Driver in Uber’s Self-Driving Car Death Goes on Trial
14th March 2022
The name Rafaela Vasquez may not immediately be recogniseable, but the accident that ties her to the first-ever fatal self-driving car crash accident will be.
Vasquez was the driver when one of Uber’s autonomous test cars crashed into a woman walking her bike across the road at night in March 2018. Now nearly three years later, she is due to go on trial for negligent homicide and has spoken out for the first time.
“I feel betrayed in a way,” she told Wired. “At first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police. Now it’s the opposite. It was literally, one day I’m fine and next day I’m the villain. It’s very – it’s isolating.”
Meanwhile Uber has escaped any criminal liability, whilst Vasquez is being sued by prosecutors in Arizona. The blame has been pinned squarely on the driver when videos of her showed she was distracted before the collision. Her defense team will argue she was checking Slack messages from Uber in her work phone at the time, whilst prosecutors will say she was watching an episode of reality show The Voice on her personal handset.
Whatever the outcome of the case, Vasquez’s side of the story is a tragic, personal tale of some of the risks in pursuing a high-tech, automated future.