Uber Technologies Inc. has hired the former head of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board to advise it on safety after an internal investigation found that a software fault caused the fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber vehicle in March.

Christopher Hart was first acting chairman of the NTSB in August 2014 and then chairman between February 2015 and August 2017. He joins Uber at the same time The Information reported that Uber has found that a software fault, specifically how the software decides how the car should react to objects it detects, was to blame for the death of a pedestrian in March.

Initially it was believed that the pedestrian was at fault — particularly given that video footage showed the now-deceased woman crossing a pitch-black stretch of road (pictured). But the internal Uber investigation found that its autonomous vehicle software had been set in a way that caused it to ignore the pedestrian.

Worse still for Uber was the fact that all the other technology deployed on the self-driving car, including its LiDAR, radar and cameras, all detected the pedestrian despite the clear, provable fact that she was crossing the road in the dark, but the software issue ultimately ended in her demise.

Uber has not officially responded to the report, but did say in a statement that “we’re actively cooperating with the NTSB in their investigation” and that “out of respect for that process and the trust we’ve built with NTSB, we can’t comment on the specifics of the incident.”

The company did, however, trumpet loudly its hiring of Hart. It said it has “initiated a top-to-bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, and we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture. Our review is looking at everything from the safety of our system to our training processes for vehicle operators, and we hope to have more to say soon.”

Uber is often the popular target in the media of negative press, but it’s not alone in killing people with its self-driving car technology. In what is arguably the worst failure of autonomous vehicle tech to-date, a Tesla Model 3 in autonomous mode slammed into a fixed concrete road barrier in March, killing the vehicle’s occupant in the process.

Photo: Uber