SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber was ordered to suspend testing of its autonomous vehicles on Arizona roads Monday evening, eight days after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe.
State officials said the ride-hailing service had failed to meet an expectation that it would prioritize public safety as it tested the technology.
"The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation," Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey wrote in a letter sent to Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive. "Arizona must take action now."
Uber had already suspended all testing of its cars in Arizona, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto.
"We proactively suspended self-driving operations in all cities immediately following the tragic incident last week. We continue to help investigators in any way we can, and we'll keep a dialogue open with the governor's office to address any concerns they have," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman.
The rebuke from the governor is a reversal from what has been an open-arms policy by the state, heralding its lack of regulation as an asset to lure autonomous vehicle testing -- and tech jobs. Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out from Google, and General Motors-owned Cruise are also testing cars in the state.
Ducey said he was troubled by a video released from the Tempe Police Department that seemed to show that neither the Uber safety driver nor the autonomous vehicle detected the presence of a pedestrian in the road in the moments before the crash.
The police said the car never slowed down before striking 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was pushing a bicycle across the road. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash with the local police, has not yet ruled whether the company was at fault.
The governor's decision comes after The New York Times reported that Uber's autonomous vehicles had struggled to meet company targets for reliability in the months leading up to crash.
Meanwhile, California's Department of Motor Vehicles told the ride-hailing service in a letter Tuesday that it will lose testing privileges after they expire Saturday. If Uber wants to return, it will need a new permit and has to address investigations into the fatal crash in Arizona.
Nvidia Corp., which provides technology to Uber, announced it has stopped its self-driving test program on public roads in the aftermath of the Tempe accident. It will continue to use vehicles with drivers that gather data.
Ultimately, autonomous vehicles "will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue," the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Tuesday in an email. The suspension was reported earlier by Reuters.
Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang called the challenge of perfecting self-driving car systems "probably the hardest computing problem that the world has ever encountered."
Nvidia is trying to parlay its dominance of graphics chips, most commonly found in computer gaming machines, into new markets where their ability to perform multiple calculations in parallel can help with artificial intelligence work. Automotive is a key focus because Nvidia says its chips are ideal for running image-recognition software needed to turn camera pictures into driving decisions more quickly than the blink of an eye.
The National Transportation Safety Board has also sent investigators to look into a fatal crash and fire Friday on a California highway that involved a Tesla electric SUV equipped with a semi-autonomous control system.
The agency said Tuesday on Twitter that it's not clear whether the Tesla Model X was operating on its Autopilot program at the time of the crash.
The feature is designed to keep a vehicle centered in its lane at a set distance from cars in front of it and also can change lanes and brake automatically.
The driver of the Tesla, a 38-year-old man from San Mateo, Calif., was killed in the crash last week on U.S. 101 in Silicon Valley, California Highway Patrol spokesman Art Montiel said.
Photographs taken of the SUV show the front of the vehicle was obliterated. Its hood was ripped off and its front wheels were strewn on the freeway.
The vehicle was traveling southbound at "freeway speed" when it hit a freeway barrier, causing a collision with two other cars whose drivers were not reported injured, Montiel said.
"For unknown reasons the Tesla caught fire," Montiel said.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla Motors wouldn't say if Autopilot was working at the time of the crash. It said in a statement Tuesday that it was deeply saddened by the crash and is cooperating with authorities.
Information for this article was contributed by Daisuke Wakabayashi of The New York Times; by Ian King of Bloomberg News; and by Jocelyn Gecker and Tom Krisher of The Associated Press.
Business on 03/28/2018