Documents indicate that Uber was having AV issues long before Arizona crash.

Continuing coverage of the March 18 incident in which an Uber AV killed an Arizona fatality focuses on Uber’s issues with its AV technology. The New York Times (3/23, Wakabayashi, Subscription Publication, 13.35M) reported that Uber’s autonomous vehicle tests were “not living up to expectations months before” the fatal crash, based on documents seen by the Times and on interviews with people familiar with the Uber tests in the Phoenix area. Uber’s autonomous vehicles had difficulty “driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs,” the Times reports, and its drivers “had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects.” In fact, “as of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per ‘intervention’ in Arizona.” Waymo says its vehicles average about 5,600 miles per intervention by the safety drivers.

        Fortune (3/24, Morris, 4.04M) reports the Times report said Uber reduced the number of safety drivers in its test vehicles from two to one, “over the safety concerns of some employees” and despite the relatively frequent driving errors by the autonomous vehicles. At the same time, internally, “the leadership of Uber’s self-driving car unit has frequently been described as troubled, with high levels of engineer attrition.” There may have also been pressure on the autonomous vehicle developers to bring a road-ready system to market as soon as possible in order “to square the financial circle” of Uber’s finances “by taking driver pay out of the equation” and helping to build profitability at a company that “regularly posts quarterly losses with few historical parallels.”

        Business Insider (3/24, Matousek, 4.81M) reports Uber “has spent the better part of the past year cleaning up the mess left by former CEO Travis Kalanick, who oversaw the company’s meteoric rise and turned it in into a symbol for the ruthless, growth-at-all-costs attitude that has come to represent the dark side of Silicon Valley.” The latest hit to the company’s wider reputation in light of the pedestrian fatality means that “even if Uber can perfect its self-driving technology by mid-2019, when it hopes to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service, city governments might not trust the company enough to work with them.” Jalopnik (3/24, Werth, 1.22M) reports that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, “brought in to clean up Uber” after Kalanick was ousted, considered “shutting down the self-driving car project” entirely.

        The San Jose (CA) Mercury News (3/23, 514K) reported that the Times says Uber, “trying to reinvent itself after sexual harassment and leadership scandals,” was “under pressure to get its autonomous-driving ride-sharing program up and running for public use by the end of the year, while the cars were having trouble driving themselves safely and the company was reducing human backup.”

        Ars Technica (3/24, 686K) writes that “insiders have long viewed Uber as a laggard in the driverless car race,” but the documents obtained by the Times “suggest that the company’s self-driving car program may be even further behind its rivals than had been publicly known.” The San Francisco Chronicle (3/23, 3M) reported that according to experts, “neither Uber’s technology nor its backup driver seemed ready for the open road.”