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Wow, one of those self driving Uber cars killed a woman near Mill Avenue and Curry Road. That's near the Salt River and the Marquee Theater, just north of downtown Tempe. I guess I will have to take a few steps away from the road next time I see one of those self driving URBER or Google cars coming by.
Self-driving Uber strikes, kills woman crossing road in Tempe
Gabrielle Olivera and Ryan Randazzo, A woman was struck and killed by a self-driving Uber as she crossed a street Sunday night in Tempe, and the company has suspended its autonomous testing, officials said. The woman was crossing outside the designated crosswalk on Mill Avenue near Curry Road at about 10 p.m. when she was hit, police said. Sgt. Ronald Elcock, a Tempe police spokesman, said the car was on autonomous mode with a driver behind the wheel when it hit the pedestrian. The woman died at a hospital. Her name was not immediately released Monday. Uber has not confirmed the vehicle was in autonomous mode, but said that its operations of self-driving cars have been "paused," similar to how the company temporarily shut down operations following previous accidents. Uber has been carrying customers in the self-driving cars in limited parts of Tempe and Scottsdale. "Our hearts go out to the victim’s family," Uber said on Twitter. "We’re fully cooperating with @TempePolice and local authorities as they investigate this incident." It would be the first fatality involving one of the autonomous cars in Arizona, if indeed the car was in autonomous mode when the accident occurred. As of Monday morning, police were investigating what caused the collision and said that Uber was assisting.
Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHIMARCH 19, 2018 SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road. The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m. The woman was not publicly identified. Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” an Uber spokeswoman, Sarah Abboud, said in a statement. The fatal crash will most likely raise questions about regulations for self-driving cars. Testing of self-driving cars is already underway for vehicles that have a human driver ready to take over if something goes wrong, but states are starting to allow companies to test cars without a person in the driver’s seat. This month, California said that, in April, it would start allowing companies to test autonomous vehicles without anyone behind the wheel. It will be interesting to see if it was a situation where a human could not do any better. Did the person dart out suddenly from behind a... Arizona already allows self-driving cars to operate without a driver behind the wheel. Since late last year, Waymo, the self-driving car unit from Google’s parent company Alphabet, has been using cars without a human in the driver’s seat to pick up and drop off passengers there. The state has largely taken a hands-off approach, promising that it would help keep the driverless car industry free from regulation. As a result, technology companies have flocked to Arizona to test their self-driving vehicles. Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior. An Uber self-driving car was involved in another crash a year ago in Tempe. In that collision, one of Uber’s Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicles was hit when the driver of another car failed to yield, causing the Uber vehicle to roll over onto its side. The car was in self-driving mode with a safety driver behind the wheel, but police said the autonomous vehicle had not been at fault. In 2016, a man driving his Tesla using Autopilot, the car company’s self-driving software, died on a state highway in Florida when it crashed into a tractor-trailer that was crossing the road in front of his car. Federal regulators later ruled there were no defects in the system to cause the accident. The National Transportation Safety Board was sending a small team of investigators to Arizona to gather information about the Uber crash, said Eric Weiss, an N.T.S.B. spokesman. v Follow Daisuke Wakabayashi on Twitter: Daiwakasei Europe
Self-driving Uber vehicle strikes and kills pedestrian By Faiz Siddiqui and Michael Laris March 19 at 3:15 PM Email the author Uber has halted testing of its autonomous vehicles across North America, the company announced Monday, after a woman was struck and killed by one of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Ariz., Sunday night. The moratorium on testing includes San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Toronto, Uber said. It is believed to be the first fatality in any testing program involving autonomous vehicles. The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into the crash, NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said. Uber issued a short statement. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” a company spokeswoman said. The vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash, though a driver was behind the wheel, Tempe police said in a statement. The crash occurred about 10 p.m. Sunday in the area of Curry Road and Mill Avenue, a busy intersection with multiple lanes in every direction. Police said the vehicle was northbound on Curry Road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, crossing from the west side of street, was struck. She died at a hospital, the department said. Missy Cummings, a robotics expert at Duke University who has been critical of the swift rollout of driverless technology across the country, said the computer-vision systems for self-driving cars are “deeply flawed” and can be “incredibly brittle,” particularly in unfamiliar circumstances. Companies have not been required by the federal government to prove that their robotic driving systems are safe. “We’re not holding them to any standards right now,” Cummings said, arguing that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should provide real supervision. Federal transportation officials have relied on voluntary safety reporting to oversee the burgeoning industry, which has emphasized the life-saving potential of the technology in arguing against government mandates. Arizona has aggressively courted driverless tech firms, based largely on its light regulatory touch. That approach has consequences, Cummings said. “If you’re going take that first step out, then you’re also going to be [the] first entity to have to suffer these kinds of issues,” she said. Driverless technology firms generally say they painstakingly map an area digitally before running their vehicles there, so that the vehicles essentially have banked information about the surroundings that can be compared on the fly to what cameras and sensors are picking up at any moment. The victim was “walking outside of the crosswalk” and was crossing a road at about 10 p.m. when she was struck, the Tempe police said. “Just because you map an area doesn’t mean your computer system is necessarily going to pick up a pedestrian, particularly one that wasn’t in a cross walk,” Cummings said. Another industry-wide issue is to what extent autonomous vehicles can deal with unanticipated problems. “The car cameras, the vision systems, they don’t perform inductively, meaning they can’t guess about the appearance of someone in a particular place and time,” Cummings said. “Pedestrians get hit by human drivers all the time for similar reasons,” though the exact cause of this crash remains unclear, she said. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a tweet that the company was working to learn what went wrong. “Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona,” he said. “We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened.” A spokesman for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), whose administration has provided a more permissive regulatory environment for deploying driverless cars than in states such as California, said “our hearts go out to the victim involved.”
Uber self-driving car fatally hits pedestrian in Arizona By BLOOMBERG MAR 19, 2018 | 10:25 AM A self-driving car from Uber Technologies Inc. hit and killed a woman in Arizona on Sunday evening, what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving a driverless vehicle. In response, Uber quickly halted its self-driving cars as the crash is investigated. The woman was crossing a road in Tempe when the Uber vehicle, operating in autonomous mode, struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department. She was taken to a hospital, where she died from her injuries. "Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation," Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. Uber said Monday that it is pausing tests of all its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. "Our hearts go out to the victim's family," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident." As self-driving cars have begun to roll out in pilot programs around the world, the chance of a pedestrian death has become more likely. Experts have long worried about the effect deadly crashes could have on the industry. "We're within the phase of autonomous vehicles where we're still learning how good they are. Whenever you release a new technology, there's a whole bunch of unanticipated situations," said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's business school. "Despite the fact that humans are also prone to error, we have as a society many decades of understanding of those errors." Drivers relying on Tesla Inc.'s Autopilot technology have been involved in fatal car crashes. Uber has had minor incidents in the past. A self-driving Uber car ran a red light in San Francisco while the company operated in the city without regulatory approval. The California Department of Motor Vehicles eventually forced Uber to pull the cars from the road. The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the death and is sending a small team of investigators to Tempe, spokesman Eric Weiss said. The NTSB opens relatively few highway accident investigations each year, but has been closely following incidents involving autonomous or partially autonomous vehicles. Last year, it partially faulted the Tesla Autopilot system for a fatal crash in Florida in 2016.
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