fatalities – Techdirt (original) (raw)

NHTSA Starts To Take The Safety Threat Of Comically Large Trucks More Seriously

from the why-yes-I-am-very-manly-thank-you-for-noticing dept

The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline. 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic fatalities. And while tech advancements have made life safer for drivers and passengers, the same can’t be true for those on the outside looking in.

There are a lot of reasons why; from poorly considered urban pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, to the overall massive (and seemingly ever-ballooning) size of SUV and truck front ends.

This week the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed new rules that would purportedly take aim at the latter. The new rule would establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard requiring new passenger vehicles be designed and tested to reduce the risk of serious-to-fatal injuries in child and adult pedestrian crashes.

NHTSA notes that in 2022, 88% of pedestrian fatalities occurred via single vehicle crashes, and 49% of all pedestrian fatalities were caused by “multipurpose passenger vehicles” (trucks, vans, and other vehicles capable of seating more than 10 people). SUV and truck designers have been obsessed in recent years with comically large front grills and bumpers, which are more deadly and reduce visibility.

“We have a crisis of roadway deaths, and it’s even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” Sophie Shulman, NHTSA’s Deputy Administrator said in a statement. “Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57% from 4,779 to 7,522. This proposed rule will ensure that vehicles will be designed to protect those inside and outside from serious injury or death.”

The NHTSA’s proposed changes would update Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to include requirements for vehicle head-to-hood impact testing, which the agency claims could save as many as 67 lives per year.

Of course, the NHTSA hasn’t always been a watchful steward of public automotive safety. The tepidness with which the agency has handled issues like the substantial body count caused by badly automated Teslas (and the company’s broad and obvious misrepresentation of the technology’s real-world capabilities) has been a particular point of public concern.

The NHTSA has never, in its fifty year history, issued rules requiring that automakers change vehicle design to better prevent pedestrian fatalities. Such rules would have to not only be crafted well, but survive lobbyist and legal onslaught in a country whose top court seems poised to all but lobotomize what remains of independent regulatory independence. Then they’d need consistent enforcement.

In addition to pedestrian-hostile SUV and truck design, the significant weight and acceleration of EV trucks and SUVs is something else global regulators have been tangling with.

The electric Ford Lightning, for example, is a whopping 6,500 pounds. The Hummer EV is even heavier, clocking in at 9,000 pounds. Its battery alone weighs more than a Honda Civic. Experts have pointed out the significant safety ramifications of this transition for a while, and while some countries (like Norway) have started taxing extremely heavy vehicle owners, the U.S. has so far lagged behind.

In 2022 the District of Columbia adopted a creative vehicle registration fee schedule charging owners of vehicles weighing more than 6,000 pounds $500 per year, seven times more than those registering light sedans. But federal efforts on this front have been muted due to lobbying concerns that such restrictions might impact product sales and policymaker worries about stunting the EV revolution.

Filed Under: cyclists, fatalities, nhtsa, pedestrians, safety, suvs, trucks, vehicle, vehicles

Tempe Police Chief Indicates The Uber Self-Driving Car Probably Isn't At Fault In Pedestrian Death

from the human-error dept

The internet ink has barely dried on Karl’s post about an Uber self-driving vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian in Arizona, and we already have an indication from the authorities that the vehicle probably isn’t to blame for the fatality. Because public relations waits for nobody, Uber suspended its autonomous vehicles in the wake of the death of a woman in Tempe, but that didn’t keep fairly breathless headlines being painted all across the mainstream media. The stories that accompanied those headlines were more careful to mention that an investigation is required before anyone knows what actually happened, but the buzz created by the headlines wasn’t so nuanced. I actually saw this in my own office, where several people could be heard mentioning that autonomous vehicles were now done.

But that was always silly. It’s an awkward thing to say, but the fact that it took this long for AVs to strike and kill a pedestrian is a triumph of technology, given just how many people we humans kill with our cars. Hell, the Phoenix area itself had 11 pedestrian deaths by car in the last week, with only one of them being this Uber car incident. And now all of that hand-wringing is set to really look silly, as the Tempe police chief is indicating that no driver, human or AI, would likely have been able to prevent this death.

The chief of the Tempe Police has told the San Francisco Chronicle that Uber is likely not responsible for the Sunday evening crash that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg.

“I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident,” said Chief Sylvia Moir.

Herzberg was “pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags,” according to the Chronicle’s Carolyn Said, when she “abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic.”

After viewing video captured by the Uber vehicle, Moir concluded that “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.”

So, once again, this tragedy has almost nothing to do with automobile AI and everything to do with human beings being faulty, complicated creatures that make mistakes. We don’t need to assign blame or fault to a woman who died to admit to ourselves that not only did the self-driving car do nothing wrong in this instance, but also that it might just be true to say that the car’s AI had a far better chance of avoiding a fatality than the average human driver. The car was not speeding. It did not swerve. It did not adjust its speed prior to the collision.

This obviously isn’t the conclusion of the police’s investigation, but when the police chief is already making these sorts of noises early on, it’s reasonable to conclude that the visual evidence of what happened is pretty clear. Sadly, all this likely means is that the major media websites of the world will have to bench their misleading headlines until the next death that may or may not be the fault of a self-driving vehicle.

Filed Under: arizona, autonomous vehicles, fatalities, pedestrian, self-driving cars, tempe
Companies: uber