An Uber Technologies Inc. car involved in a deadly crash in Arizona wasn’t designed to automatically brake in case of an emergency, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report on the accident. The self-driving car, which was being tested on a public road with a human operator, struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in March. Uber said Wednesday that it was closing down its self-driving vehicle program in the state, two months after Arizona barred it from road-testing the technology. The agency, which investigates deadly transit accidents, said Uber’s self-driving system determined the need to emergency-brake the car 1.3 seconds before the deadly impact. The NTSB report said that, according to Uber, automatic emergency braking isn’t enabled in order to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior” and that the system also isn’t designed to alert the operator in case of an emergency.
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From the Texas Trial Lawyers Association news release.
