The D20 steps back in quiet week

With eleven price losers and nine gainers, the Driverless Transportation Weekly Stock Index (D20) slipped 0.5 percent to end the week at 190.35.  Both the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 stepped back this week as well.  The Dow lost 1.5 percent to close at 20596.72 while the S&P 500 closed at 2343.98 down 1.4 percent.

The fourth quarterly sales decline in the last six quarters pushed Ford (F) to 6.9 percent loss last week making it the largest price percentage loser for the D20.  Ford closed the week at $11.62 a share.

Up 22 percent during the last four weeks, Renesas Electronics (TYO:6723) was the leading price percentage gainer last week moving up 3.5 percent to close at ¥1140.  Renesas continues to benefit from good reviews of its recently completed acquisition of Intersil and corporate restructuring.

Visit the Driverless Transportation D20 Stock Index page to learn more about it and its component stocks.

Up and Comers: 

Uber continues its string of bad news with an announcement that one of its driverless vehicles was involved in a high speed accident in Arizona.  Although the vehicle had no backseat passengers at the time of the accident, Uber has suspended all autonomous driving in the US as it investigates the incident.

DeepScale, based in Mountain View, CA, raised $3M in seed funding to help driverless automakers use standard low wattage processors to build more perceptive autonomous systems.  DeepScale was founded by UC-Berkeley alumni, Forrest Iandola.  His goal is to reduce both the cost of the processers required and the time it takes to “train” to neural nets that run on those processors to get to affordable and safe driverless vehicles to market quickly.