Today Is Sponsored by the Letter N

nuTonomy - One of the driverless cars tooling around Singapore in anticipation of AV-taxibot services got into an accident with a truck. In marked contrast to Tesla, but in taking a page from Google PR on handling minor accidents, nuTonomy has been up front about what happened: nuTonomy has halted driverless operations and it has released all data.

Nvidia - This AI savvy company is cuddling up with Tesla, which makes sense because the founder is the proud owner of a Tesla car. Musk and Huang, Nvidia's CEO, have met at various forums and now the companies of these friends are going to capitalize on Nvidia's AI system for driverless vehicles, DRIVE PX 2, which will be used in Tesla cars. 

DRIVE PX 2 is an end-to-end AI computing system that uses groundbreaking approaches in deep learning to perceive and understand the car’s surroundings… [and] lets carmakers first train their own deep neural networks on GPU supercomputers. Once loaded into the car, it processes the networks at high speed to provide the real-time, accurate response required for autonomous driving.

It is safe to say that Nvidia is the leading or one of the leading companies developing AI for driverless vehicles.

Nashville - The Tennessee city has been selected as one of five international cities for technical assistance in planning and technology to prepare for driverless and connected vehicles. The other cities are Austin, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles; plus, five more will be added within the next two months. Today is for the letter N, so we will celebrate Nashville. The program is officially called the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles and it aims to develop a set of policy recommendations for ways cities should plan and use their land and resources for when automated vehicles arrive on their roadways.

With a word from the letter W

Wheego is changing its image and its purpose from being a tiny electric car company to being an autonomous car company - yet another driverless testing permit for the state of California - with an emphasis on deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Using the word of the month, pivoting is what Wheego is doing and the pivot has a geographic element. The company is shifting its focus from the US to China. The new official name of Wheego is Wheego Technologies.

Alphabet bomb

Google is ready for its car business to go out on its own. Google's Alphabet car will soon be a standalone business. Corporate legal stuff (a technical term) is in the works. No plans released yet for how the cars or travel will be sold.

Grammar

Comma.ai has been stopped in its tracks. Slated to sell its driverless-in-a-box add-on for existing cars by the end of this year (within the next two months), NHTSA has warned Comma.ai to not sell its product due to possible conflicts with federal regulations.