It is a great tragedy, a woman in Tempe, Arizona was struck by a self-driving car on Sunday night. The self-driving car was a test car by Uber and the pedestrian passed away according to ABC15. In an immediate response, Uber has halted all of its self-driving car testings in all cities.
This marks a great tragedy as well as raise a lot of questions about the incident which caused the death of a pedestrian. It looks at key factors especially as of now, no one knows if there was a safety driver behind the wheel or it was a fully autonomous vehicle running.
Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened. https://t.co/cwTCVJjEuz
— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) March 19, 2018
Currently, companies such as Waymo, Lyft, GM, Apple, and Uber have been testing self-driving cars. Whilst some states make it mandatory that self-driving cars must have a safety engineer behind the wheel, some states opt to let the tech companies test vehicles on public roads without them.
The crash will definitely trigger investigations and it is a crucial time where we will see if the technology is mature enough to be tested again on public roads.
