UBER autonomous car kills American woman

abc5 news reports on Uber's self-driving car which killed a woman in

49-year-old Elaine Herzberg who was crossing a four-lane road with her bicycle was hit by Uber’s self-driving car in Tempe, Arizona.

Video of the first self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian in the US shows how the autonomous Uber failed to slow down before it hit a 49-year-old woman walking her bike across the street. It has raised fresh questions about why the vehicle did not stop when a human entered its path.

Two sources tell that the software was tuned in such a way that it “decided” it didn’t need to take evasive action and possibly flagged the detection as a “false positive.” The reason a system would do this, according to the report, is because there are a number of situations where the computers that power an autonomous car might see something it thinks is a human or some other obstacle. Uber reportedly set that threshold so low, though, that the system saw a person crossing the road with a bicycle and determined that immediate evasive action wasn’t necessary.

Nvidia Corp which provides drive technology to automakers has kept away itself from Uber saying it does not use Nvidia’s self-driving platform architecture. “Uber does not use Nvidia drive technology. Uber develops its own sensing and drive technology,” Huang said.

Shares of Nvidia corp have fallen by ~9.5% since the company statement on last Tuesday where it said ‘self-driving tests on public roads has been temporarily stopped out of respect for the victim in the 18 March crash in Tempe.

A spokesperson from UBER said:

We’re actively cooperating with the NTSB in their investigation. Out of respect for that process and the trust we’ve built with NTSB, we can’t comment on the specifics of the incident. In the meantime, we have initiated a top-to-bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, and we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture. Our review is looking at everything from the safety of our system to our training processes for vehicle operators, and we hope to have more to say soon.

This classic case questions our dependency on AI Powered vehicles in the near future. Just how safe is driverless car technology? Tell us in comments below.