After Tempe police released videos of a fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber, the question of whether autonomous cars are ready to hit the roads has been proposed.

Uber has suspended self-driving tests in North America and are working with the police to investigate the incident. But is it really just the incident they should be investigating, what about the software and programming of the self-driving car?

SIDETONE: Before we get into that, its important that we take into consideration that this particular incident is one of the first times an autonomous car has been in a fatal collision with a pedestrian. This shows that, up until last Sunday the self-driving Uber has had a pretty good run on the roads, and maybe this incident was a very unique situation.

It’s quite easy to sympathise with the car when you look at the circumstances.

• It was pitch black
• No street lights
• The pedestrian was in dark colours
• The pedestrians appearance was extremely sudden

BUT… surely, when we think about new technology and a self driving car, you would expect it to have no flaws and to be able to have braked faster or swerved the accident. Or was swerving that incident impossible, whether it was a self-driving car or a human driving?

No matter how advanced we may think we are, self-driving does not suspend the laws of physics; the error in this situation may have been simply outside the circumstance.

So if that is the case, if we are yet to develop a software, or to code an algorithm which could be successful in every possible situation life could throw at it, is it truly safe to allow self driving uber’s until this has been solved?

We could be decades away from the self-driving uber, but at the same time we could be closer than we think. Maybe this devastating incident has given us the key to discover what the software is missing.