Uber test car kills Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona

By early 2018 several companies were testing self-driving cars on public roads in Arizona. The arrangement was the same everywhere: the car drove itself, a human operator sat behind the wheel, and the operator was expected to take over when the software could not cope. The safety case rested on that person.

On the night of 18 March 2018 a modified Volvo XC90 belonging to Uber Advanced Technologies Group was driving itself north on Mill Avenue in Tempe with the operator Rafaela Vasquez aboard. Elaine Herzberg, aged 49, was walking a bicycle across the road away from a crosswalk. The car struck her at about 38 mph and she died of her injuries. It was the first recorded death of a pedestrian hit by a self-driving car. Uber suspended its testing programs across every city the following day.

The National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation and published a preliminary report on 24 May 2018. Federal investigators found that the vehicle’s software had detected Herzberg but had not classified her correctly in time to brake; the system had not been built to expect a person crossing away from a crosswalk. The finding was awkward for the whole field, because it described a failure of ordinary object recognition rather than an exotic edge case.

The crash changed how the testing was governed. Arizona suspended Uber’s permission to test on its roads, Uber’s program never regained its earlier scale, and other states and cities rewrote the terms under which they would host trials. Nine months later Waymo opened the first commercial robotaxi service in the same metropolitan area, with safety drivers still behind the wheel.