Uber Safety Driver Charged With Negligent Homicide in Arizona Test Incident
The Uber test vehicle that struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, has been under public scrutiny since March of 2018. But we never heard a lot about the safety driver behind the wheel. So much attention was given to addressing whether or not the autonomous systems on the SUV should or could have seen Elaine Herzberg — and stopped the car before the tragedy occurred — that it became the overriding narrative.
But it really shouldn’t have, as some of the earliest video footage appeared to show that Uber’s safety operator had entirely tuned out of the driving experience in the moments leading up to the incident. Fortunately, Maricopa County Superior Court and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were keeping tabs while the rest of us were not. In fact, the former decided to charge Rafael Vasquez (who also goes by Rafaela) with negligent homicide late last month.
While the NTSB was highly critical of Uber’s safety systems and testing routine, Vasquez probably received the harshest review following its extensive investigation into the incident. In November, the board announced the driver’s failure to act was ultimately what caused the entire incident “because she was visually distracted throughout the trip by her personal cell phone.”
A Tempe police report likewise stated that Vasquez was repeatedly looking down instead of maintaining focus on the road ahead, which became Uber’s out from having to accept any liabilities. Local investigations previously suggested that the crash was “entirely avoidable” and noted that Vasquez was streaming “The Voice” TV program at the time of the crash.
“Distracted driving is an issue of great importance in our community,” said Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel. “When a driver gets behind the wheel of a car, they have a responsibility to control and operate that vehicle safely.”
[Images: Uber]
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
More by Matt Posky
Comments
Join the conversation
This is why I have zero appetite for all the nannies in my car. Make mine fully autonomous please, I'll sit in the back and read a book. Until then, I'll do the driving, watch my mirrors, and generally not hit things. If I had all that the 'autopilot' stuff to rely on, I'm afraid I might tune out eventually. I like: automatic headlights -- but I get in trouble when my 'other' car doesn't have them; backup cameras in large cars -- but I still turn my head to see what ELSE is going on; cruise control -- always; adaptive cruise -- never had it, would probably like it. All the other stuff, automatic braking, wiggling my steering wheel because the car 'thinks' i'm wandering etc. is just a pain. As is the beeping when I get close to an obstacle, or when I fail to put on my seat belt at walking speed.
Not mentioned here but brought up shortly after the incident, and repeated in mainstream reporting today, Uber had disabled Volvo's safety nannies, and was relying on its own obviously hokum hardware/software. The Volvo had standard pedestrian detection, but it was disabled. Exit one pedestrian, jaywalker or not, it doesn't matter. Add to that hours of tedious behind the wheel "monitoring" for Rafael when the software sort of performed properly as it repeatedly wandered around a set course, leading to the same sort of relaxation that seems to have offed more than one Tesla driver, and it all went horribly wrong. Was Rafael really seriously "trained"? You gotta ask, why were these half-arsed autonomous crapmobiles allowed to prowl public roads in the first place? Who oversold who on the merits of that approach? There's your guilty party. All these autonomy wackos should be forced to build a test facility together, and then let's have the two dozen or more different systems run around continuously on a fake cityscape and try to not hit each other, without V2V systems, to see whose autonomous system actually sort of kind of works. Stick in a few feeding spots and some trees and blindspots and faded white and yellow lines and random broken traffic lights, then add a herd of deer looking for those elusive buckets of apples cunningly placed somewhere different each day. That'll sort the halfway decent autonomy systems out from one another. Judging by the AAA and other reports I've read on the crappiness of autonomous systems and nannies and the behavior of the nannies of my own car, it kind of seems to me that prosecuting a minimum wage worker is just the easy way out for officialdom to wipe its hands clean of the whole affair by offloading blame.