Autonom-ish Cars

摘要

On Sunday, March 18, a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg walked her bicycle across Mill Avenue, a divided highway just north of downtown Tempe, Ariz., and was hit head-on by a Volvo SUV traveling at about 40 miles per hour.The death would have been an ordinary tragedy-6,000 pedestrians were killed by cars last year in the U.S. alone-but for one thing: The driver was a piece of software created by Uber Technologies Inc. This was the first known fatality caused by a driverless car. The ride-hailing app company and its main chip supplier, Nvidia Corp., suspended testing indefinitely, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board announced it would conduct an investigation. Uber is cooperating.In Jerusalem, Amnon Shashua began his own tests. Shashua, a 57-year-old Israeli, is a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the chief executive officer of Mobileye. The company, which he co-founded in 1999, makes a "driver-assist" system roughly the size of a computer mouse. Stuck behind a car's rearview mirror, the device's camera and custom chip allow it to predict when a driver is about to hit something and, if necessary, the system slams on the car's brakes.