The “safety” driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber that hit and killed a pedestrian was streaming the television show The Voice on her phone at the time of the crash, police have said.
The collision that killed Elaine Herzberg, 49, who was crossing the road at night in Tempe, Arizona, was “entirely avoidable”, a police report said, if Rafaela Vasquez had been paying attention.
Instead, she repeatedly looked down at her phone, glancing up just half a second before the car hit Herzberg. Police said she could faces charges of
vehicular manslaughter, but it would be for prosecutors to decide.
The Uber car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash, but Uber, like other self-driving car developers, requires a back-up driver in the car to intervene when the autonomous system fails or a tricky driving situation occurs.
Vasquez looked up just 0.5 seconds before the crash, after keeping her head down for 5.3 seconds, the police report said. Uber’s self-driving Volvo SUV was travelling at just under 44mph.
Police obtained records from Hulu, an online streaming service, which showed Vasquez’s account was playing the television talent show The Voice the night of the crash for about 42 minutes, ending at 9.59pm, which “coincides with the approximate time of the collision”, the report says.
Vasquez could not immediately be reached for comment and Reuters could not locate her attorney.
The crash dealt Uber a major setback in its efforts to develop self-driving cars, and the company ended its autonomous car testing programme in Arizona after the incident.
Uber declined to comment on the police report. The company prohibits the use of any mobile device by safety drivers while the self-driving cars are on a public road, and drivers are told they can be fired for violating this rule.
A spokeswoman last month said the company was undergoing a “top-to-bottom safety review”.
Police said video from inside the car showed Vasquez was looking down during the trip, and her face “appears to react and show a smirk or laugh at various points during the times that she is looking down”.
The report found that Vasquez “was distracted and looking down” for close to seven of the nearly 22 minutes prior to the collision.
According to a report last month by the US National Transportation Safety Board, which is also investigating the crash, Vasquez told federal investigators she had been monitoring the self-driving interface in the car and that neither her personal nor business phones were in use until after the crash.
That report showed Uber had disabled the emergency braking system in the Volvo, and Vasquez began braking less than a second after hitting Herzberg.
Herzberg, who was homeless, was walking her bicycle across the street, outside a crossing on a four-lane road, on the night of 18 March when she was struck by the front right side of the Volvo.
The police report faulted Herzberg for “unlawfully crossing the road at a location other than a marked crosswalk”.