The National Transportation Safety Board releases hundreds of pages related to the 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona, that killed Elaine Herzberg.
The software inside the Uber self-driving SUV that killed an Arizona woman last year was not designed to detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, according to new documents released as part of a federal investigation into the incident. Thats the most damning revelation in a trove of new documents related to the crash, but other details indicate that, in a variety of ways, Ubers self-driving tech failed to consider how humans actually operate.
The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent government safety panel that more often probes airplane crashes and large truck incidents, posted documents on Tuesday regarding its 20-month investigation into the Uber crash. The panel will release a final report on the incident in two weeks. More than 40 of the documents, spanning hundreds of pages, dive into the particulars of the March 18, 2016 incident, in which the Uber testing vehicle, with 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez in the driver's seat, killed a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a darkened road in the city of Tempe, Arizona. At the time, only one driver monitored the experimental cars operation and software as it drove around Arizona. Video footage published in the weeks after the crash showed Vasquez reacting with shock during the moments just before the collision.
The new documents indicate that some mistakes were clearly related to Ubers internal structure, what experts call safety culture. For one, the self-driving program didnt include an operational safety division or safety manager.
The most glaring mistakes were software-related. Ubers system was not equipped to identify or deal with pedestrians walking outside of a crosswalk. Uber engineers also appear to have been so worried about false alarms that they built in an automated one-second delay between a crash detection and action. In addition, the company chose to turn off a built-in Volvo braking system that the automaker later concluded might have dramatically reduced the speed at which the car hit Herzberg, or perhaps avoided the collision altogether. (Experts say the decision to turn off the Volvo system while Ubers software did its work did make technical sense, because it would be unsafe for the car to have two software masters.)
Much of that explains why, despite the fact that the car detected Herzberg with more than enough time to stop, it was traveling at 43.5 mph when it struck her and threw her 75 feet. When the car first detected her presence, 5.6 seconds before impact, it classified her as a vehicle. Then it changed its mind to other, then to vehicle again, back to other, then to bicycle, then to other again, and finally back to bicycle.
It never guessed Herzberg was on foot for a simple, galling reason: Uber didnt tell its car to look for pedestrians outside of crosswalks. The system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians, the NTSBs Vehicle Automation Report reads. Every time it tried a new guess, it restarted the process of predicting where the mysterious objectHerzbergwas headed. It wasnt until 1.2 seconds before the impact that the system recognized that the SUV was going to hit Herzberg, that it couldnt steer around her, and that it needed to slam on the brakes.