> The vehicle was factory equipped with several advanced driver assistance functions by Volvo Cars, the original manufacturer. The systems included a collision avoidance function with automatic emergency braking, known as City Safety, as well as functions for detecting driver alertness and road sign information. All these Volvo functions are disabled when the test vehicle is operated in computer control but are operational when the vehicle is operated in manual control.

However, that appears to be separate from emergency braking under Uber's self-driving system:

> At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2).[2] According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.

> [2]: In Uber’s self-driving system, an emergency brake maneuver refers to a deceleration greater than 6.5 meters per second squared (m/s^2).

It sounds like Uber didn't trust their own self-driving system enough to allow it to initiate sudden crash stops. Too many false positives, I guess? Of course, simply disabling the function leads to other obvious problems, as shown.

I think the better interpretation is that the Uber system disabled another separate (non-Uber) system.

There are two systems in the vehicle. One is the manufacturer's, let's call it System V after Volvo, and the other is System U, for Uber.

System V provides collision detection and emergency braking. It played no part in this incident, since it's inactive if the car is under control of System U, which it was at the time.

System U can decide that the car should slow down in some situations. Let's call gradual slowdown Action U1, and emergency slowdown Action U2. The incident called for Action U2, by Uber's criteria. What Uber said is that a) they disabled automatic execution of Action U2, punting it to the driver (really, a bored passenger in driver's seat), and b) that the driver would get no indication of emergency situations from the system.

The idea is, presumably, that driver should watch the road and react in emergencies. But we also know that the driver had the duty of working with the onboard console, which must have been quite a distraction. Effectively, Uber has set themselves up for failure, and it happened.

Volvo has automatic driver-assistance emergency braking. That's turned off while Uber's self driving system is on, because obviously the two systems are not built to work together.

Uber also disabled emergency braking from their own system. That was because it would "drive erratically" when it was turned on.

So assuming the driver knows all of this (and that's a big assumption), then you have the blame shared two ways, and it's hard to tell who deserves more.

(1) You'd have the driver being at fault, since they were responsible for controlling the vehicle at the time, even though the computer was doing the majority of the driving. In this case, the driver should not have been using their phone and ignoring the road and their duties to control the car.

(2) Uber should share some blame for not building alerts to the driver into the system.

But how much of these responsibilities Uber made clear to the driver is very much worth knowing, because however you slice it this was not so much a failure of technology as human negligence.

If the claim is that Volvo's system is intervening in valid cases where Uber's system would (arguably) have handled it, then Uber's system is driving too aggressively or is too slow in responding. Humans, when paying attention, can drive Volvo's cars without often triggering the emergency braking.

> At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision[..]

[emphasis mine]

> In Uber’s self-driving system, an emergency brake maneuver refers to a deceleration greater than 6.5 meters per second squared (m/s2).

But then again these systems also make people lazy when the vehicle drives perfectly 99% of the time...