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Nvidia Suspends Self-Driving Car Tests in Wake of Uber Crash (theverge.com)
Nvidia said on Tuesday it will suspend its autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the aftermath of Uber's fatal crash in Arizona. Uber is a customer of Nvidia's, using the chipmaker's computing platform in its fleet of self-driving cars. From a report: 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. "Ultimately AVs will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue," a Nvidia spokesperson said in an email. "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."
Why is every tech company thinking they have the domain expertise to get into the car industry?
Tesla is proving they have no idea how to scale manufacturing. This seems like the kind of things you partner with an actual car maker instead of just grafting this on later.
Because at this rate we're going to end up with dozens of different self-driving cars, all of which have their own quirks and warts.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you disagree don't bother debating with me, I'm not listening.
Ah, the closed minded approach.
For those on /. who ARE willing to listen, the point is not for self-driving cars to be perfect. Real-world scenarios suggest that a zero-crash world is virtually impossible.
What we need are for self-driving vehicles to be far safer than human-driven vehicles, not necessarily zero crashes. And so far, that has proven to be the case. Right now there are about 32,000 fatalities in car crashes across the US every year. Even if that number were reduced to 20,000 fatalities it would be well worth it in lives saved; it is quite likely if all cars were replaced the fatalities could be reduced from thirty thousand to a few hundred per year. Some would still die but it would be a tiny fraction of those who die under human control.
In this crash the company and police released videos and telemetry. The video shows a jaywalker at night walking their bike (which has no reflectors or lights) across an unlit road after coming out from behind a shrub and small metal fence (about the same density and radar reflectivity as a bike) in the median. The computer's radar identified the moving obstruction and slammed on the brakes about 200 milliseconds before I could see anything in the unlit patch. No human could have seen the pedestrian in time to apply the brakes. If they did notice, many people in high speed collisions will swerve and roll their vehicle as well. The computer managed to apply the brakes, but also realized it could not avoid the pedestrian by swerving, nor could it stop the vehicle from highway speeds in that distance despite slamming on the brakes.
Even though the jaywalker died, the computer still reacted faster and more accurately than any human could. The computer identified and was reacting (including realizing swerving would not help) before there was anything visible to the human eye.
Tragic as her death was, it was caused by physics of speed and the jaywalker's choice to cross in an unlit area, walking from behind a shrub, directly in front of a high-velocity car that was completely visible if they looked to their right. Neither a human driver nor computer driver could compensate for the jaywalker's fatal choice.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
What is parent +5 insightful? Its full of false assumptions and outright lies.