According to Aptiv, the company that supplies Volvo’s radar and camera, Uber had disabled the standard collision avoidance system on the XC90 that plowed into that pedestrian. For now, everyone else is remaining largely silent with Uber declining to comment and Volvo saying the company can’t speculate on the cause of the incident. However, Intel’s Mobileye, Aptiv’s supplier of chips and sensors for collision-avoidance systems played a video of the incident, and its software was able to detect the pedestrian one second before impact even with the “second-hand” quality of the video.

This, of course, is a move by Aptiv and Intel to protect themselves and their client, Volvo, who was apparently - -if these reports are to be believed – free of fault as the systems were disabled during the incident. This notion certainly angles the blame at Uber’s technology, which could be a huge problem for the company as Arizona has already revoked its permission to test autonomous cars on public roads. And, it certainly goes to show that Uber has a lot of work to do and really has no business having driverless cars on the road. The question now is, whether or not the rest of Uber’s autonomous operations will be subject to interruption. After all, the company just got done boasting its autonomous truck fleet.

For what it’s worth, disabling standard safety equipment included with vehicles at purchase may be a normal practice in order to help facilitate testing Uber’s own self-driving system. Even if it is standard practice, it looks like that standard practice may change in the near future, don’t you think?

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