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Uber, the company of the future – like Tesla or Hooli – has begun testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. The days of creepy Uber drivers asking us extremely personal questions before nearly wrecking their Nissan Altimas are slowly dwindling.
And while cities like Austin have reverted back to the dark ages by eliminating ridesharing while angering an estimated 100 percent of their in-touch residents, Uber treks on towards a day where cars will essentially be robots transporting us without the need for human interaction.
From USA TODAY:
The ride-hailing behemoth announced in a blog post Thursday that it has begun testing a self-driving car in Pittsburgh, home of the company’s nascent Advanced Technologies Center.
The car, a Ford Fusion Hybrid with a roof-full of radar, lasers and cameras, will be collecting road-mapping data as well as testing its real-world traffic reactions. Uber’s interest in autonomous car technology dates to a year ago, when the $60 billion start-up began hiring Carnegie Mellon University robotics experts to staff its new center not far from the Pittsburgh-based school.
As with all self-driving cars that are approved for testing on public roads, Uber’s vehicle will have a safety driver who can take over the controls should the situation demand it.
I honestly don’t know how I would react if a self-driving car picked me up to drive me somewhere. On one hand, it’s pretty cool to see us go from shitty flip phones to self-driving Ford Fusions in like 10 years. On the other hand, it feels like we haven’t learned anything from Will Smith’s warning in I, Robot.
Did we design these cars…to be trusted??
And while the autonomous car research has advanced 1000-fold in the last few years, it will likely never fully thwart the “I’m not getting in a God damn car that doesn’t have a driver” sentiment that remains one of its biggest obstacles.
But the bigger hurdles remain both regulatory and psychological. Many consumers still express fear of self-driving technology, while government officials continue to grapple with establishing a series of overarching national regulations to govern everything from how the cars should interact with each other to what happens if there’s an accident.
Only time will tell. Until then, you can find me hailing yellow cabs on the street corner like a fucking neanderthal. .
[via USA TODAY]
Image via source goes here
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I’d feel safer on the road with robotic cars than I do with 80% of the human drivers on the road now.
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If it’s cheaper than uberx I’m in
I can’t wait for self driving cars. But wouldn’t uber go out of business? My own car would be able to drive my drunk ass home.
Not everyone is going to have access to self driving cars initially. Maybe they’d adjust their focus to more urban areas where many people don’t own a car- people will always need some sort of cab service.
The idea is that very few people will actually own cars and Uber etc. would provide most of the door to door transportation infrastructure with a fleet of driverless cars in every city.
Why would anyone give up their own car. Think of roads trips. You let the car drive while you sleep at night. Wouldn’t have to take as many vacation days for bachelor parties/wedding because your travel time is when you would normally be sleeping.
I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and having a car is a nightmare at times- not just traffic, but parking. Finding a place to park, buying parking stickers, switching sides of the street for street cleaning, damages caused by other drivers parallel parking, meter police, MONTHLY parking rates ranging from $150-$300, etc.
Cars in major cities are often more trouble than what they’re worth, this is why people take the bus, subway, and uber.
It’s a great idea for uber, plus now they might even come back to Austin if they can side step this fingerprint fiasco.
I see your point. I park my truck in my garage in the burbs.
Anybody ever try to use a GPS in Pittsburgh? No idea how the self driving cars are gonna handle that.
Problem with self-driving cars: if it has to turn to avoid hitting a group of pedestrians, but doing so would kill the passenger, what does it do?
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You guys excited to try this around the office?
If the car is self driving, will it still have to get fingerprinted?
I believe the car will still be required to pass that test as well as an FBI background check.
I love how they chose Pittsburgh as the test market because we all know that the general public won’t really give a fuck about that city or the people in it besides Sydney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. It was completely a “cut the loses” mentality because the damage control of losing a couple of working class union steel workers is a lot easier to deal from a PR standpoint than losing some high profile mover and shaker from a larger market in the case of an accident.
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