Beginning today, a select group of Pittsburgh Uber users will get a surprise the next time they request a pickup: the option to ride in a self driving car.
The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology.
Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers — and how passengers react to them.
“How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
If they are anything like me, they will respond with fascination followed by boredom.Driver error kills thousands of people every year in the U.S. alone, so self-driving cars don't have to be perfect in order to make our roads much, much safer -- they just have to be better than us. And here's the thing: they're already better than us. The hurdles to getting self-driving autos on the road aren't technological -- the technology already exists, and it already works well enough to be an enormous improvement over the status quo.
No, the real hurdles to adoption of this technology are cultural -- matters of public perception, and the influence that perception can have on the politicians who will be called on to modify existing laws in order to allow fully autonomous vehicles to be rolled out in large numbers.