A driverless Uber vehicle has struck and killed a pedestrian on a public road in Arizona, in an incident believed to be the first death of a pedestrian by a vehicle using self-driving technology.
Uber has said it is suspending its AV testing on public roads, leaving investors of Alphabet, Inc. ( GOOG, GOOGL), General Motors Co. ( GM), Tesla ( TSLA) and others wondering whether it may take longer than anticipated to bring driverless cars to market.
An Uber AV struck a 49-year-old woman who was pushing a bicycle across the street on Sunday evening. The police say the vehicle was traveling at about 40 miles per hour when it struck the woman and did not show signs of slowing down.
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“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” Uber said in a statement.
Uber’s AV partners and potential partners, including Toyota Motor Corp. ( TM) and Volvo, have not commented on the incident.
Uber and its competitors have been racing to be the first to get a totally driverless vehicle to market. GM has said it plans to launch a fleet of fully autonomous taxis in major cities in the U.S. in 2019. However, the Uber death highlights the serious nature of the regulatory process involved in giving AV’s the green light to operate freely on public roads.
Proponents of AV technology often argue that one of its biggest benefits is the potential to significantly reduce the number of traffic accidents and fatalities. But a recent study by Rand Corp. found that there are so many variables involved in comparing human drivers to autonomous drivers that companies would need to log hundreds of years worth of test data to prove that AVs are safer than humans.
“It’s going to be nearly impossible for autonomous vehicles to log enough test-driving miles on the road to statistically demonstrate their safety when compared to the rate at which injuries and fatalities occur in human-controlled cars and trucks,” the Rand study said.
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California recently reported that Alphabet subsidiary Waymo logged the most driverless test miles on public California roads last year with 352,545 test miles. GM vehicles traveled 131,676 driverless test miles, while Tesla logged zero driverless test miles.
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Uber Fatality Puts Spotlight On Autonomous Vehicles originally appeared on usnews.com
