Hit with fatal crash case, Uber's vision of autonomous cars begins to blur

Uber first made its interest in self-driving cars public when it hired about 40 researchers and scientists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015

After Dara Khosrowshahi took over as Uber’s chief executive last August, he considered shutting the company’s money-losing autonomous vehicle division. A visit to Pittsburgh this spring changed that.

In town for a leadership summit, Mr. Khosrowshahi and other Uber executives were briefed on the state of the company’s self-driving vehicle research, which is based in Pittsburgh. The group was impressed by the progress its autonomous division had made in testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh and in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the ride-hailing company, who were not authorized to speak publicly. They left the meeting energized, convinced that Uber