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Mr. Douma said prosecutors’ announcement Tuesday tracked with how typically people, and not car manufacturers, are held responsible for crimes they commit behind the wheel. But, as autonomous vehicles become more sophisticated, he said, such cases raise questions about that way of thinking.

“Is this driver, or was this driver, behaving in any way different than what most drivers are going to be behaving like when the car is doing this much driving?” he said. “It’s a very conventional way of thinking to say we can expect and we should expect people to sit and monitor technology that is otherwise doing all the decision-making.”

The Yavapai County Attorney’s Office did its review at the request of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which had a potential conflict of interest in the case because of an earlier partnership with Uber in a safety campaign. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

The New York Times reported last March that Uber’s autonomous cars in Arizona struggled to meet the company’s expectations and required drivers to intervene more frequently than those of the company’s competitors.

Uber suspended testing of self-driving vehicles after the crash. In December, the vehicles returned to public roads, though at reduced speeds and in less-challenging environments.

In a preliminary report about the crash released in May, the National Transportation Safety Board said the Uber car’s computer system had spotted Ms. Herzberg six seconds before impact, but classified Ms. Herzberg, who was not in a crosswalk, first as an unrecognized object, then as another vehicle and finally as a bicycle.

The Uber car, equipped with Uber’s sensing technology, comes with an automatic emergency braking system from the manufacturer.