(PHOENIX) — Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey suspended Uber’s self-driving vehicle testing privileges Monday in the wake of a pedestrian fatality in a Phoenix suburb last week.

Ducey told the company CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that video footage of the crash raised concerns about the company’s ability to safely test its technology in Arizona. He said he expects public safety to be the top priority for those who operate self-driving cars.

“The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation,” Ducey said.

The move by the Republican governor marks a major step back from his embrace of self-driving vehicles. He previously welcomed Uber and other autonomous vehicle companies to use Arizona as a place for testing under few, if any, regulations. In early March, he authorized self-driving vehicle companies to run tests without a person in the car to act as a safety operator.

Police in Tempe released a 22-second video showing a woman walking from a darkened area onto a street just before an Uber SUV strikes her. The Volvo was in self-driving mode with a human backup driver at the wheel when it struck 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, police said.

Uber’s human backup driver appears on the video to be looking down before crash and appears startled about the time of the impact.

Experts who viewed the video told The Associated Press that the SUV’s sensors should have seen the woman pushing a bicycle and braked before the impact.

The fatal crash in Tempe was the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle in the United States.

Uber immediately suspended its self-driving vehicle testing in Arizona, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that the company’s own documents showed the testing program was rife with issues. They included trouble driving through construction zones and requiring far more human intervention than competing companies.

In Arizona, companies such as Uber only need to carry minimum liability insurance to operate self-driving cars. They are not required to track crashes or report any information to the state.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</s>This March 19, 2018 still image taken from video provided by ABC-15, shows investigators at the scene of a fatal accident involving a self driving Uber car on the street in Tempe, Ariz. | AP

PHEONIX(ARIZONA): Arizona Governor Doug Ducey on Monday suspended the self-driving cars of Uber after a fatal crash last week killed a pedestrian.

Ducey sent a letter to the Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi saying that he was suspending the ride-sharing company's tests of self-driving cars on Arizona roads.

"Improving public safety has always been the emphasis of Arizona's approach to autonomous vehicle testing, and my expectation is that public safety is also the top priority for all who operate this technology in the state of Arizona," Ducey said in his letter to Khosrowshahi.

"The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation," the letter added.

In 2015, Ducey first welcomed Uber when he stopped Arizona from cracking down on the ride-share business for insurance issues. Later that year, Ducey issued an executive order welcoming self-driving car companies to the state without any special oversight, USA Today reported.

The Arizona governor has directed the country's transportation department to suspend Uber's ability to test and operate autonomous vehicles.

The accident that took place last week appeared to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on public roads.

Meanwhile, Uber said that it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in the cities of Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco in the US and Toronto in Canada.</s>Arizona is suspending Uber’s ability to test its self-driving cars in the state.

The suspension of testing for Uber comes after one of the company’s self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian last week. The order to halt the tests comes from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in a letter sent to company CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

Uber is complying with the order and is pulling all of its self-driving cars off the streets. The company notes that it has already suspended tests of self-driving cars across the country following the accident.

The accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars is currently under investigation by the Tempe Police Department and the National Transportation Safety Board. The ride-sharing company notes that it is helping investigators with their work, reports CNN.

The person that was struck and killed by Uber’s self-driving car was 49-year-old Elaine Herzber. The woman was hit by the car at around 10:00 p.m. last Sunday. There was a driver behind the wheel of the car, but they weren’t in control when the accident occurred.

The test driver behind the Uber self-driving car was 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez. Vasquez was warned by the self-driving system to take control of the car prior to the wreck, but didn’t do so. She also previously served almost four years in prison on charges of attempted armed robbery and unsworn falsification.

Uber isn’t the only company that is testing self-driving cars in Arizona. However, it is the only one that this new ban applies to. This means other companies will still have self-driving cars on the road.

As of this writing, William White did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.</s>Nvidia will suspend its autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the aftermath of Uber’s fatal crash in Arizona, Reuters reports. Uber is a customer of Nvidia’s, using the chipmaker’s computing platform in its fleet of self-driving cars.

Nvidia had been testing its self-driving cars in New Jersey, California, Japan, and Germany. The company is hosting its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, where it is expected to make several announcements regarding its automotive products.

“The accident was tragic. It’s a reminder of how difficult SDC technology is and that it needs to be approached with extreme caution and the best safety technologies,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in an email. “This tragedy is exactly why we’ve committed ourselves to perfecting this life-saving technology. Ultimately AVs will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident. Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate.”

Uber had been using Nvidia’s tech for a while

The company is the latest to halt autonomous vehicle testing after a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, last week. Toyota also said it would pause its testing in cities across the globe, citing the “emotional toll” of the Uber crash on its safety drivers.

In addition to testing its own self-driving cars, Nvidia also manufactures powerful computing platforms for use in autonomous vehicles. Earlier this year, Nvidia began selling its Xavier chip for use in self-driving cars. The chipmaker says it has 320 clients in the automotive space.

Uber has been using Nvidia’s self-driving technology in its autonomous test cars for a while, though the companies only just started to talk about it earlier this year. Uber has said it would use Nvidia’s tech in its eventual self-driving fleets of Volvos as well as the company’s autonomous trucks. But Uber has also halted its AV testing in all the cities in which it operates, and the governor of Arizona suspended the company from testing its self-driving cars in the state “indefinitely.”

The types of computers produced by Nvidia and its competitors like Intel are arguably the most important part of the driverless car. Everything the vehicle “sees” with its sensors, all of the images, mapping data, and audio material picked up by its cameras needs to be processed by giant PCs in order for the vehicle to make split-second decisions. All this processing must be done with multiple levels of redundancy to ensure the highest level of safety.

Update March 27th, 1:17PM ET: post has been updated to include a new statement from Nvidia.</s>WARNING: The following video may be disturbing to some viewers

Click here if you are having trouble viewing the photos or video on your mobile device.

In what is believed to be the first death of a pedestrian hit by a self-driving car on a public street, a woman in Tempe, Arizona, was killed in an accident involving an Uber autonomous vehicle Sunday night — and Uber immediately suspended its testing of such vehicles.

Elaine Herzberg, 49, was struck as she walked from west to east outside of a crosswalk, according to Tempe police. Herzberg was then transported to a local hospital, where she died. Police said the incident was still part of an active investigation and that Uber is assisting with the matter.

The incident comes at a particularly inopportune time for self-driving car companies in California: The state is set to allow autonomous cars, without any human support behind the wheel, for testing and transporting people on public roads beginning April 2.

Herzberg’s death prompted a call Monday for a nationwide suspension of self-driving car tests on public roads from a group that has criticized the rapid roll-out of such testing.

But while the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday it would seek information from Uber about the deadly Arizona crash, it didn’t say whether it would postpone the April 2 start of autonomous car tests in California without any human support behind the wheel.

Uber confirmed the Arizona accident occurred and that there was a person in a front passenger seat acting as operator of the vehicle. The giant San Francisco-based startup said that as a result of the accident, it is putting a hold on all tests involving its self-driving cars. In addition to Arizona, the ride-sharing company has been running tests of self-driving cars in San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Uber said it has more than 200 self-driving cars as part of its autonomous vehicle testing program.

“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” said an Uber spokesperson in a statement provided to this news organization.

John Simpson, privacy and technology project director at the nonpartisan group Consumer Watchdog, which has been critical of rapid growth of the self-driving car technology industry, said the fatality “underscores the difficulty robot cars have in interacting with pedestrians and cyclists.” He called for an immediate national moratorium on the testing of self-driving cars on public roads until an independent analysis of what caused the accident can be completed.

“Arizona has been the wild west of robot car testing, with virtually no regulations in place,” Simpson said. “That’s why Uber and (Alphabet-owned) Waymo test there. When there’s no sheriff in town, people get killed.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said it is sending a team of four investigators to Tempe to look into the factors surrounding the accident.

The California DMV also said it plans to seek answers from Uber, though it stopped short of saying whether the crash would affect plans for testing on public roads of self-driving cars with no human support behind the wheel.

“The California DMV takes the safe operation of our autonomous vehicle permit holders very seriously,” the agency said in a statement. “The California DMV has many requirements in place for testing permit holders and requires collision reports and annual disengagement reports. We are aware of the Uber crash in Arizona, but we have not been briefed on the details of the crash at this time. We plan to follow up with Uber to get more information.”
• Lyft links up with Canada’s Magna on self-driving cars
• New report details all the triggers that have caused the human behind the wheel to take over
• Self-driving cars get OK for California public roads Tim Bajarin, president of tech consultancy Creative Strategies, said Sunday’s fatality shows that the technology behind autonomous vehicles is “by no means ready for prime time,” despite all the attention and investment being given to it.

“This underlines that this technology is still years away from being safe enough to use in real-world settings,” he said. “We need a lot more in the way of technological breakthroughs before autonomous vehicles ever hit the road in a broad way.”

Tempe police said the woman was crossing Mill Avenue outside of a crosswalk just south of Curry Road when she was struck by a northbound car. That stretch of road runs alongside Papago Park north of the Salt River.</s>Nvidia is temporarily suspending its self-driving car tests on public roads worldwide.

The company best known for its powerful graphics cards has in recent years waded into the self-driving car waters, and it currently counts over 370 partners in the space.

But following a fatal accident last week in which an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian while in autonomous driving mode, Nvidia is suspending its testing.

"The accident was tragic. It's a reminder of how difficult [self-driving car] technology is and that it needs to be approached with extreme caution and the best safety technologies," Nvidia said in a statement.

"This tragedy is exactly why we've committed ourselves to perfecting this life-saving technology. Ultimately [autonomous vehicles] will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident. Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate."

The data collection vehicles are cars in the traditional sense; a driver is at the wheel controlling the vehicle while an autonomous sensor suite collects data, according to TechCrunch. News of Nvidia's self-driving car testing suspension was first reported by Reuters.

Speaking at the GTC 2018 conference in San Jose, California, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged the Uber fatality, noting that while autonomy is where the transportation industry is headed, "Safety is the single most important thing."

Nvidia announced in January that Uber had selected Nvidia technology to power its self-driving car AI, though Nvidia computing tech was already present in Uber's first fleet of Volvo XC90 SUVs.

At the same time it's announcing the cessation of real-world testing, Nvidia also unveiled a new system for testing self-driving cars, one that takes place in virtual rather than real-world environments.

Nvidia DRIVE Constellation is a cloud-based computing platform that will test driving scenarios using photo-realistic simulations.

The system runs on two servers. The first server powers the Nvidia DRIVE Sim, a software set that emulates a self-driving car's various sensors, including its cameras, lidar and radar.

The second server houses the Nvidia DRIVE Pegasus AI, which will process the gathered data as if it's coming from sensors in a self-driving car on the road.

The testing may be taking place in a virtual environment, but it's happening on the same hardware and software that would be found in a self-driving car, Nvidia's Danny Shapiro explained in a briefing.

The simulator is constantly validating information coming from the DRIVE Pegasus AI, while the DRIVE Sim can create virtual driving scenarios ranging from rain to glare to limited night vision.

Nvidia says that in addition to being a safer way to test the technology for self-driving cars, the DRIVE Constellation also allows for faster testing; collecting data from billions of miles on virtual roads and innumerable scenarios in much less time than self-driving cars could gather on the road.

It's not yet clear to what degree Nvidia will rely on virtual testing versus real-world testing once its public driving tests resume.

Nvidia's announcements come at a pivotal time for the self-driving car industry.

Less than 10 days ago, an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian who was walking outside of a crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona. The car was in autonomous mode when it struck the victim, and it is the first known pedestrian death involving a self-driving car.

Following the accident, Uber suspended all self-driving car tests in North America. Earlier today, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey suspended Uber's ability to test and operate self-driving cars on public roads in the state.

The accident has called into the question the safety of testing self-driving cars on public roads.

It remains to be seen how effective Nvidia DRIVE Constellation is at putting self-driving cars through the paces and how that testing translates into the real world.

Testing may not involve putting self-driving cars on public streets, with all the safety issues that entails, but virtual environments aren't real ones, no matter how authentic the simulations seem.</s>Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will suspend self-driving tests across the globe following a fatal Uber accident last week in which a self-driving vehicle killed a pedestrian in Arizona.

"Ultimately [automated vehicles] will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident. Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate," a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement.

The chipmaker is testing self-driving technology globally including in New Jersey, Santa Clara, Japan and Germany.

Shares of Nvidia lost 4 percent on Tuesday, following the announcement.</s>(CNN Money) — Nvidia is temporarily pausing its self-driving car tests on public roads.

Nvidia is best known for providing technology for other companies in sectors ranging from bitcoin mining to self-driving cars, but it also has its own fleet of self-driving cars, used for research and development purposes.

The move to pause the tests comes one week after a self-driving Uber car, which incorporates Nvidia technology in its self-driving vehicles, struck and killed a woman in Arizona.

Nvidia said Tuesday it will halt testing of its cars until it learns more about the incident, in which 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was killed while walking her bicycle across a street.

“Ultimately AVs will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement sent to CNN on Tuesday. “Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate.”

A source familiar with the situation said that Nvidia’s decision was made “out of respect for what happened” last week and not because the company believes its technology to be unsafe.

Related: Why is everyone so excited about Nvidia?

Uber proactively suspended self-driving operations in all cities following the accident.

Last week, Toyota also halted its self-driving car testing.</s>Chipmaker Nvidia has revealed it has suspended self-driving tests across the globe, a week after an Uber Technologies Inc autonomous vehicle hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona.

"Ultimately, autonomous vehicles will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident," a company spokesman said.

"Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate."

Uber suspended North American tests of its self-driving vehicles after the fatal collision on March 18 in Tempe, Arizona.

The incident has raised questions about the safety of autonomous technology in general, and of Uber's system specifically.

Nvidia is testing its technology globally including in New Jersey, Santa Clara, Japan and Germany.

"Nvidia has no choice but to take steps in the context of the fear, uncertainty and outrage likely to be stimulated by a robot car killing a human being," Roger Lanctot, an automotive technology analyst with Strategy Analytics, wrote in a blog post.

"This is precisely the type of event that is capable of slaying a nascent industry in the crib," Lanctot wrote.

Analyst Kinngai Chan from Summit Insight Group does not expect the suspension to hurt Nvidia's earnings.

The question is whether it would be one or two years before fully autonomous vehicles are ready, Chan said, adding if it's pushed out further then the multiple for stock needs to come down as the valuation is very high.

Nvidia, which generates bulk of its revenue from chips used in gaming and data centers, reported automotive revenue of US$132 million in the fourth quarter ended Jan. 28. That mainly includes revenue from infotainment and development agreements for self-driving cars.

Nvidia leads the autonomous industry with its artificial intelligence platform and has partnered with major global automakers such as Volkswagen, Tesla and Audi AG.

Uber has been using Nvidia's computing technology since its first test fleet of Volvo SC90 SUVS were deployed in 2016.

Around 320 firms involved in self-driving cars - from software developers, automakers and their suppliers, sensor and mapping companies - use Nvidia Drive platform, according to the company's website.</s>SANTA CLARA — As Google, Uber and Tesla fight for control of the self-driving car market, another company better known for its gaming chips than its wheels is positioned to cash-in on the transportation revolution.

Nvidia has quietly become one of the top suppliers of the “brains” that control self-driving cars — the super computers that sit nestled inside the trunk or perhaps tucked behind the glove compartment and interpret visual cues like red lights and pedestrians, telling the vehicle how to respond. The Santa Clara-based chipmaker has racked up deals with big carmakers including Tesla, Audi, Mercedes, Toyota and Volvo and is poised to power a large portion of the burgeoning self-driving car industry, a market that is expected to hit $77 billion by 2035.

“Nvidia is obviously going to be one of the strongest players in this area,” said Gartner research director Mike Ramsey.

And by taking on self-driving cars, Nvidia is pulling off a key move from the Silicon Valley playbook. Expanding into new industries — think Google trying its hand at everything from drones to high-speed internet — is vital for any large company hoping to stay relevant in a world where innovative technology can quickly become obsolete, Ramsey said. Diversifying can be tricky, as proven by Yahoo’s unsuccessful attempt to expand into media. But if it works, it can act as insurance against future upsets.

“You never know when someone is going to come along in your core industry and kick your butt,” Ramsey said. “You’re not guaranteed to be at the top.”

While fully autonomous cars are still several years away, Nvidia’s newfound dominance in self-driving cars and early expertise in artificial intelligence is paying off. Its stock price tripled over the past 12 months, and it was the best performing company in the S&P 500 last year — largely because investors see a coming windfall in AI and self-driving tech, experts say. Those up-and-coming sectors already helped boost Nvidia’s revenue last quarter nearly 50 percent from the year before.

“We’re at the very beginning of the AI revolution,” Danny Shapiro, Nvidia’s senior director of automotive work, said during a recent interview. “We’re fueling that revolution, and we’re extremely optimistic about where it’s going to take us.”

Founded in 1993, Nvidia became known for building powerful graphics processors (GPUs) used for rendering stunning video game visuals. About five years ago, Nvidia realized its GPUs also could be used for artificial intelligence — a major turning point for the company just as AI was becoming the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley. Big names including Google, Facebook, Shazam and Netflix started using Nvidia’s chips, running applications such as the facial recognition software that identifies people in Facebook photos.

Nvidia soon expanded into self-driving cars. In 2015, the company revealed the Nvidia Drive PX — the world’s first in-car super computer. Last year Nvidia unveiled the Drive PX 2, which is about the size of a license plate and boasts the power of 150 MacBook Pros.

“That has now snowballed into them being basically the leader for autonomous driving hardware for the auto industry,” said Egil Juliussen, director of research and principal analyst for automotive technology at IHS Markit.

But Nvidia isn’t alone in the race to dominate the market. Intel, so far Nvidia’s biggest competitor in self-driving cars, plans to have autonomous BMWs powered by Intel processors in production by 2021. Intel bought Mobileye, a leader in computer vision and mapping technology for self-driving cars, for $15.3 billion in March, giving the chipmaker a major step up in the autonomous vehicle game. Nvidia also may have to contend with competition from other chip companies like Qualcomm, or even Google and Apple, which reportedly also are making their own chips that could end up in self-driving cars.

Nvidia faces another risk, Ramsey said. Though many companies today are using Nvidia’s high-powered processors to develop self-driving software, once they perfect that software, they may decide they can run it with an Nvidia competitor’s less expensive chip, he said.

Nvidia already has more than 80 automakers, software firms, transportation network providers and other companies using its chips to develop self-driving car technology, and last month Nvidia added Volvo as one of its newest partners. Together Nvidia and Volvo, which this month said it will put electric motors in all its cars within two years, hope to build autonomous vehicles that will be ready for sale by 2021, Nvidia said in a news release.

NuTonomy, the Massachusetts-based self-driving software startup that teamed up with Lyft last month, also uses Nvidia chips. The startup is considering using Nvidia’s processor in the autonomous Lyft cars that are expected to hit the road in Boston soon, said NuTonomy co-founder and CEO Karl Iagnemma.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is growing at warp speed. The company’s market cap skyrocketed 232 percent last year over the year before, and it landed as No. 18 on the SV150, this newspaper’s annual ranking of Silicon Valley public companies by revenue. Nvidia is building a new Santa Clara campus to handle its expansion, and plans to move 3,000 people in by the end of the year.

Last quarter, Nvidia pulled in $409 million in revenue from companies using its processors in their data centers, mostly for artificial intelligence. That’s a 186 percent increase from the year before — growth which impressed ARK Invest analyst James Wang.

“I cover the whole internet space, and there’s nothing that behaves like that,” he said. “That’s just an incredible amount of growth, and that shock and awe factor definitely helped lift Nvidia’s stock.”

Meanwhile, revenue from Nvidia’s sales in the automotive industry, from self-driving and in-car entertainment technology, climbed 24 percent. For now, sales in AI and auto tech account for just a fraction of Nvidia’s total revenue — 21 percent and 7 percent, respectively — while gaming still brings in slightly more than half. But experts say that balance may shift as the markets for AI and self-driving cars develop.

“Artificial intelligence,” said Ramsey, “of which self-driving cars are a part, is totally their future.”
U.S. graphics processing unit producer Nvidia suspends all its tests of self-driving cars.