Uber's autonomous car had 6 seconds to prevent fatal crash but failed to act

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The self-driving car owned by Uber that fatally struck a woman in March detected her in the road about six seconds before the crash, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board, which also acknowledged delayed responses from the vehicle’s automatic emergency braking system.

The NTSB said Uber engineers had disengaged the safety features of its autonomous Volvo XC90, as previously reported, which includes a collision avoidance function and automatic emergency braking.

Uber disengages Volvo’s emergency braking features when the car is in autonomous mode, so as to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior,” the NTSB said.

“The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action,” the NTSB said.

Uber had only one safety operator in the car at the time, an unusual setup in the fledgling autonomous driving industry, as Jalopnik previously reported. Most companies testing self-driving cars use two operators, so one can monitor the vehicle’s autonomous driving interface at the center console, while another keeps their eyes on the road.

In a video released after the crash, the operator is seen staring down and away from the road until the moment before impact. Indeed, the vehicle operator said in an interview that “she had been monitoring the self-driving interface and that while her personal and business phones were in the vehicle neither were in use until after the crash,” according to the NTSB.

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