The big tragedy we’ve all been bracing for
happened this last Sunday night in Tempe,
Arizona when a self-driving car struck and
killed a pedestrian.
According to a Tempe police spokesperson,
the footage shows that the car didn’t really
brake much before the collision happened.
Now, Uber confirmed that their car was in
autonomous mode when it happened and that
there was even a safety driver in the vehicle.
This stands out relative to Waymo’s recent
announcement that their cars will begin picking
up passengers in the same area, in Phoenix,
but without safety drivers in them.
With this pedestrian death, the big question
is: What are the implications for the future
of self-driving cars?
Well, the first big implication is that Uber
has immediately halted the testing of its
cars.
It's pulled them off the roads in Arizona,
obviously, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and San Francisco.
For the first time, we’ll get to see how
the public reacts to a pedestrian being killed
by a driverless car.
A lot of people feel like these cars are being
put on the roads prematurely, while a lot
of other people feel like they're not getting
on the roads fast enough.
So we’ll see how the general sentiment is
affected by this.
We’ll get to see how the death is investigated.
These cars are loaded with sensors and cameras,
and so we’ll literally get to see why the
car didn't stop, why these sensors didn’t
tell the car’s brain to put on the brakes.
We’ll see how co-operative Uber is.
It'll be interesting to watch one of these
companies with driverless cars, and see how
they pivot and change after a tragedy like
this happens.
An MIT article today suggested that most likely
there won’t be any big legal changes or
implications from this death, most likely
because Uber will try to settle.
If they're able to settle, they can avoid
creating this test case for future legal precedence,
which keeps their name out of, you know, every
other future legal case.
Federal investigators have looked at similar
cases where driverless cars have been at fault,
but they have yet to call for any sort of
halt in testing.
And why is that?
Why is it so easy for us to ignore this big
question of safety with driverless cars?
Well, first of all, people clearly want the
technology.
Cars are very dangerous.
In 2014 alone, vehicles were involved in 1.25
million deaths.
And driverless cars are a very clear solution
to this, if they're safe.
And everybody wants those deaths to go down.
Everybody wants to feel safer on the road.
Everybody wants more convenience that these
cars would bring.
And it's so hard to say no when that progress
feels so tangible.
But Uber has already been under the microscope
for its haste to get a leg up in the driverless
race.
They put their driverless cars on the roads
in California without getting the permits
that everybody else got.
They scalped trade secrets from Waymo, Google’s
driverless arm.
There’s no question that Uber has been hastily
pursuing its own progress.
As a consequence of the collision and resulting
death, legislation opening the roads to self-driving
cars may be slowed, but at least we'll now
be asking these harder questions harder.
And companies like Uber will hopefully begin
to push self-driving progress forward with
a steadier hand.
