Uber Technologies Inc. plans to let some customers in Pittsburgh summon rides from autonomous vehicles as soon as this month, a first for the industry in a race among automobile and technology companies to make driverless cars commercially available.
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Two employees with Uber will be in the front seats of the vehicle when picking up customers, one will be behind the wheel as an emergency backup driver and another person will be monitoring from the passenger seat, according to The Wall Street Journal. The new initiative makes Uber the first company to put driverless cars on the road for the public to use.
The billion-dollar auto company has now partnered with Volvo in developing self-driving cars which will be available to customers at the end of this month, USA TODAY reported.
Uber is launching a pilot program in Pittsburgh, Pa., next month which will allow customers to order a driverless auto from their smartphones.
Kalanik, in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press, said development of autonomous cars is paramount for the 7-year-old San Francisco company.
“We’ve got to be laser-focused on getting this to market because it’s not a side project for us. This is everything. This is all the marbles for Uber”, he told AP.
“So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then auto ownership goes away”, Kalanick said at the Code Conference in 2014, shortly after Google unveiled its self-driving vehicle prototype.
Uber’s push to carry people with autonomous vehicles is not surprising, given the company’s history of gravitating toward gray areas where there is little or no regulation, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of SC professor who studies self-driving technology.
“Part of this is marketing in the sense that they’re going to be doing continued research and development of these systems, but they’re going to carry people in the process”, he said.
Over the long term, Uber and rivals such as Lyft could cut the cost of paying drivers if they can gradually incorporate self-driving cars into their fleets. The city also gets a fair amount of snow, which can cover lane lines and trick autonomous vehicle sensors. That’s different from the relative chaos of even a small downtown, much less a big city where drivers do not always follow the rules. He thinks they will adopt the same risk-management approach as Uber.
Uber and Volvo announced, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2016, a $300 million deal for Volvo to provide SUVs to Uber for autonomous vehicle research.
Use of the backup drivers also is an acknowledgement that autonomous driving systems to date can not handle the wide range of unpredictable circumstances on public roads, Walker Smith said. Eventually the SUVs will be part of the self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh. The plan calls for their joint efforts to produce a “base car” that each company can use for developing and implementing their own autonomous vehicle technologies.
This week, Ford Motor Co. announced – in Silicon Valley, not Detroit – that it intends to have a self-driving vehicle on the road by 2021.
On the company’s webpage, Uber’s CEO and Co-Founder Travis Kalanick officially announced the acquisition of Otto, a fresh startup driven by high profile engineers who developed a kit that allows big-rig trucks to drive autonomously on highways. Large tech and auto companies suggest they could start selling self-driving cars within three to five years.
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“It’s probably for the best”, he said.
