Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Uber dashcam footage shows moment before fatal impact

Police have released two videos showing the moments leading up to a fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber car in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday.

In the 14-second video, the autonomous vehicle is seen failing to slow down before hitting Elaine Herzberg, 49, who is walking her bike across the road.

One video shows dashcam footage of the impact. The other, an Uber operator monitoring the car's controls.

Uber has suspended self-driving tests in North America following the crash.

In footage released on Wednesday by the Tempe police department, the human Uber operator sitting inside the Volvo appears to be looking down at something while the vehicle is travelling in autonomous mode.

Moments later, the woman appears visibly shocked as she looks up to see Ms Herzberg crossing the highway in their path seconds before impact.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Uber has been testing autonomous Volvo vehicles

"The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine's loved ones," Uber said in a statement.

"Our cars remain grounded, and we're assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can," the statement added.

Police said the accident happened on Sunday night, adding that Ms Herzberg had not been using a pedestrian crossing.

Ms Herzberg was taken to a local hospital following the collision but died of her injuries.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board earlier said they would be investigating the incident in Tempe.

While self-driving cars have been involved in multiple accidents, it is thought to be the first time an autonomous car has been involved in a fatal collision with a pedestrian.</s>Video of the fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber car shows the critical moments just before the vehicle makes contact with a pedestrian walking her bike across a dimly lit road. The release from Tempe, Arizona, police provides a startling piece of evidence in a case that could shape laws and public perceptions around driverless vehicles.

In the video, a woman carries her bike into the middle of a dark street. The vehicle, a Volvo from Uber Technologies Inc. operated in autonomous mode, doesn’t appear to slow down. The video freezes as the car is about to collide with the woman, a 49-year-old named Elaine Herzberg.

The video also shows the view from the inside the vehicle. Uber’s safety driver, Rafael Vasquez, appears to look down at something off-camera in the moments before the collision. Police said they’re reviewing this detail as part of the investigation.

Uber suspends self-driving vehicle testing in Toronto after pedestrian killed in Phoenix</s>Autonomous Volvo hits a pedestrian crossing the road, but police chief says Uber likely not to blame.

Uber has halted trials of its driverless vehicles across North America following a fatal collision between one of its cars and a pedestrian.

The incident happened on Sunday evening in Tempe, Arizona, according to the local police department (as reported by BBC News), when a woman, named as Elaine Herzberg, stepped out into the road in front of the specially equipped Volvo, which was in autonomous mode but also had a human behind the wheel. Herzberg wasn't using a pedestrian crossing at the time.

Tempe police chief Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle Uber is likely not at fault, however. "The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them," she said. "His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision."

The incident was caught on video by the car, which had at least two operational cameras at the time - one facing forward in front of the car and one facing the driver. Of the recordings, Moir said: "It's very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."

"I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," she added.

This is the second accident involving a self-driving Uber car in Tempe, with one of its vehicles being flipped on its side in a collision last year. However, this is the first reported instance of any autonomous vehicle being involved in a fatal collision.

Consumer Watchdog, a citizen safety lobby group, said on Twitter: "This is a tragedy we have been fighting years to prevent. We hope our calls for real regulation of driverless cars will be taken seriously going forward by Silicon Valley and the Trump Administration."

Tempe mayor Mark Mitchell called Uber "responsible" for pausing driverless car tests, but said he still supports the technology. "Testing must occur safely," he said in a statement. "All indications we have had in the past show that traffic laws are being obeyed by the companies testing here. Our city leadership and Tempe Police will pursue any and all answers to what happened in order to ensure safety moving forward.

"I support the step that Uber has taken to temporarily suspend testing in Tempe until this event is fully examined and understood. That is a responsible step to take at this time."</s>TEMPE, Ariz. (Reuters) - Police in Arizona on Wednesday released a short video of a fatal collision between an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian, as investigators probe the accident that has put new focus on the safety of autonomous vehicles.

The video, taken from inside the Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicle that Uber has used for testing, shows the vehicle driving along a dark road when an image of a woman walking a bicycle across the road appears in the headlights.

The woman, Elaine Herzberg, 49, later died from her injuries.

Police have released few details about the accident that occurred on Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, while the SUV was driving in autonomous mode. Uber suspended its self-driving testing in North America after the incident and federal safety regulators are conducting their own probe.

The video shows the vehicle traveling in the right-hand lane of a divided four-lane roadway. Suddenly, the vehicle’s headlights illuminate a woman directly in front of it who is crossing the SUV’s lane with her bike.

A photo released by safety regulators on Tuesday showed that the impact occurred on the right side of the vehicle.

The video also shows the driver at the wheel, who appears to be looking down throughout most of the video. Just before the video stops, the driver looks up and looks shocked.

“The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine’s loved ones,” Uber said in a statement. “Our cars remain grounded, and we’re assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can.”

The video is likely to be a key part of investigations of Uber’s self-driving car technology and whether it was ready for testing on public roads.

Although the exact specifics of Uber’s technology are not known, self-driving cars generally use a combination of sensors, including radar and light-based Lidar, to identify objects around the vehicle, including potential obstacles coming into range.

One question on regulators’ minds would be why the sensors did not pick up on the presence of Herzberg, who would ostensibly have already crossed three lanes of traffic before arriving in the path of the Uber vehicle.</s>SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) - Police in Arizona on Wednesday released a short video of a fatal collision between an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian, as an investigation continues into the accident that has put new focus on the safety of autonomous vehicles.

The video, taken from inside the Volvo sport utility vehicle that Uber has used for testing, shows the vehicle driving along a dark road when an image of a woman walking a bicycle across the road appears in the headlights.

The woman, Elaine Herzberg, 49, later died from her injuries.

Police have released few details about the accident that occurred Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, while the car was driving in autonomous mode. Uber suspended its self-driving testing in North America after the incident.

The video shows the vehicle traveling in the right hand lane of a divided four-lane roadway. It is dark but the vehicle's headlights are on. Suddenly, the headlights illuminate a woman directly in front of the car who is crossing the car's lane with her bike.

A photo released by safety regulators on Tuesday of the vehicle showed that the impact occurred on the right side of the vehicle.

The video also shows the driver at the wheel, who appears to be looking down. Just before the video stops, the driver looks up and suddenly looks shocked.</s>New video of the fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber vehicle in Tempe, Arizona, shows a failure of the expected performance of the autonomous vehicle’s technology, according to experts. The technology’s backup — the human test driver who was also in the vehicle at the time of the crash — also failed to react.

The test driver is responsible for ensuring safe operation of the vehicle, which is operating with unfinished software that is a work in progress and known to have limitations.

The Tempe police department released a short clip Wednesday of the March 18 crash in which a Volvo XC90 operating in autonomous mode struck and killed a woman walking a bicycle across the road. Volvo supplies Uber a vehicle, which Uber then retrofits with its autonomous driving technology.

The clip shows the woman, Elaine Herzberg, walking across multiple lanes of traffic, as the SUV drives forward without slowing. The test driver appears to be looking down or out the side window.

Experts told CNN that video released by the police department — which included both internal and external camera views — appears to show the autonomous technology fell short of how it should be designed to perform.

Related: Self-driving cars are already really safe

“This video screams to me there are serious problems with their system, and there are serious problems with their safety driver not being able to pay attention, which is to be expected,” Missy Cummings, an engineering professor and director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke University. Cummings has testified on Capitol Hill about autonomous systems.

“[The pedestrian] wasn’t jumping out of the bushes. She had been making clear progress across multiple lanes of traffic, which should have been in [Uber’s] system purview to pick up.”

According to Bryan Reimer, research scientist in the MIT AgeLab and the associate director of the New England University Transportation Center at MIT, it is possible the video represents what’s called an “edge case,” a rare situation the autonomous system was never trained to handle.

He also said the video could represent a failure of a vehicle sensor or its algorithms, but it’s unknown at this time if that’s what happened. A full investigation has not yet been completed.

Reimer also criticized police for publicly releasing a video that could prematurely influence consumer perception of a technology that may one day help save lives.

The Tempe police department has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Self-driving advocates have long pointed to automation as a way to address motor vehicle crashes, which are overwhelmingly caused by human error.

“It is really hard to understand how the system didn’t react, when even a standard automatic emergency braking system could reasonably be expected to at least hit the brakes,” Michael Ramsey, a research director at Gartner’s CIO Research Group, told CNN.

Related: The life of an Uber test driver

Autonomous car companies have test drivers on board to take over in case of emergencies. Companies hire human test drivers to sit behind the wheel of self-driving vehicles and take over when necessary — for instance, if a car’s sensors fail to recognize a bicyclist, pedestrian or other vehicle, or if the software system crashes.

Cummings said the video of the distracted Uber test driver is a reminder of how humans can develop too much trust in automated systems and may not be prepared to take control of them quickly when needed.

“The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine’s loved ones. Our cars remain grounded, and we’re assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement.

The Uber test driver, Rafaela Vasquez, who has been cooperating with the investigation, has not responded to a CNN request for comment.

Tempe police chief Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle Monday that the collision would have been difficult for any driver to avoid. The incident occurred at night and the pedestrian did not use a crosswalk while crossing the street.

“From what I know of autonomous systems, it was entirely avoidable,” said Paul Godsmark, co-founder of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence, a Canadian organization that advises governments as they prepare for autonomous vehicles.

“I’m very concerned that people are blaming the pedestrian,” Godsmark said.

While the pedestrian is only visible in the video at the last second, the SUV’s LIDAR and radar sensors should have detected and classified her to avoid a crash, according to Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who has written extensively about autonomous vehicles.

“I’m really looking forward to the [results of the] investigation and an explanation from Uber,” Godsmark said. “Why didn’t the [technology] see, and why didn’t the car react?”</s>Dramatic video footage released by police in Tempe, Arizona, shows the moment a female pedestrian pushing her bicycle was knocked down by a self-driving Uber car on Sunday, March 18.The victim, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, later died in hospital from her injuries.Police named the driver as 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez, while stating that the vehicle was in “autonomous mode” at the time of the crash, according to ABC15 Arizona. The accident happened on Mill Avenue near Curry Road, the report said.This video first shows the Uber hitting the cyclist from the perspective of the driver, before revealing the driver’s reaction to the crash. Credit: Tempe Police via Storyful</s>Investigators looking into the crash of an Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, earlier this week have released unsettling dashcam video of the incident.

In an exterior camera view, the Volvo XC90 SUV test vehicle is seen traveling the partially lit road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, suddenly appears in the headlights as she walks a bicycle across the vehicle's lane. The fatal impact occurs in a split second.

Another camera mounted inside the car is trained on the Uber safety driver, identified by Tempe police as Rafael Vasquez, 44, whose job is to take over the operation of the vehicle if necessary. The driver's gaze seems divided between something inside the car and the road. His eyes appear to be diverted from road for about four or five seconds before he looks up with a startled expression less than a second before the impact.

Sunday night's fatal crash near Mill Avenue and Curry Road in Tempe marks the first pedestrian death involving an autonomous vehicle.

Uber called the video released Wednesday "disturbing and heartbreaking to watch," in a statement to The San Francisco Chronicle, adding "our thoughts continue to be with Elaine's loved ones."

The vehicle was traveling at 38 mph at the time of the impact on a stretch of road that police say is a 35-mph zone.

Following the crash, Vasquez reportedly told Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir that "it was like a flash, the person walked out in front." He said that "the first alert of the collision was the sound of the collision."

However, experts suggested that the technology employed in the Uber test vehicle should have been able to detect Herzberg and avoid a crash.

"The victim did not come out of nowhere. She's moving on a dark road, but it's an open road, so lidar (laser) and radar should have detected and classified her" as human, Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles, tells The Associated Press.

"It absolutely should have been able to pick her up," Sam Ambuelsmaid, an analyst at Navigant Research who follows self-driving technology, tells the AP. "From what I can see in the video, it sure looks like the car is at fault, not the pedestrian."

Soon after the crash, Moir was quoted in an article by The Chronicle as saying she believed the Uber driver was not at fault even though her department had yet to make such a determination. Wednesday's statement said, "Chief Moir and the Tempe Police Department would like to reaffirm that fault has not been determined in this case."

In a statement released with the video, the Tempe Police Department said its investigation of the incident "will address the operating condition of the vehicle, driver interaction with the vehicle, and opportunities for the vehicle or driver to detect the pedestrian that was struck."

The department said as part of its investigation, it was cooperating with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Uber and that it would be looking into the technology aboard the vehicle and all its electronic data.

In its statement, Uber said: "Our cars remain grounded, and we're assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can."</s>Uber Technologies Inc. halted autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.

OK, that’s me talking, not Uber and certainly not the car manufacturers who are making the death machines. But what they’re admitting with their actions is that they haven’t figured out how to make them safe :

It may very well be that no party was at fault, and that’s the whole problem. If the car didn’t have the ability to drive itself, then a human being would have been at the wheel with his feet on the pedals, giving the car at least a fighting chance to stop before hitting and killing the woman who was walking her bike.

Companies including Alphabet Inc., General Motors Co., Uber and Baidu Inc. are investing billions of dollars to develop autonomous-vehicle technology because it has the potential to transform the auto industry, transportation in general and the way cities work. One analyst has estimated Alphabet’s Waymo unit is worth at least $70 billion. The fatality in Tempe could slow testing, delay commercialization and undermine such optimism.

Uber said on Monday that it was pausing tests of all its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident.”

After the incident, which happened at 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, she was transferred to a nearby hospital, where she died from her injuries. “Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation,” Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department.

If it’s the first death involving a pedestrian, it’s only because there aren’t that many driverless cars on the road yet. Let them proliferate as much as some people want, and you’re going to see that number explode.

Much speculation surrounding this accident has focused on the fact that the victim wasn’t crossing at the crosswalk. Supposedly the driverless cars are programmed to recognize when they’re approaching a crosswalk - which is supposed to add to the safety of pedestrians - but they have no notion of what to do if someone tries to cross the road outside the crosswalk.

Yeah, that’s jaywalking. Usually the penalty for that isn’t death.

The very fact that Uber felt the need to employ a “safety driver” tells you they’re not 100 percent convinced of the safety of the driverless cars. Nor should they be. There’s no way to do a realistic simulation that can show what will happen when the driverless cars operate in large numbers on roads built for driver, and in the midst of driver-controlled cars, bicyclists and pedestrians. One can only imagine the things that will go wrong, and then they’ll send the cars back to the University of Michigan testing grounds to “find out what happened” while people are being buried.

Here’s a question: The need cars have to be driven by a human . . . why is that a problem that needs to be solved? Humans don’t always drive that well, but at least they possess the senses that make them fully capable of operating a vehicle safely, even if they often don’t. A human being can get rip-roaring drunk and get behind the wheel of a car - and I’ve long believed those convicted of DUI should do serious prison time on the first offense - but even serious drunk would have had a chance of stopping that car when Elaine Herzberg tried walking her bike across the street. The “autonomous car” has no concept of why it should stop, so it doesn’t.

Why do we need these cars? What possible benefit are we missing out on if we just keep making cars that people have to drive?</s>Police in Arizona on Wednesday released a short video of a fatal collision between an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian, as investigators probe the accident that has put new focus on the safety of autonomous vehicles. The video, taken from inside the Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicle that Uber has used for testing, shows the vehicle driving along a dark road when an image of a woman walking a bicycle across the road suddenly appears in the headlights.

The woman, Elaine Herzberg, 49, later died from her injuries.

Police have released few details about the accident that occurred on Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, while the SUV was driving in autonomous mode. Uber suspended its self-driving testing in North America after the incident and federal safety regulators are conducting their own probe.

Fall-out from the accident could stall the development and testing of self-driving vehicles, which are designed to perform far better than human drivers and sharply reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities that occur each year.

The video shows the vehicle traveling in the right-hand lane of a divided four-lane roadway. The vehicle’s headlights illuminate a woman directly in front of it who is crossing the SUV’s lane with her bike. The woman appears to be jaywalking as she is not in a crosswalk.

A photo released by safety regulators on Tuesday showed that the impact occurred on the right side of the vehicle.

The footage also shows a view of the vehicle’s interior and the driver at the wheel. The driver appears to be looking down, and not at the road, for two periods of about five seconds each. Just before the video stops, the driver looks upward toward the road and suddenly looks shocked.

“The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine’s loved ones,” Uber said in a statement. “Our cars remain grounded, and we’re assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can.”

The video is likely to be a key part of investigations of Uber’s self-driving car technology and whether it was ready for testing on public roads.

Although the exact specifics of Uber’s technology are not known, self-driving cars typically use a combination of sensors, including radar and light-based Lidar, to identify objects around the vehicle, including potential obstacles coming into range. While cameras do not perform well in the dark, radar and Lidar can work at night.

One question on regulators’ minds will be why the sensors did not pick up on the presence of Herzberg, who would ostensibly have already crossed three lanes of traffic before arriving in the path of the Uber vehicle.

One self-driving car expert, Bryant Walker Smith, said his first impression was of “outrage” viewing the video.

“Although this video isn’t the full picture, it strongly suggests a failure by Uber’s automated driving system and a lack of due care by Uber’s driver (and by the victim),” said Smith, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.

“The sensors should have detected the pedestrian in this case; the cameras were likely useless but both the radars and the Lidar must have picked up the pedestrian,” said Raj Rajkumar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon.

“Though no information is available, one would have to conclude based on this video alone, that there are problems in the Uber vehicle software that need to be rectified,” he said.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its systems.

The video is likely to renew calls for more oversight in a nascent industry that lacks standardized testing or safety definitions. Lawmakers have had to juggle the need to encourage innovations that promise to dramatically improve safety on roads with current public safety concerns.

Companies including Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’s Cruise Automation have been testing their self-driving technology in Arizona, which has welcomed the industry with a lighter regulatory touch than in states like California, for example.

On Tuesday, Arizona transportation officials said they saw no immediate need to tighten rules on the testing of self-driving cars in the state.

Although some within the self-driving industry have suggested agreeing testing and safety standards for autonomous technology, there has been no concerted effort to do so.

Timothy Carone, an associate teaching professor at Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business whose research specialties include artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, said the question is whether Uber did enough testing before sending robot cars out onto streets alongside humans.

“Did they jump the gun?” he said. “If their testing is found to be inefficient, that cannot be allowed to happen again because these systems have to be ready for road tests.”

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Police release onboard video from an autonomous Uber car that fatally struck a pedestrian crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona.