Self-Driving Car Pioneers Are Slowing Down After Crashes

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 Wednesday.

The accidents, some of them fatal, have ignited a debate about how to   regulate the safety of self-driving vehicles and tempered the public’s expectations, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in the report. They’ve 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 Technologies Inc.,    Tesla Inc. and    Alphabet Inc.’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 in March. The company halted its autonomous-vehicle test program.    Toyota Motor Corp. and    Aptiv Plc’s Nutonomy then announced they were temporarily suspending public road testing in the U.S. Also in March, a driver of a Tesla Model X died in a crash in California that occurred while   Autopilot was engaged.