A series of high-profile accidents involving self-driving cars are slowing the mad rush into the autonomous vehicles business, according to a report issued on Wednesday. The accidents, some of them fatal, have ignited a debate about how to regulate the safety of self-driving vehicles and have tempered the public’s expectations, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in the report. They have also exposed the downside of rushing to market, prompting some in the industry to slow down, said Andrew Grant, a London-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Companies including Uber, Tesla and Alphabet’s Google have been touting self-driving cars as the next revolution in transportation. Pressure was mounting to make the technology road-worthy when one of Uber’s cars killed a pedestrian in Arizona,US in March. The company halted its autonomous-vehicle test programme. Toyota and Aptiv’s Nutonomy then announced they were temporarily suspending public road testing in the US. Also in March, a d...
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