Acknowledging that Uber has no experience in making cars, Kalanick also announced a partnership with Swedish auto maker Volvo.
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The program will kick off in Pittsburgh, as the Pennsylvania city is the home of Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, where numerous world’s top experts in autonomous vehicles could previously be found, prior to being poached by the ride-share company.
The self-driving auto will still have Uber drivers inside of the vehicle for safety precautions.
Overnight Volvo and Uber announced that they will join forces to develop the next generation of autonomous vehicles.
Uber and Volvo were two of the founding members of a coalition unveiled in April to push for a unified U.S. legal code on self-driving cars, a group that also includes Google, auto maker Ford and Uber rival Lyft.
On Thursday, Uber announced it had acquired Otto, a 90-person startup focused on developing self-driving truck technology that would upend the trucking and shipping industry.
Because if Uber isn’t at least “tied for first”, if not first, it will be last, Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick told news site Business Insider on Thursday.
“I’d be willing to try it as long as there’s a real human there to hit the brakes, you know, if the thing goes belly-up”, he said. The cars will be staffed with safety drivers, per current transportation laws. “We can only rely on technology so much or it’s going to bite us”. Earlier this week, Ford Motor Co. promised to develop its own fleet of autonomous vehicles for road use by 2021, to be deployed in a ride-hailing network as well.
“Even if Uber was confident enough in the technology to dispense with a human, neither Pittsburgh nor any other city is ready to adapt its regulations to allow completely autonomous driving”, he said.
Though the Google auto project just lost its director, Chris Urmson, it has a big head start on Uber and others.
With Google, the self-driving auto leader, slowly making progress with its autonomous cars, you’d be forgiven for thinking Uber’s efforts are far behind and barely visible in its frenemy’s rearview mirror.
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The new base vehicle will be developed on Volvo’s fully modular Scalable Product Architecture (SPA). Otto’s technology can be fitted to existing trucks, and, according to Bloomberg, the technology will be adapted to create a lidar – laser detection – system to power autonomous Uber vehicles.
