Arizona suspends Uber autonomous car testing indefinitely
Following the recent fatality caused by a self-driving vehicle being tested by Uber in Arizona, the state Governor has suspended his permission to do that sort of thing.
Governor Doug Ducey has a fair bit of political capital on the line over this, having rolled out the red carpet to autonomous vehicle testing in 2016. The Associated Press seems to have been the first to report on Ducey’s decision but 12 News managed to get hold of his letter to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, which you can see below.
NEW: In light of the fatal Uber crash in Tempe, Governor Ducey sends this letter to Uber ordering the company to suspend its testing of autonomous vehicles in Arizona indefinitely #12News pic.twitter.com/gO5BZB9P2e
— Bianca Buono (@BiancaBuono) March 27, 2018
This seems to be a simple piece of damage limitation, in which a politician that had previously positioned himself as pro-technology is now wary of being associated with a negative turn of events.
The more interesting development may be a more general distrust of autonomous vehicles seeping into the broader technological and regulatory environments. Intel, for example, immediately moved to blog about how important to sort this stuff out and many AV stakeholders will be keen to limit the reputational damage to their industry.
Roughly 4800 pedestrians per year are killed by Motor Vehicles. This represents about 14% of all traffic fatalities every year. Here we have a single death that’s Triggerd the shutdown of an entire program without knowing how many miles these driverless Uber cars have driven before this accident happened. I think that before somebody goes and shuts down an entire program, there should be a very detailed analysis comparing the number of people killed buy driverless cars and the number of miles driven by them with the number of people killed by regular vehicles driven by human beings. Without doing this kind of analysis making a decision like this could actually put more pedestrians at risk of being hit by cars.
Twisted logic — as if everything were just fine as long as the number of fatalities caused by autonomous cars is less than the number killed by regular manned vehicles?
T.