Heavy Duty Trucking, August 2018

HDT AUGUST 2018 106 WWW TRUCKINGINFO COM Rolf Lockwood Executive Contributing Editor rolf@ newcom ca take it back Way back In my May column I wrote about the Arizona fatality last March involving an Uber vehicle in autonomous mode Locking It In Are We Moving Too Fast on Autonomous Vehicles The facts were a bit sketchy I admitted but suggested that in a sense they dont matter Its about the optics Well it certainly was about the optics in the larger context of social acceptance in the autonomous world And they were undeniably bad even though it was the first fatal accident involving what people call a robot vehicle Id venture a guess that autonomy actually has little to do with this accident that nothing could have prevented the womans death I wrote back in May There simply wasnt time for any reaction human or otherwise But there actually was time apparently according to a 300 page report released by the Tempe Police Department in late June And in fact the report blames the crash on distracted driving Sound familiar To remind you of the circumstances the Uber vehicle a Volvo XC90 SUV was doing 44 mph on a multi lane roadway at night apparently in Level Four autonomous mode and simply failed to see Elaine Herzberg crossing the road while walking her bicycle She was not at a crosswalk jaywalking in other words A so called backup human driver Rafaela Vasquez was present though not actively driving Worse than that the police report says the driver was watching The Voice on a cell phone and in the 20 minutes or so before the crash her eyes were off the road some 32 of the time The driver in this case and its clear in a video the police released on Twitter see https tinyurl com yc4lyaap scroll down to March 21 saw the woman crossing the road only half a second before impact The car did not brake at all But police say she could have seen the victim 143 feet away and stopped the Volvo some 43 feet before hitting Herzberg if shed been paying attention This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted the report stated Confusing the issue the vehicles native collision avoidance system had been partly disabled according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board It saw Herzberg with six seconds to spare but did not automatically apply the brakes as it would ordinarily do Nor did it issue a warning to the driver The automatic braking function was turned off the NTSB report said to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior It depended on human intervention And therein lies Ubers big mistake it would seem alongside an apparent failure to screen its backup drivers effectively So I was pretty much correct in writing back in May that autonomy itself wasnt to blame here rather its management What I didnt see was the egregious human error at play The most glaring lesson as if we need to hear it again is that even a couple of seconds of distraction can be deadly This is the most dramatic example we might imagine but in the end it came down to seconds Like the time it takes to check text messages on your own cell phone A fatal crash revisited Rolf Lockwood is vice president editorial at Newcom Business Media which publishes Todays Trucking He writes for HDT each month on the making maintaining and using of trucks He can be reached at rolf@ newcom ca or 416 315 1829 LOCKING IT IN Police say she could have seen the victim 143 feet away and stopped the Volvo some 43 feet before hitting Herzberg if shed been paying attention I