Cases › physical harm › LR-2026-0599
Uber paused self-driving after fatal crash
Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change
Developing: a major or severe case captured in the last 72 hours. Later changes are logged on the corrections page.
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer.
Severity severe: Safety-of-life test met: the sentence states that an autonomous robotaxi struck and killed a cyclist.
An autonomous Volvo XC90 robotaxi that Uber was testing struck and killed a cyclist in Tempe, Arizona, in early 2018. Uber then promptly paused its in-house autonomy program. In the years since, the company shifted from building self-driving technology itself to backing outside specialists. The source is a 2026 press article about Uber's later robotaxi investments, which recounts the crash only as background. It does not describe how the system behaved, how the crash was detected, what the investigation found, or the exact date of the crash.
What happened
What was done
No source states an action or fix.
Risks
Primary43 incidents
Read from the sources; not yet reviewed by a person.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
Harness ApplicationPhysical safety interlocks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Live behaviour monitoring · Adversarial testing before deployment
Similar incidents
Evidence
No source states: what it reached or did, how it was caught, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 3 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- early 2018 An autonomous Volvo XC90 robotaxi being tested by Uber struck and killed a cyclist in Tempe, Arizona.
Not dated in the sources:
- Uber promptly paused its in-house autonomy program after the crash.
- In the years since, Uber shifted to signing deals with self-driving specialists instead of building the technology itself.
Show every field, with its source and grade
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
The pause is reported as Uber hitting the brakes on its in-house program; it is not described as a documented control, so no remediation entry is made. Reversibility is not stated, so it is left out.
LR-2026-0599 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON