Uber has settled with the family of a pedestrian who was killed when one of the company’s self-driving cars hit her while she crossed a road in Tempe, Ariz. Earlier this month.
A lawyer representing the family of the deceased victim, Elaine Herzberg, told Reuters on Thursday that “the matter has been resolved,” but she did not reveal the settlement’s terms.
An Uber spokesperson declined to comment to Coins2Day about the settlement.
Herzberg was struck by one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles on the night of March 18 as she crossed a busy street while pushing her bicycle. Although a human driver was inside the self-driving car as a precautionary measure, a video of the accident shows the driver looking down until seconds before Herzberg appeared in front of the car, illuminated by the vehicle’s headlights.
Local police told Coins2Day that the car was operating in autonomous mode when the accident occurred.
The accident is believed to be the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle, an area in which several big companies like Alphabet (GOOG) subsidiary Waymo and General Motors (GM) are heavily investing.
After the accident, Uber paused all of its self-driving vehicle tests, including in California, where the online ride-hailing company is based.
Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened. Https://t.co/cwTCVJjEuz
— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) March 19, 2018
By avoiding any future civil litigation over the accident, Uber has dodged the possibility of the courts establishing a legal precedent over liability in autonomous vehicle accidents.
A recent New York Times article highlighted problems with Uber’s self-driving car program, in which human drivers were more likely to take control of the autonomous cars during tests compared to rival companies.
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Additionally, a Reuters report published earlier this week revealed that Uber removed the number of lidar sensors from its newer fleet of self-driving cars. These sensor are used to help the cars “see” objects in the road, and reducing the number of sensors could have created more blind spots than Uber’s earlier test fleets as well as those of its rivals, the report said.
