Uber’s self-driving car that killed a woman didn’t recognise jaywalkers

An Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman last year in Arizona failed to recognize her as a pedestrian because she was jaywalking, US transport regulators said Tuesday.

The woman had been crossing the street “at a location without a crosswalk; the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians,” the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said in a statement.

In a preliminary report, the NTSB had already determined that the car’s software spotted the 49-year-old woman nearly six seconds before the vehicle hit her, as she walked across the street at night with her bicycle in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix.