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Many have said that a fatal accident involving an autonomous car was inevitable, and many have also said that such an accident would put a major brake on robot car development. Well, we're about to find out because an autonomous car, under test by ride-sharing company Uber, has been involved in a fatal collision in the city of Tempe, Arizona.
According to the Tempe Police Department, the pedestrian, identified at 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, was walking near to a street intersection when she was struck by the Uber car. The car was, at the time, in fully autonomous mode, but was under the supervision of a technician in the car.
Uber immediately suspended its autonomous car testing programmes, and issued a statement which said: "Our hearts go out to the victim's family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident."
Tempe police did not comment beyond that there had been an incident, and that Ms Herzberg died in the hospital subsequent to her injuries.
It's not the first time that an Uber autonomous vehicle has been involved in a crash. One of the company's autonomous Volvos was involved in a crash last year, but no-one was hurt and the police absolved the autonomous vehicle of any blame.
It's also not the first fatal accident involving an autonomous vehicle. Last year a Tesla Model S crashed, killing its driver, while on auto-pilot mode, but the blame was shared equally by the driver and the car.
This one could be different. If the investigation finds that the vehicle itself was at fault, and that either the operator or Uber itself is criminally responsible for a death, then it could throw autonomous vehicle development into quite a new light.
Speaking to CompleteCar, Evgeny Chereshnev, CEO at Biolink.Tech, an expert in artificial intelligence, said that: "at the moment, the autonomous vehicles we have already - such as airport trains and the Docklands Light Railway in the UK - thankfully work hazard free because the journeys are simple and predictable. Statistically, there is very little risk of anything going wrong because they're programmed to only go from A to B. Even with other forms of partly automated transport, such as planes and ships, there is still always a human there to monitor them.
"However, on roads, autonomous cars have the potential to be compromised almost 100 per cent of the time. There are many factors that bring significant risk to the use of autonomous cars, all of which are from external sources such as other human drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and even sudden extreme weather changes. Unless all cars on the road are autonomous, sadly there is the potential for more people to be injured or worse. That being said, I think it's important not to kill the initiative of autonomous cars. Any risk of road accident by self-driving cars will be significantly less than the current number of road accidents - which is reported to be a staggering 1.25 million per year.Unfortunately, unless we have fully controlled environments on the roads, accidents can and will continue to happen."