PJ Vogt

The way this story was reported, nearly everyone blamed the safety driver.

She was on her phone.

She was streaming an episode of The Voice.

There was some important additional context, which is that Uber's robot driver was also just much worse than Waymo's.

A statistic I found jaw-dropping.

At this point, Waymo safety drivers were having to take over from the car once every 5,600 miles.

Uber's safety drivers that year had to intervene more than once every 13 miles.

Despite that, five months before the crash, over employee objections, Uber had cut its safety crews.

Instead of two humans, they just used one.

One safety driver overseeing a robot driver that was arguably not ready to be on public roads.

In the last moments of Elaine Hertzberg's life, the robot spent an indefensible 5.6 seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road that was a human body pushing a bike.

Over those 5.6 seconds, the robot kept reclassifying her.

Was she an unknown object?

A vehicle?

A bicycle?

During that time spent wondering, the car did not slow down.

Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.

We reached out to Uber for comment.

A spokesperson said that the fatal collision was indeed a tragedy, which had a significant impact on Uber and the entire industry.

There would be other competitors who would shut down after similar accidents.