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

Uber puts the brakes on its self-driving fleet after Arizona car crash

By

Uber crash
Mark Beach
Uber has taken its self-driving cars off the streets following a crash involving one of the vehicles on Saturday.

Photos of the accident scene in Tempe, Arizona, showed one of Uber’s Volvo SUVs on its side, while another car nearby appeared pretty beat up. There were no reports of serious injuries.

Recommended Videos

Uber’s car, which had engineers in the front two seats and no one in the back, was in self-driving mode at the time of the collision, local cop Josie Montenegro told reporters. She added that the accident occurred when the other car  apparently failed to yield to Uber’s vehicle at a left turn.

Related

The company’s fleet of 16 self-driving cars had been on the streets of Tempe for just over a month as part of a pilot program. It confirmed over the weekend that it’s also suspended testing at its two other sites in San Francisco and Pittsburgh while it continues with investigations into what caused the smash-up.

Uber customers had been able to take rides in the self-driving cars, but anyone nervous about doing so could use the app to opt out of the opportunity. While Uber’s technology doesn’t appear to have been at fault in Saturday’s accident, it’s possible the publicity surrounding the incident will prompt some riders to think twice about hopping into one of Uber’s driverless cars when they return to the streets.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing giant started testing its driverless car technology in Pittsburgh last year before expanding the pilot program to its home city. However, a run-in with regulators at the end of 2016 prompted the company to shift testing from San Francisco to Tempe, Arizona. Uber recently received permission to relaunch testing in the California city.

The Tempe crash certainly isn’t a first for a self-driving car companies, with, for example, Google’s own project — now operated by Waymo — having experienced a few incidents up to now.

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)…
A weird thing just happened with a fleet of autonomous cars
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

In what must be one of the weirder stories linked to the development of autonomous vehicles, a fleet of Cruise self-driving cars gathered together at an intersection in San Francisco earlier this week, parked up, and blocked traffic for several hours. And to be clear: No, they weren't supposed to do that.

Some observers may have thought they were witnessing the start of the robot uprising, but the real reason for the mishap was more prosaic: An issue with the platform's software.

Read more
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