US safety investigators are right to be fed up with rules allowing companies to unleash driverless cars on streets, while “self-certifying” that their testing methods are safe.
“In my opinion they’ve put technology advancement here before saving lives,” Jennifer Homendy, a member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, said at a recent hearing into the March 2018 fatal crash involving an Uber self-driving car.
To understand why that vehicle killed a pedestrian as she crossed the street with her bicycle and why such accidents may be hard to avoid in the future, think about my drive to buy groceries in a middle-sized British city. I have to navigate narrow streets, past dozens of parked cars. It is a complicated process: I must wait for drivers coming the other way and decide whether they are going to let me go first or if I should give way.