Fast forward to the present day and Uber have officially announced their first four autonomous driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. It has now launched its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh as customers will now get a chance to ride in the autonomous prototypes.
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The cars won’t be making the pick ups and drop offs all on their own; a driver, who can take the wheel if needed, and observer will be placed in the front seats of the vehicles.
Uber suggested that its new driverless auto service need not necessarily cut jobs drastically.
Uber on Wednesday became the first company to make self-driving cars available to the general public in the USA through a test program in Pittsburgh. “We think it can help with congestion and can make transportation cheaper and more accessible for the vast majority of people”.
Sadly, fully driver-free Ubers likely won’t be available until 2021, so you’ll be stuck riding with somebody for at least a few more years.
A reporter from The Associated Press tried out the service Monday.
He explained that the reason why Uber’s service tends to be pricey is because commuters have to pay not only for the actual ride itself but also for the driver.
Approaches to driverless technology differ.
“Because vehicles are driving at seventy miles per hour on the highway, if something goes wrong, things could go wrong very bad, very quickly”, said Carnegie Mellon engineering Professor Raj Rajkumar. But a major goal, they say, is to take human error OUT of the driving equation. NuTonomy beat Uber to the punch on a worldwide level last month in Singapore when it began picking up passengers in self-driving taxis.
Uber added that it envisions the new service as a combination of robot cars and human-driven vehicles, which would allow the company to address the limitations of self-driving software as well as the growing demand for people-powered transport.
The Uber vehicles are equipped with everything from seven traffic-light detecting cameras to a radar system that detects different weather conditions to 20 spinning lasers that generates a continuous, 360 degree 3-D map of the surrounding environment.
One will sit behind the wheel, with hands at the ready to take over in sticky spots, while the other will monitor the car’s behaviour.
Uber touts its self-driving cars as an ultimate fix to the challenges of roadway safety and urban design.
“We’re inviting our most loyal Pittsburgh customers to experience the future first”, the company said in a statement.
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The introduction of driverless cars challenges the image of what Uber has become: an app-based service of the “gig economy” that gave millions of vehicle owners around the world the chance to make money ferrying passengers without taxicab licences or other permissions. All of the testing is perfectly legal, Uber claims, and by having a fleet of vehicles toiling about in the city, company officials hope to shape future legislation regarding testing and, ultimately, the daily use of autonomous vehicles.
