After that fatality, the ride-hailing company temporarily suspended its driverless vehicle testing in Tempe, Pittsburgh, Toronto and San Francisco, the four cities where it operates the cars.
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Kicked out of California, Uber simply drove its cars over the state line into Arizona and Ducey welcome their arrival with a statement that read: “Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads”.
Operations in those two locations will not be suspended, barring governmental hand-me-downs that mandatorily make Uber stop.
Regarding the next steps it plans to take, Uber said the company’s autonomous cars remain grounded. “This bombshell report further exposes the mismanagement by Governor Ducey and his sheer priority to put business relationships ahead of Arizona”.
Also on Tuesday, chipmaker Nvidia Corp. announced it too will temporarily suspend self-driving tests, spokesman Hector Marinez told NPR. The Volvo XC90’s standard advanced driver-assistance system “has nothing to do” with the Uber test vehicle’s autonomous driving system, he said.
With fewer of those crucial components, Uber “introduced a blind zone around the perimeter of the SUV”, according to former employees and a Carnegie Mellon University expert, who has more than a decade of self-driving technology experience, who spoke to Reuters. “The entire industry will learn from this incident”, Marinez said. After the fatal crash, Ducey suspended the program in Arizona, but the emails reportedly show that he was all for the self-driving testing, and Uber courted him aggressively with praise and offers to bring jobs and money into Arizona.
The Uber-controlled vehicle slammed into 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg on March 18, killing her.
According to a copy of the letter obtained by CNN, Ducey said he found video footage of the crash “disturbing and alarming”.
Uber seems to be continuing its removal from the self-driving auto testing market after the Arizona governor nixed the company’s license to test within its borders. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 37,000 people were killed in auto accidents in 2016, the latest year for which data are available.
He said in a series of tweets that he was “personally very disturbed” by the video and it raised questions that need to be answered with the help of federal investigators.
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“Dara and I both know all of you have been through a lot of change, and that is not easy”, Meyhofer wrote in the email obtained by Bloomberg.
