In 2018, Rafaela Vasquez was working as a "safety driver" for Uber in Arizona. Employed to sit in a "self-driving car", and seize control if something went wrong, she was behind the wheel when the car, a modified Volvo, hit and killed a pedestrian. The details, as they always are, are messy. The car had been altered to disable Volvo's own automatic braking function, so as to test Uber's machine learning system. The pedestrian was crossing the road outside of a designated spot. Arizona had passed wildly permissive laws allowing testing of self-driving vehicles with minimal oversight, in an effort to tempt valuable engineering jobs from companies like Google and Uber. And Vasquez, at the time of the collision, was watching TV.
crumple zones
crumple zones
crumple zones
In 2018, Rafaela Vasquez was working as a "safety driver" for Uber in Arizona. Employed to sit in a "self-driving car", and seize control if something went wrong, she was behind the wheel when the car, a modified Volvo, hit and killed a pedestrian. The details, as they always are, are messy. The car had been altered to disable Volvo's own automatic braking function, so as to test Uber's machine learning system. The pedestrian was crossing the road outside of a designated spot. Arizona had passed wildly permissive laws allowing testing of self-driving vehicles with minimal oversight, in an effort to tempt valuable engineering jobs from companies like Google and Uber. And Vasquez, at the time of the collision, was watching TV.