{"id":8356,"date":"2018-03-29T08:16:45","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T22:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=8356"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:29:51","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:29:51","slug":"driverless-car-causes-fatal-accident-in-arizona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/blog\/driverless-car-causes-fatal-accident-in-arizona\/","title":{"rendered":"Driverless Car Causes Fatal Accident In Arizona"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo courtesy of Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

On 18th<\/sup> March \u2013 that\u2019s just over a week ago \u2013 driverless car technology received a major blow.\u00a0 The horrible truth is that the blow struck to the technology by this particular vehicle being road-tested by the Uber taxi service wasn\u2019t as nasty as the blow it delivered to a 49-year-old Arizona woman named Elaine Herzberg who was crossing the road one evening, like you do.\u00a0 The car hit her and killed her.\u00a0 Dashcam on the autonomous car captured the moment before the car ran her down.\u00a0 I\u2019ve decided not to embed it in this post in case you\u2019ve got autoplay or something on, because it\u2019s decidedly disturbing.\u00a0 Find it online yourself if you must, but personally, I\u2019d rather not watch the tragic and completely avoidable death of a woman about my age who probably has a partner and children and friends who thought she was great fun \u2013 someone just like me and you.<\/p>\n

The reaction has been exactly what you would expect: Arizona has called a halt to on-road real-life testing of autonomous cars, Uber and a few other companies like Toyota have stopped all testing in North America, and shares in companies that have been investing heavily into driverless car technology such as Tesla have dropped.\u00a0 In addition, Ms Herzberg\u2019s family have been coping with the shock and loss of losing a mother, daughter, sister, wife, cousin\u2026\u00a0 There\u2019s also one Uber driver who trusted the technology to take care of things the way they told her it would who is going to live with a lifetime of questions and guilt, and who is probably in the hands of a good therapist right now \u2013 or at least ought to be.<\/p>\n

We can ask the same questions as that Uber driver and the Herzberg family are probably asking over and over again: why did this happen? What went wrong? Aren\u2019t driverless cars supposed to get rid of the human error factor that is responsible for the majority of fatal accidents?<\/p>\n

Without actually looking at the chilling dashcam footage personally and based on other people\u2019s reports, it appears that what happened was this.\u00a0 The Uber vehicle was cruising along a road on a normal spring night in Tempe, Arizona, on a Sunday night.\u00a0 It was dark and the driver, who was probably on a tight schedule and having to manage half a billion things at once \u2013 like you do \u2013 looked away from the road for about five seconds.\u00a0 The car was in autonomous mode and it had the full fleet of sensors that are available in even regular cars that aren\u2019t driverless cars, such as automatic braking, pedestrian detection, cross-traffic detection and collision avoidance mode. \u00a0The driver thought that all would be well \u2013 after all, the car was supposed to take care of itself most of the time, wasn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Then along came Ms Herzberg, wheeling her bicycle.\u00a0 Probably she was a bit too careless and didn\u2019t pick a big enough gap in the traffic to cross in \u2013 but haven\u2019t we all done that when trying to cross a busy road when there\u2019s no pedestrian crossing or traffic lights in sight?\u00a0 Most of us take it for granted that the humans behind the wheels don\u2019t want to hit us and they\u2019ll slow down a fraction if we\u2019re cutting it a bit fine (this is something that I don\u2019t assume \u2013 call me paranoid but maybe it\u2019s an assumption we need to start questioning).\u00a0 To make matters worse, Ms Herzberg was wearing black at night, which would have made her hard to see even if the driver hadn\u2019t looked away.<\/p>\n

The sensors and the system didn\u2019t see or recognize Ms Herzberg, so the collision avoidance systems weren\u2019t triggered.\u00a0 The vehicle kept going straight ahead at normal road speeds.\u00a0 The driver, trusting the autonomous system, didn\u2019t see her either until the last moment when the car ploughed full-speed into her and there was no time for the human driver to do anything to stop it.\u00a0 Ms Herzberg died later that night in hospital.<\/p>\n

This is the first time that a driverless car has been involved in a fatal accident involving a pedestrian \u2013 hang on, let\u2019s call a spade a spade.\u00a0 The car wasn\u2019t just \u201cinvolved\u201d: it knocked her down and killed her.<\/p>\n

Naturally, all the tech companies and car manufacturers involved are properly horrified and are wondering what on earth went wrong.\u00a0 The sensors were supposed to work without being \u201cdistracted\u201d like a human driver could be.\u00a0 They were supposed to be able to see in the dark, so to speak, and therefore be better than a human driver would be.\u00a0 Autonomous systems are supposed to be so much safer because they don\u2019t get drunk, tired or distracted, but stay focussed and on the job all the time. So what went wrong?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t the car see Ms. Herzberg and brake in time?<\/p>\n

Naturally, as the questions are still being answered and the accident only happened about a week ago, they don\u2019t have answers yet.\u00a0 A few fingers are being pointed, especially as different companies make different bits of the tech.\u00a0 Did the Lidar sensor plus artificial intelligence system fail to distinguish the pedestrian with a bicycle from a power pole or a bush? (These systems do have trouble with this \u2013 in Australia, they have real trouble recognizing how close kangaroos on the road actually are, because the jumping motion of a roo fools the sensor into thinking that there\u2019s more road between the car and the roo than there really is.) \u00a0Robotic systems and computers follow the rules and keep to the rules no matter what \u2013 and something unexpected that\u2019s out of the box and not included in the rules really throws them.\u00a0 Possibly, someone crossing the road with a bike without looking properly or allowing a big enough gap is a novel concept for them.<\/p>\n

I guess that at this early stage, there are a few lessons that all of us can learn from this tragedy:<\/p>\n