Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Toyota halts autonomous car tests on public roads following Uber crash

By
Toyota Platform 3.0 self-driving car

Toyota has stopped testing its autonomous-car technology on public roads. The decision come after an incident on Sunday, March 18 involving a self-driving Uber car that struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The car had an Uber engineer in the driver’s seat but the vehicle was reportedly operating in autonomous mode when the accident occurred. It’s believed to be the first fatality involving a self-driving car.

The suspension has been ordered to give its own test drivers time to deal with any upset caused by Sunday’s tragedy, Toyota said in a statement seen by Bloomberg.

Recommended Videos

“Our thoughts are first and foremost with the victim’s family,” the message said, adding, “Because we feel the incident may have an emotional effect on our test drivers, we have decided to temporarily pause our Chauffeur mode testing on public roads.” Chauffeur mode refers to a system for Toyota’s self-driving vehicle that allows it to drive without any human input.

Related

The company has been testing its self-driving technology on public roads in Michigan and California.

The announcement follows news last that week that Uber is in talks with Toyota to sell the Japanese automaker its self-driving technology for possible use in one of Toyota’s minivans.

Last week a representative for Toyota told Reuters that the two companies “regularly exchange information about automated driving,” but added that no further decisions had been made outside of the current partnership. It’s not clear if or how Sunday’s accident will affect any potential deal.

Like many other automakers, Toyota is investing heavily in the development of self-driving vehicles. Just a few weeks ago it revealed plans for Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development, or TRI-AD, a $2.8-billion company aimed at advancing the development of self-driving technology alongside the existing Toyota Research Institute based in Silicon Valley, California.

Platform 3.0 - TRI's New Automated Driving Research Vehicle

Volvo, whose Uber-owned XC90-based prototype collided with Ms. Herzberg on Sunday and which last year inked a deal with Uber to sell the ridesharing company 24,000 XC90 SUVs, has yet to make any comment on the recent incident or about its relationship with Uber.

Automakers, together with other firms such as Alphabet-owned Waymo, Lyft, and of course Uber, have been ramping up efforts to advance their respective autonomous-car efforts over the last year or so, with many testing their vehicles on both public and private roads. Regulations mean that for the majority of the tests on public roads, an engineer is behind the wheel, though this clearly made no difference on Sunday.

Another accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars, again in Tempe, prompted the company to suspend testing on public roads for a brief period in March, 2017.

But Sunday’s fatality presents a far more serious setback and has forced the industry to carefully examine the way it’s handling its self-driving efforts, with state regulators also taking another look at the rules that they’ve been laying down for such projects.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Waymo’s self-driving cars can’t get enough of one dead-end street
waymo

Waymo has been testing its self-driving cars in San Francisco for the last decade. But an apparent change to the vehicles’ routing has caused many of them to make a beeline for a dead-end street in a quiet part of the city, causing residents there to wonder what on earth is going on.

At CBS news crew recently visited the site -- 15th Avenue north of Lake Street in Richmond -- to see if it could work out why so many of Waymo’s autonomous cars are showing up, turning around, and then driving right out again.

Read more