NVIDIA Pauses Self-Driving Vehicle Testing; Confirms DRIVE Wasn’t In Last Week’s Uber Collision

Uber rolled their own crappy software.

While not announced as part of this week’s GTC keynote, during the keynote itself word got out via Reuters that the company had suspended their active testing of their DRIVE autonomous vehicle driving system. Later confirmed and expounded upon by NVIDIA, the company was pausing public road testing of self-driving vehicles in light of last week’s fatal self-driivng Uber collision in Arizona. Noting that they wanted to be able to learn from the incident, they opted to stop and see what the investigation turned up.

And while the pause makes sense for both political and practical reasons, since then there’s bit a bit of confusion over just what NVIDIA’s involvement was with the Uber vehicle in last week’s incident and the timeline of their response. So as part of a GTC press Q&A session yesterday afternoon, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang clarified a few details about the incident - at least to as much as NVIDIA is able and willing to do.

On the hardware side of matters, NVIDIA is confirming that the Uber vehicle was using NVIDIA GPUs, but that it wasn’t using the company’s DRIVE platform. This matches earlier reports that NVIDIA hardware was in the vehicle. Uber for its part has been using NVIDIA GPUs in this fashion since 2016 - including in Arizona - well before the announcement of the closer partnership with NVIDIA back at CES 2018.