Matti Robinson
21 Mar 2018 9:50
Earlier this week we reported about the first confirmed pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. The Uber's experimental car in question killed a woman in a collision in Tempe, Arizona. Now Toyota is following Uber's suit in temporarily halting tests.
Toyota has announced that it is halting self-driving tests on public roads as a result of learning about the casualty. The company is afraid that the accident in Tempe might pose the employees in self-driving cars an unwanted emotional risk, Engadget reports.
The police chief from Tempe has expressed that the Uber car was likely not at fault in the accident but it has obviously caused a major pause in Uber as well as other companies developing self-driving technologies. The car was a Volvo XC90 crossover SUV, but the Swedish car manufacturer has yet to comment.
Both Volvo and Toyota are collaborating with Uber on self-driving cars.
Elon Musk, perhaps the foremost spokesperson for self-driving, recently in a SXSW interview quoted studies in which even Tesla's first generation was 40 percent safer than a human driver. The second generation, currently used by some Tesla cars, is already considered at least twice as safe as the previous generation.
Even though it is undeniable that self-driving will improve the safety, every accident and especially fatality related to self-driving vehicles is, for a good reason, considered with extreme seriousness. One can only hope that development doesn't stall too much, and that the baby isn't thrown out with the bathwater.