nationwide after the crash, and in May shut down its Arizona program entirely. Last month it was reported that Uber plans on resuming its self-driving vehicle tests on public roads in Pittsburgh. Company representatives told The Information that it has already gotten approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to do so.
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