Safety Driver Pleads Guilty in Fatal Weber Autopilot Crash

Rafaela Vasquez, the safety driver of an Uber robot cab prototype that struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018, pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter by dangerous driving.

Her plea was accepted by the judge, who sentenced her to three years of supervised probation, Fox 10 reported.

According to Fox 10, prosecutors did not file more serious criminal charges because the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the accident was primarily caused by Vasquez's failure to monitor the road.

Vasquez was at the wheel of a Volvo XC90 equipped with Uber's proprietary self-driving system. The vehicle struck Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the street outside the crosswalk while pushing her bicycle. Herzberg was transported to the hospital, where she later died from her injuries.

A subsequent police investigation revealed that Vasquez had been streaming the series "The Voice" on her cell phone for approximately 42 minutes, ending at 9:59 PM, one minute after the accident. The video also showed her looking down just before the accident.

Vasquez's attorneys said their client was watching the messaging system used by Uber employees on a work cell phone that was on her lap, and her personal cell phone, which was streaming "The Voice," was in the passenger seat, Fox 10 reported.

According to a preliminary report by the NTSB, the Uber rider and radar spotted Herzberg 5.6 seconds before the collision. 1.3 seconds before the collision, the system determined that evasive action was necessary, and Vasquez took the wheel 1 second before the collision. She did not apply the brakes until after the collision.

Uber stated at the time that the self-driving system may have been tuned to consider the pedestrian a "false positive." Essentially, the system may have determined that no action was necessary to avoid an accident.

Volvo was not involved in any investigation because Uber had disabled the XC90's factory-installed automatic emergency braking software.

Uber then abandoned the development of self-driving systems and sold the Uber Advanced Technology Group, the division responsible for developing the technology, to rival self-driving technology company Aurora in 2020. Uber will instead rely on other companies' self-driving systems for future robot cabs; in 2022, Uber announced that robot cabs from the Hyundai-backed self-driving technology company Motional will be added to its fleet in Las Vegas