Nvidia temporarily halts self-driving car tests due to Uber accident
Due to the fatal accident involving a self-driving car from Uber, Nvidia temporarily stops testing self-driving cars worldwide. Many automakers use Nvidia hardware for their autonomous cars, including Uber.
A spokesperson for Nvidia told Reuters on Tuesday that the company will temporarily stop the tests. According to Reuters, Nvidia is testing its self-driving car technology in New Jersey and Santa Clara in the US, as well as Japan and Germany. However, cars will continue to drive with Nvidia hardware with a driver at the wheel, which drive around to collect data.
Uber’s Volvo XC90 that was involved in the fatal accident last week also uses Nvidia hardware. At the beginning of this year, Uber chose Nvidia as its hardware partner. On Tuesday, the governor of Arizona already banned Uber from continuing its tests of self-driving cars.
The exact cause of the accident is still unclear. Video evidence shows that the driver who should have intervened was not paying attention, but it is not known why the crossing pedestrian was not detected by the sensors present and the car did not attempt to brake. It has been announced that the sensors of the Volvo XC90 itself, which come from Aptiv, were disabled. However, the system Uber uses for its self-driving cars also uses lidar and radar, which can map the environment without relying on visible light.
It is not yet clear how long Nvidia will stop testing. The video card maker has won a large share of the autonomous car market in recent years. Volkswagen, Tesla and Audi, among others, use hardware from Nvidia. In total, according to the Nvidia website, there are 320 companies that use the Nvidia Drive platform in some way.
Nvidia also announced the Drive Constellation system at its GPU Technology Conference on Tuesday. That is a virtual environment for testing self-driving cars. According to Nvidia, this should make it possible to drive billions of test kilometers and thus train systems properly, without the risk of accidents.
The system works with the Nvidia Drive Pegasus in-car computer; which is supplied with data by a simulation server equipped with Nvidia GPUs. Drive Constellation should be available to early access partners in the third quarter of this year.