Uber Car Accidents

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Minnesota readers may have heard that an autonomous Uber vehicle recently struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. One of the reasons for that fatality may be that the vehicle's software was copying human behavior, according to a computer professor at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

The fatal accident occurred in Tempe on March 18. A woman was walking her bike across a dark road when the Uber car, which had a human driver behind the wheel for safety purposes, hit her. The professor says that the program controlling the self-driving car was mimicking the way a human would drive and that could be what allowed the accident to happen. For example, a human driver who cannot see a pedestrian on a dark road