In 2018, an Uber autonomous vehicle fatally struck a pedestrian. In a WIRED exclusive, the human behind the wheel finally speaks…

Questions of fault when things go wrong have been settled over a century for human driving. But they are still largely the stuff of thought experiments for the cyborgs now roving our streets: vehicles controlled by a machine brain, programmed by human engineers, and usually overseen on the road by some other person behind the wheel. For years, researchers and self-driving advocates had anxiously prognosticated about how the public and the legal system would react to the first pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car…

The crash in Tempe ripped those musings into reality—forcing police, prosecutors, Uber, and Vasquez into roles both unwanted and unprecedented in a matter of seconds. At the scene that night, Vasquez stood at the center of a tragedy and a conundrum.