So that leaves it up to cities and states, causing confusion for consumers and the companies piloting driverless cars.
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A report says that consumers are starting to show less interest in autonomous driving systems as stories about their safety hit the headlines and experience of “early” implementations proves a turn-off for some drivers.
But Uber’s trying to fix this, and it’s doing it with a fleet of mapping cars, similar to those used by Google’s Street View.
With robots taking over the driving, many drivers under Uber will certainly have concerns and possibly worries with regards to the future of their employment. Uber noted that the acquisition had helped boost its self-driving engineering efforts. Competitors such as Volvo and Google have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and logged millions of miles test driving autonomous vehicles, but Uber is the first company in the U.S.to make self-driving cars available to the general public.
Uber says passengers won’t be entirely alone.
“The Pittsburgh pilot is our opportunity for real world testing, so that we can learn more about what makes riders feel safe and comfortable”, said Uber product manager Emily Bartel. Knowing that doesn’t change the councilmen’s minds, though, and they seek to establish an ordinance that will specifically ban these cars…even if human drivers are still behind the wheel.
That would be far away, Uber officials stress.
Levandowski came to Uber when it took over his own startup Otto, which was developing self-driving technology for commercial trucks.
During the test programme, two engineers are seated in front – a backup driver and another monitoring the car’s 3D map and scribbling notes on how to improve the vehicle’s software. The company now has six driverless trucks being tested on california roads.
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“But we know that self-driving Ubers have enormous potential to further our mission and improve society: reducing the number of traffic accidents; freeing up the 20pc of space in cities now used to park the world’s billion plus cars; and cutting congestion, which wastes trillions of hours every year”.
