NTSB Investigation of Fatal Driverless Car Accident

Autonomous systems are going to have to do much better than this.

The Uber car that hit and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Ariz., in March 2018 could not recognize all pedestrians, and was being driven by an operator likely distracted by streaming video, according to documents released by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) this week.

But while the technical failures and omissions in Uber’s self-driving car program are shocking, the NTSB investigation also highlights safety failures that include the vehicle operator’s lapses, lax corporate governance of the project, and limited public oversight.

The details of what happened in the seconds before the collision are worth reading. They describe a cascading series of issues that led to the collision and the fatality.

As computers continue to become part of things, and affect the world in a direct physical manner, this kind of thing will become even more important.