Tesla's customers are also test drivers amassing an unprecedented dataset that the company hopes to use to design its self-driving cars. And it hopes to do this before other car companies test their own self-driving technology with paying customers. So far, the strategy seems to be working. Sterling Anderson, director of Tesla's Autopilot program, told MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference this week that the company had recorded data from Tesla drivers who covered 780 million miles in the last 18 months. The company's Autopilot program, launched in 2014, is not fully autonomous, but it uses a suite of ultrasonic sensors, radar and cameras to steer, change lanes and avoid collisions, and has been described as the predecessor to the full automation Tesla says it will release in 2018. Tesla's rate of data collection is climbing fast.

This week, Uber announced that it will cease operations in Arizona and revive its self-driving tests in Pittsburgh. This, apparently, was news to the mayor of Pittsburgh, who issued a press release stating that he hadn't been informed of that announcement. "I made it clear to Uber officials after the Arizona crash that a full federal investigation had to be completed, with strong rules for keeping streets safe, before I would agree with the company to begin testing on Pittsburgh streets again," he said in the release. But, considering the NTSB released its preliminary report on that fatal Arizona crash today, it makes sense that Uber would want to continue its self-driving tests, which have been on hold since the accident. Mayor William Peduto had two conditions before he would agree to allowing Uber to test on Pittsburgh streets again: the computer-operated vehicles would never exceed a speed of 25 mph in the city, regardless of what posted speed limits were, and the company would use its app to alert drivers when they are exceeding speed limits when humans are in control.

We've made the tough call to wind down operations in Phoenix. As you know, there's been a public call for the suspension of our self-driving program on Arizona's public roads and we have decided to refocus the bulk of our efforts in our engineering hubs in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. This is the best path forward as we work to get back on the road as soon as possible. To be clear, we are not shutting down our self-driving program. We are actively working to make our return to the road a reality with a goal of resuming operations in Pittsburgh this summer.

An Uber Technologies self-driving test vehicle like the one that hit a pedestrian in Arizona on Sunday night. SAN FRANCISCO -- One of the country's top self-driving car experts says that a recently released dashcam video suggests a failure of technology is at issue in the fatal Uber self-driving car incident that killed an Arizona woman. "The car's LiDAR (light ranging and detection laser system) should have picked the pedestrian up far before it hit her," says Raj Rajkumar, who leads the autonomous vehicle research team at Carnegie Mellon University. "Clearly there's a problem, because the radar also should have picked her up throughout, she was moving," he says. "Maybe it's the sensors not working correctly or the hardware that processes it, or the software."

For all its heat, the fire that is Uber in 2017 hasn't scorched everything. While the nigh-apocalyptic past six months have felled founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, and sparked questions about its ability to keep its employees safe, let alone happy, Uber's self-driving car program seems to be doing just fine. It's a rare but vital bit of good news for Uber, for which autonomy is an existential question. If another company figures out how to operate a taxi service without paying drivers and Uber cannot, it's lights out, unicorn. "What would happen if we weren't a part of that future? Kalanick told Business Insider last year. "Then the future passes us by." Now, Uber's self-driving program hasn't been unscathed. It faces a vicious lawsuit from Waymo, Google's self-driving car spinoff, which accuses it of using stolen IP to advance its autonomy research. Last month, Uber fired Anthony Levandowski, its self-driving car lead who allegedly brought that IP over from Google.

That evidence includes emails Levandowski exchanged with Uber while he still worked at Waymo, and 5.3 million shares of stock (worth approximately $250 million) Uber granted Levandowski on Jan. 28, 2016, the day after he left Google. Uber responded by clarifying it actually awarded Levandowski the stock months later during the Otto acquisition, but set the vesting date earlier as a courtesy.

Apple has been interested in automotive technology for a long time -- the company already has the CarPlay infotainment system. But now it is moving further into the automotive industry and is working on its own self-driving technology. Apple was granted a permit to test its self-driving technology in California earlier this month. The state released 41 pages of application documents to Business Insider because of a request to access public records. While the company has not made a formal acknowledgement of the information mentioned in the documents, a lot of light has been shed on what the company plans to do in terms of its self-driving program.

Uber is putting the brakes on its driverless car pilot program after one of its self-driving cars got into a high speed crash in Arizona. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more. A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. SAN FRANCISCO -- A potentially pivotal lawsuit between Uber and Alphabet's Waymo over allegedly stolen self-driving vehicle sensor technology just took another screeching turn. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google employee who founded the now Uber-owned self-driving truck company Otto, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to protect himself from self-incrimination Wednesday, according to a transcript of the private court hearing reviewed Thursday by USA TODAY.

Uber is putting the brakes on its driverless car pilot program after one of its self-driving cars got into a high speed crash in Arizona. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more. SAN FRANCISCO -- A self-driving car flipped on its side seems guaranteed to make humans think twice about riding with a robot. Never mind that Uber's accident last weekend in Tempe, Ariz., was the result of a human failing to yield and smacking into the autonomous Volvo. Despite the lack of serious injuries, that image alone raises questions about both our acceptance of self-driving tech as well as Uber's rabid rush to bring this new age of mobility to life.

When Sebastian Thrun started working on self-driving cars at Google in 2007, few people outside of the company took him seriously. "I can tell you very senior CEOs of major American car companies would shake my hand and turn away because I wasn't worth talking to," said Thrun, now the co-founder and CEO of online higher education startup Udacity, in an interview with Recode earlier this week. A little less than a decade later, dozens of self-driving startups have cropped up while automakers around the world clamor, wallet in hand, to secure their place in the fast-moving world of fully automated transportation. And these companies are hungry for talent and skill sets many don't have. "Uber has just bought a half-a-year-old company [Otto] with 70 employees for almost 700 million," Thrun said.