Stephen Silver
Safety driver was behind the wheel of car, which was in self-driving mode, in Arizona tragedy, and the company has now halted all testing of the technology.
A woman in Tempe, Ariz. was struck by an Uber self-driving car late Sunday night and has since passed away, according to local TV station ABC 15.
Uber has told news outlets that it is cooperating with the investigation- and as a result, CNBC reported, Uber has announced the immediate halt of all testing of self-driving cars.
Uber, pioneering ride-sharing company, has long pursued self-driving car technology, as they bought a company called Otto for that purpose, and recently settled a lawsuit from Google's Waymo for $244 million.
Despite some media reports, the Arizona tragedy is not the first-ever death involving self-driving car technology. A Tesla driver, Joshua Brown, was killed while testing Tesla's autopilot mode in July 2016.
In late 2016, at the urging of Arizona's governor, Uber pulled a self-driving car test program from San Francisco and moved it to Arizona.
If the tragedy shakes consumer faith in such technologies, it could have an effect on Apple's plans for self-driving technology, as Apple is at an earlier stage of testing its own autonomous cars and is said to be either "all in or all out."
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91 Comments
I am so proud of Uber. They just made history. This will go down in the history books!
First pedestrian killed by a self-driving car. Way to go Uber!
Then again, 40,200 people were killed in 2016 by human drivers.
why on earth did you feel the need to bring up the idiot who crashed his own tesla into this article? this article is about a freakin' pedestrian doing what pedestrians do and getting killed in the process and not about someone who let their car drive itself into a semi. The best the pedestrian could possibly have done is to jump out of the way (if they saw or heard the car coming). all the dill hole in the tesla had to do was keep his frickin' eyes on the road and hands near the wheel.
Duh! I think we all knew this would happen sooner or later. I'm sure there will be more "sacrificial lambs" before autonomous cars really take off.