This Self Driving Uber Vehicle Is On Its Side After A Collision In Arizona.

Two ‘safety’ drivers were in the front seats of the Uber car, which was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, Uber said in an email, a standard requirement for its self-driving vehicles. The back seat was empty.

Uber has been getting itself in trouble recently, and it looks like this won’t help. A car apparently failed to yield for the Uber vehicle and the resulting impact led to it rolling onto its side.

The problem here is that the XC90 SUVs are their autonomous vehicles.

And it crashed.

Wether it was driving in its autonomous mode is as yet unknown, but the not-really-a-ride-sharing company has been testing out cars in Tempe Arizona where this happened. According to reports so far (Friday night) there was a passenger in the vehicle but no injuries were sustained.

Uber was recently in trouble in California and received a cease and desist letter for operating without a permit. On top of that, Uber is having trouble with scandals and sexual harassment allegations. This won’t help their cause as there will no doubt be a lot of press on the incident shortly, and wether it was in self driving mode or not is basically the only question anyone will care about.

Sources: Fresco News and ABC 15.

Update: The car was in self driving mode at the time of the crash. Uber have suspended their self driving car programme as a result, and the question now is “would a human driver have avoided the collision?”.

Hundreds of thousands of collisions are avoided every day by people that didn’t make the initial mistake, and to be allowed on the road autonomous cars need to be at least as good as humans at defensive driving.