Uber Halts Self-Driving Car Tests in Arizona After Friday Night Collision (businessinsider.com)

"Given that the Uber vehicle has flipped onto its side it looks to be a high speed crash," writes TechCrunch, though Business Insider reports that no one was seriously injured. An anonymous reader quotes their report: A self-driving Uber car was involved in an accident on Friday night in Tempe, Arizona, in one of the most serious incidents to date involving the growing fleet of autonomous vehicles being tested on U.S. roads... Uber has halted its self-driving-car pilot in Arizona and is investigating what caused the incident... A Tempe police spokesperson told Bloomberg that the Uber was not at fault in the accident and was hit by another car which failed to yield. Still, the collision will likely to turn up the temperature on the heated debate about the safety of self-driving cars.

Comments

Tipped over does not imply speed

[linuxwrangler]

"Given that the Uber vehicle has flipped onto its side it looks to be a high speed crash, which suggests a pretty serious incident..."

In one past life I learned accident investigation and in another extricated victims, both dead and alive, from vehicle collisions. I have to call malarkey on the "high-speed" claim.

Cars can tip over at very low speed. I've seen at least two such crashes within two blocks of my house. In one, a driver ran a stop sign and clipped a small SUV which tipped over onto the opposite sidewalk. The entire accident scene covered, perhaps, 30 feet edge to edge.

In the other, a driver drifted into the parking lane sideswiping a parked car such that the door-panels hooked which caused the car to rotate then roll.

The "high-speed" car in both cases was traveling 20-30mph.

Though the provided photo does not show a large surrounding area, neither car looks crushed - just some body-panel denting and debris is right next to the car vs. scattered down the roadway and "nobody was seriously injured."

Nothing about this suggests high-speed.