by Mathieu Goulet-Côté
peer-reviewed by Léa Drolet-Roy
Despite huge progress in artificial intelligence, driverless cars are far from perfect. The accident that happened on March 18 proves just that. The pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was pushing her bike across the pedestrian walk when she got hit by an autonomous car from Uber in Arizona.
The conditions of the accident still remain unclear, despite the fact that it happened a few weeks ago. All Uber’s cars have been removed from circulation until the engineers in charge identify the cause of the crash, seemingly a bug in the safety systems.
The event is likely to cause a large drawback for the self-driving vehicles. The accident was only one out of a dozen deaths on the road in America that day. Although a general public distrust could cause a halt to the project for at least several weeks. It’s also causing other companies to stop their testing, such as Toyota, worried about the effect of the incident on its test drivers.
There was a backup driver aboard the car to take control of the car in the case of a malfunctioning of the system, although as the incident show, it was not enough to stop the crash. The onboard camera revealed that the human driver was not paying attention to the road at the moment preceding the impact, which raises new questions, who was responsible for the death of miss Herzberg, was it the backup driver? the company? the programmers?
Elaine’s family seemed to think it was the company, by suing them for the death of their loved one. An arrangement was however reached, quickly ending a potential judicial war over the first death of a driverless car.
The conditions of the accident still remain unclear, despite the fact that it happened a few weeks ago. All Uber’s cars have been removed from circulation until the engineers in charge identify the cause of the crash, seemingly a bug in the safety systems.
The event is likely to cause a large drawback for the self-driving vehicles. The accident was only one out of a dozen deaths on the road in America that day. Although a general public distrust could cause a halt to the project for at least several weeks. It’s also causing other companies to stop their testing, such as Toyota, worried about the effect of the incident on its test drivers.
There was a backup driver aboard the car to take control of the car in the case of a malfunctioning of the system, although as the incident show, it was not enough to stop the crash. The onboard camera revealed that the human driver was not paying attention to the road at the moment preceding the impact, which raises new questions, who was responsible for the death of miss Herzberg, was it the backup driver? the company? the programmers?
Elaine’s family seemed to think it was the company, by suing them for the death of their loved one. An arrangement was however reached, quickly ending a potential judicial war over the first death of a driverless car.
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