Nevertheless, presumably to assuage public fears about the safety of the technology, self-driving trips will be free for passengers during the trial period. He was also on Google’s self-driving vehicle team.
Advertisement
“Volvo is a world leader in the development of active safety and autonomous drive technology and possesses an unrivalled safety credibility”, he said. The Uber has no immediate plans to deploy self-driving cars in other cities.
“More and more, the world of atoms is interacting with bits”, Travis Kalanick, chief executive of Uber, said in a company blog post announcing the deal.
Earlier this week, the Ford Motor Co. announced it had acquired SAIPS, an Israeli startup focusing on self-driving technology. “This alliance places Volvo at the heart of the current technological revolution in the automotive industry”, Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo CEO, told Ars Technica.
Taxi drivers won’t need to worry about being out of work just yet though as even these autonomous cars will have a person sat behind the wheel, just in case.
But since the technology has not been perfected, the cars will come with human backup drivers to handle any unexpected situations.
Kalanick would not imagine on when Uber might be ready to separate the human driver, saying that full automation can only be used now in less crowd area. Together the two companies have a strong team of autonomous vehicle engineers with autonomous vehicles already on the road through the companies’ Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh.
Advertisement
“We abandoned a stepping-stone approach and created a dedicated “top down” engineering program to deliver fully autonomous vehicles and the new mobility solutions and business opportunities that a fully autonomous vehicle could deliver”, he said. He mentioned that fleets of self-driving vehicles will need “tens of thousands” of people to do maintenance on them. This sets the venture apart from Google’s own autonomous vehicle project since the search major is preparing to manufacture its own automobiles.
