A death blow to Uber’s driverless project?

Uber Freight has stopped its driverless truck program, at least for the time being. The company had only recently announced an active 344-mile shuttle of actual freight between Arizona and California.

Actually Uber has suspended all of its driverless vehicle on-highway operations since one of the company’s autonomous Volvo XC90 SUVs struck and killed a pedestrian on March 19. Fault has not yet been determined, but an incident of this kind was long anticipated. Even so the death-by-autonomous-car has rippled through the community of self-driving vehicle developers.

As many as 50 companies are involved in one phase or another of driverless car testing in California alone. Uber’s Arizona development center in Phoenix employs 400 people working with 150 cars. On Monday, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered Uber’s autonomous vehicles off the state’s roads. The company also announced Monday that they would not renew their permit to test autonomous vehicles in California, pending the results of the fatality investigation.

In a revealing story on March 24, The New York Times said Uber’s “robotic vehicle project had not been living up to expectations.” The story noted that Uber test cars had difficulty operating in construction zones and next to “tall vehicles” – like big trucks.

Virtually all autonomous test vehicles have a human in the driver’s seat on standby if the digital system fails. Most programs measure progress in the number of miles covered without human intervention. Uber competitor Waymo, for example, boasts that its cars average almost 5,600 miles between such interventions.

Uber, the Times reported, has yet to meet a company-set goal of 13 miles.

Nevertheless last October, the paper said, Uber cut a second employee from each test car. That person had overseen technology-related aspects of the testing. Uber test drivers told the Times that monotonous solo driving reduced attentiveness. In fact, the driver of the Uber car that killed the pedestrian did not have her eyes on the road at the critical instant. There was no intervention before impact.

Test drivers are subject to strict company standards, but they are difficult to enforce. Some incidents are reported by other Uber drivers; the autonomous test vehicles equipped with obvious exterior sensors are easy to identify. According to the Times, at least one test driver was fired after he was seen asleep at the wheel as the car drove through an intersection. Another was let go after he was noticed “air drumming.”

The traffic death is a serious blow to the program Uber hoped would provide real, self-driving passenger car service as early as next year. In November, the company agreed to buy 24,000 Volvo XC90s over a two-year period from 2019 to 2021. Now some in the tech community say Uber should stop its driverless car program altogether and arrange to use better technology from someone else — if not bitter competitor Waymo, then maybe Cruise, the General Motors driverless car developer.

So far, at least, Uber Freight has not been mentioned prominently in that context.