First Pedestrian Death by Self-Driving Vehicle (Elaine Herzberg)
Uber's autonomous test vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona — the first known pedestrian fatality involving a fully autonomous vehicle.
On 18 March 2018, an Uber autonomous test vehicle operating in autonomous mode struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she pushed a bicycle across a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona. NTSB investigation found the vehicle's perception system detected Herzberg approximately 5.6 seconds before impact but cycled through multiple classifications (vehicle, then bicycle, then unknown) and failed to plan an evasive maneuver until 0.2 seconds before impact. The safety driver, Rafaela Vasquez, was watching a streaming video at the time of the collision and was later charged with negligent homicide; Vasquez pled guilty to endangerment in 2023. NTSB cited inadequate safety culture at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group as a probable cause.
Systems & Vendors Implicated
What EvalGuard would have caught
Every entry in this catalogue traces back to a guardrail class — chatbot self-harm detection, facial recognition validation thresholds, deepfake watermark verification, algorithmic bias auditing, or compliance gating. See our product catalogue for the specific tools that ship those safeguards today.