On the night of 18 March 2018, an Uber test car in Tempe, Arizona, struck and killed Elaine Herzberg as she wheeled a bicycle across an unlit road. The car had detected her 5.6 seconds before impact. Its software could not work out what she was. It cycled through “unknown object,” then “vehicle,” then “bicycle,” and never settled in time to brake. About 1.3 seconds before the collision the system concluded it needed to stop. It did not stop, because Uber had switched off the car’s automatic emergency braking during testing and was relying on the human in the seat to intervene.
The human in the seat was a safety operator named Rafaela Vasquez. She was watching a television show on her phone. She did not touch the brake until after the car had hit.
When the courts went looking for someone to hold responsible, they found her. Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide, later pleaded guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years of probation. Uber faced no criminal charges. The federal investigators were blunt about the design: the company had removed the car’s ability to brake for itself and left a distracted person as the last line of defence. The system was built so that the only party who could stop the car was the one least equipped to.
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