Uber is ready to unleash its first fleet of driverless cars in the US

Four vehicles kitted out with lasers and sensors will be picking up passengers on the streets of Pittsburgh today.

By AFP

UBER WILL LAUNCH a groundbreaking driverless car service on today, jumping ahead of Detroit auto giants and Silicon Valley rivals with technology that could revolutionize transportation.

A fleet of cars equipped with lasers, cameras and other sensors will be deployed on the challenging roads of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and steer themselves to pick up regular Uber passengers who are used to being fetched by cars driven by humans.

Four of the Ford Fusion hybrids, with an ungainly rooftop load of technology, will be available to pick up customers on Wednesday, with the company showing at least a dozen more ready to put on the streets.

The cars and their supporting technology have been trained on the city’s complicated grid for less than two years, but demonstration rides ahead of the launch showed them very able to handle most situations.

Still, the first riders will be joined by two company technicians to make sure everything goes right, one sitting behind the wheel, with hands at the ready to take over in sticky spots, while the other monitors the car’s behavior.

Uber Autonomus Cars Uber's self-driving fleet of cars
Source: Gene J. Puskar

Jumping ahead

The move has put Uber ahead of the rest of the auto industry in getting such cars out for the general public. The major automakers all have driverless car development programs, as do tech giants Alphabet (Google) and Apple.

What allowed Uber to get to the front of the pack was not auto engineering but rather its ability to accumulate and crunch massive amounts of data on road and driving conditions collected from the billions of miles driven by Uber drivers.

“We have one of the strongest self-driving engineering groups in the world, as well as the experience that comes from running a ridesharing and delivery network in hundreds of cities,” said Uber founder and chief executive Travis Kalanick in a blog post Wednesday.

The introduction of driverless cars challenges Uber’s image as an app-based service of the “gig economy” that gave millions of car owners around the world the chance to make money ferrying passengers without taxi licenses or other permits.

Uber Autonomus Cars An Uber safety driver behind the wheel
Source: Gene J. Puskar

Uber’s vision now suggests a world of taxis on call by app with no drivers at all.

“Self-driving is core to Uber’s mission,” Anthony Levandowski, Uber’s vice president of engineering, said.

That would be far away, Uber officials stress. Kalanick says the main aim is to create safer roads.

“Self-driving Ubers have enormous potential to further our mission and improve society: reducing the number of traffic accidents, which today kill 1.3 million people a year; freeing up the 20 percent of space in cities currently used to park the world’s billion plus cars; and cutting congestion, which wastes trillions of hours every year,” he said.