What happened

On March 18, 2018, the self-driving vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bicycle across the street outside of a crosswalk. The vehicle was travelling at 38 mph in self-driving mode on Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona, at around 9:58 p.m. 

The SUV was supervised by a safety operator, Rafaela Vasquez, who was later found to have been watching an episode of The Voice while behind the wheel. Although there was no passenger in immediate danger, the incident exposed every pedestrian and road user in the vicinity of Uber's test programme to unacknowledged risk. 

Between September 2016 and March 2018, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found there had been 37 other crashes and incidents involving Uber's test vehicles in autonomous mode - none of which had been disclosed to or monitored by regulators. 

Why it happened

The crash was found to have resulted from a compounding set of technical, organisational, and regulatory failures:

• Technical failures. The car's self-driving system did not have the capability to classify an object as a pedestrian unless they were near a crosswalk. For five seconds before impact, the system alternated between classifying Herzberg as a vehicle, a bike, and an unknown object. Uber had also disabled the vehicle's factory-fitted emergency braking and collision avoidance capabilities "to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behaviour."

• Organisational failures. The NTSB found that Uber had an inadequate assessment of risk and ineffective oversight of backup drivers who were susceptible to becoming distracted and overreliant on imperfect technologies.

• Regulatory failures. When investigators asked whether Arizona's Department of Transportation or Department of Public Safety had sought any information from autonomous driving companies to monitor safety, they were told that none had been collected. The NTSB noted that submission of safety assessments by testing companies was entirely voluntary, and one board member described the federal government's approach as "laughable."