Around the world, vehicles kill more people than HIV/AIDS – about 1.3 million each year. In the vast majority of cases, it is the inattentive and error-prone humans operating those cars and lorries who are at fault.
Events in Arizona mark a new phase in this story. Pedestrian Elaine Herzberg died after being struck by an autonomous Uber car on Sunday as she crossed a road – the first time that a self-driving vehicle has claimed the life of another road user. Local police said that the vehicle was in autonomous mode, travelling at about 65 kilometres an hour, had a human safety driver behind the wheel at the time and did not appear to have been braking. Investigators have drawn no conclusions about fault so far.
Advertisement
Rewind to 2011. Google went public with its self-driving car programme (since rebranded as Waymo) that year, with the goal of reducing road fatalities. A car with superhuman attentiveness and senses, such as laser ranging, radar and 360-degree vision, should be able to deal with navigation and road hazards far more reliably than fallible humans, it argued.
Driverless driving test
Then along came Uber with its own message. Founder Travis Kalanick called autonomous vehicles , believing that the first company to develop a cheap driverless taxi would force rivals out of business.
Either way, Silicon Valley’s problem has been how to get from a few driverless vehicles on test tracks, to millions operating safely on public roads. Even Waymo, which also drives billions of virtual miles a year in realistic computer simulations, concedes that there is no substitute for real-world testing.
Nevada was the first US state to authorise experimental autonomous vehicles on public roads, in 2011. Vehicles were treated like human learners, even undergoing a driving test with an examiner in the passenger seat. California followed shortly after, requiring companies to employ highly trained  safety drivers, file reports detailing each bump and scrape, and note every time a vehicle’s systems failed.
States coming later to the game enticed companies with fewer regulations. In 2015, Arizona’s governor Doug Ducey issued an executive order opening the state’s road to autonomous vehicles with necessary. The tactic worked. After Uber’s self-driving cars had their licences revoked in California for not complying with its regulatory regime, they fled across the border to Arizona.
Safer streets
That state is now home to around half of Uber’s 200-strong self-driving test fleet. The cars have covered well over 3 million miles and completed more than 50,000 trips with public (but not paying) passengers.
Uber has suspended all testing while it investigates Sunday’s crash. Until that investigation – and those of police and US federal transportation agencies – are complete, it is impossible to say whether California-style reporting might have helped to avoid the accident; perhaps we will never know. But, incidentally, .
Given the millions of miles self-driving test vehicles are covering, a fatal accident was always likely at some point. That said, states and countries should end the race to the bottom in regulation and oversight. If autonomous vehicles are ever to fulfil their promise of safer streets, they will need the full weight of public and political confidence behind them.
Our autonomous future will come soon enough. Let it be one that we enter with eyes open, all the data to hand and full oversight by those charged with ensuring safety on our roads.
Read more: Give your car a conscience: Why driverless cars need morals; Why Uber’s human drivers aren’t out of a job just yet
