Uber is to shut down its self-driving car programme in Arizona after one of its cars killed a pedestrian there in March.
The company will focus its research efforts on Pittsburgh, where a number of AI car projects, including Ford’s Argo AI program and Google’s Waymo, are centred. Uber will also continue to test in San Francisco, where the company has its headquarters.
In an internal email, the Uber executive Eric Meyhofer wrote that the company would be changing the way it tested its driverless cars. “When we get back on the road, we intend to drive in a much more limited way to test specific use cases,” he said.
“Taking this approach will allow us to continually hone the safety aspects of our software and operating procedures. We have also used the past two months to strengthen our simulation capability, which will allow us to be more efficient with our use of road miles.”
According to the Arizona Republic, about 200 Uber employees – many of them safety drivers – will lose their jobs in the state.
Meyhofer said that returning to testing driverless cars to public roads would be tied “to securing the proper testing permits alongside our safety improvements. We remain focused on our safety review, which is evaluating everything from the safety of our system to our vehicle operator training.”
The testing freeze came after one of its SUVs hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Tempe while operating in autonomous mode – the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle.
The Uber car, a Volvo XC90 sport utility, had been equipped with the company’s sensing system and was in self-driving mode with a human backup driver at the wheel when it struck Elaine Herzberg, 49, who was walking with her bicycle on the street.
A Tempe police spokesman said it did not appear as if the car had slowed down before impact.
The switch to testing primarily in Pittsburgh is in keeping with other companies developing self-driving technology. In addition to Uber, Google and Ford, Apple also established a research facility in the city.
Pittsburgh, sometimes referred to as “Silicon Valley East”, is popular because of the access to Carnegie Mellon University’s leading robotics lab and because the city’s road network is based not on a grid system, but rather on windy American Indian trading trails. The theory is that if self-driving cars can work there, they can work anywhere.
