Uber driver was watching The Voice before fatal self-driving car collision

The Uber driver of a self-driving car was streaming the TV talent show The Voice immediately before a fatal accident, a police report has found.

The prototype self-driving Volvo XC90 SUV struck Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, as the 49-year-old crossed the road with her bicycle at night.

Following a three-month investigation, the Tempe Police Department has released a 318-page report that claims the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, had been looking down while the vehicle was moving and glanced up only half a second before the crash, Reuters reports.

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Investigators’ tests show that the accident, in March, would have been “entirely avoidable” had Vasquez focused on the road, the report says.

The police department accessed Vasquez’s account for the streaming service Hulu, where they discovered that she had been watching The Voice for 42 minutes prior to the accident, The Verge says.

Speaking to the tech site, an Uber spokesperson said: “We have a strict policy prohibiting mobile device usage for anyone operating our self-driving vehicles. We plan to share more on the changes we’ll make to our programme soon.”

Tempe police have submitted the report to county prosecutors, who will determine whether to press charges against Vasquez, says Sky News.

Why didn’t the car stop?

A preliminary police report released last month found that the car had about six seconds to react to Herzberg straying into the road, the BBC says.

Uber has yet to officially confirm why the car failed to stop when Herzberg stepped into the road, but company insiders told US news site The Information that the self-driving software had chosen to ignore her.

The sources said this was due to the way the vehicle had been “tuned”. The car categorised Herzberg as a “false positive” - a description of “objects in its path that wouldn’t actually be a problem for the vehicle, such as a plastic bag floating over a road”, according to the site - and therefore decided it didn’t need to react to her.