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.
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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
-
Should you add your child to your credit card?The Explainer You can make them an authorized user on your account in order to help them build credit
-
Cracker Barrel crackup: How the culture wars are upending corporate brandingIn the Spotlight Is it 'woke' to leave nostalgia behind?
-
'It's hard to discern what it actually means'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Are self-driving cars still an impossible dream?Talking Point State-of-the-art robot cars still ’struggle’ with construction sites, animals, traffic cones and pedestrian crossings
-
Why is the US waging a tech war on China?Today's Big Question Battle for technological supremacy is at the forefront of a new economic Cold War
-
Is this the end of Uber in London?In Depth Transport for London revokes licence and says taxi firm is not ‘fit and proper’
-
What can the ‘world’s largest computer chip’ actually do?In Depth Cerebras Systems’ processor has 50,000 times as many cores as an iPhone chip
-
Tesla ‘robotaxis’: what they are and how you can make money from themIn Depth Elon Musk plans to have one million driverless cars on the road by the end of 2020
-
Apple lays off 200 staff working on Project Titan autonomous carSpeed Read Job losses are believed to be part of a restructuring under new leadership
-
CES 2019 tech round-up: Intel, Apple, Samsung and moreIn Depth From 8K smart TVs to robots – the highlights from this year’s tech show
-
Human driver crashes into Apple self-driving carSpeed Read Company’s autonomous Lexus rear-ended during road testing
