Uber resumes AV road tests

  Uber have cleared its self-driving cars and resumed its pilot programme three days after one of its vehicles was involved in a crash in Tempe, Arizona. An Uber spokeswoman told Reuters the trials will resume in Tempe, San Francisco and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The programme was suspended last Saturday. The incident occurred after another car – driven by a human – failed to give way to the turning autonomous vehicle. At the time, the Uber car was in self-driving mode, and a driver and engineer were in the front seats. “The vehicles collided, causing the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side," a spokeswoman for the Tempe police department, Josie Montenegro, said in an email to journalists. "There were no serious injuries." The Uber Volvo SUV was deemed to be not at fault in the collision. No other such incidents have been reported in Uber’s self-driving pilot programme. Although some other accidents have been reported in global trials, experts insist that AVs are ultimately safer than human-driven vehicles, and note that the majority of such AV crashes are very minor and down to human error.  “Driverless cars keep getting better the more they drive, whereas humans have a roughly constant safety record over the years," Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering and roboticist at Columbia University, told Reuters. He estimated there were about 23,000 traffic fatalities per week globally. So far, one person has been killed driving an AV in autopilot mode – 40-year-old Joshua Brown, when his Tesla Model S crashed into a truck on an American highway last May. Prosecutors decided not to charge Tesla earlier this year.