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From "The Failing NY Times:" Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

Uber’s robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz.

The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber’s human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects.

Yet Uber’s test drivers were being asked to do more — going on solo runs when they had worked in pairs. And there also was pressure to live up to a goal to offer a driverless car service by the end of the year and to impress top executives.

Early on in Phoenix, there were two groups of test drivers. A smaller group “stressed” the cars by putting them in challenging situations where, without human intervention, they would have crashed.

A larger group of drivers was focused on picking up customers in the autonomous vehicles. Those drivers were expected to pay more attention to little details, often taking control to prevent a “bad experience” like hard braking, according to a company document.

Around October, Uber merged the two groups to get to a point where it could offer a truly driverless car service to customers “as quickly as possible.” The customer pickup service was mostly dropped so drivers could focus on accumulating miles and gathering data to help the system become more reliable.

Around the same time, Uber moved from two employees in every car to one. The paired employees had been splitting duties — one ready to take over if the autonomous system failed, and another to keep an eye on what the computers were detecting.

When Uber moved to a single operator, some employees expressed safety concerns to managers, according to the two people familiar with Uber’s operations. They were worried that going solo would make it harder to remain alert during hours of monotonous driving.