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Holy Cow: Uber Launching Self-Driving Cars This Month!

We figured self-driving cars were maybe five or ten years away. But Uber has beaten Apple, Google, Tesla and others to the punch, and is rolling out a small fleet of autonomous Volvos—this month, according to Bloomberg.

In the test city of Pittsburgh, Uber users will summon cars as normal using the app. But a handful of the cars that show up—they will be assigned randomly—will be driverless Volvo XC90s, kitted out with “dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers.” Rides in these cars will be completely free of charge.

That doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to sit in the back of one of these driverless Ubers and argue with your spouse in privacy. While a computer will be doing the driving, current law requires a “safety driver” man the driver’s seat, ready to grab the wheel if anything goes wrong. Uber is even doubling down and adding a second staffer to ride shotgun:

These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop, and everything that happens is recorded by cameras inside and outside the car so that any glitches can be ironed out. Each car is also equipped with a tablet computer in the back seat, designed to tell riders that they’re in an autonomous car and to explain what’s happening.

If you’re wondering why Pittsburgh, well, that’s where Uber’s engineer-studded Advanced Technologies Center is located. There’s an additional benefit to the city in that it provides Uber-gineers an opportunity to work out a rather important kink:

On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” [Engineering Director Raffi] Krikorian says. “And there are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”

It’s unclear how much of the driverless technologies in these test cars were developed by Volvo, and how much by Uber. But given that Uber is reportedly not limiting themselves to Volvos for their robo-car ambitions, it’s a safe bet that the Uber ATC is doing most of the heavy lifting.

If any of our readers in Pittsburgh (we’re looking at you, Carnegie Mellon ID students) catch a ride in one of these, share your experience with the rest of us!