Uber confirmed some time ago that it’s working on self-driving cars as well. It revealed recently that the first public test will involve self-driving cars picking up passengers and driving them to their destination on their own. There will always be a human driver behind the wheel to take over if something goes south but the car will be allowed to operate on its own at all times provided that nothing is about to go wrong. Uber’s self-driving cars have now started picking up passengers.
The first public test of Uber’s self-driving technology is limited to a select group of users in Pittsburgh. They will get an option in the app itself to ride in a self-driving car. The cars are Ford Fusions that have been equipped with sophisticated gadgetry to enable them to drive on their own.
Having self-driving cars out on the road with passengers in them is going to provide Uber with a significant amount of data which it can then use to further improve the technology. A lot of work still needs to be done before self-driving cars can be let loose on the roads without supervision, and these tests are just one of the steps on that ladder.
Uber will continue testing its self-driving cars on the road for many months to come. It’s unclear right now whether it’s going to roll out a similar fleet in other cities across the United States.
Companies like Google have been testing their self-driving cars in Silicon Valley for a very long time, so it’s not like there are no cities in the country where people haven’t come across a self-driving car on the road yet.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars and Uber. Source: techcrunch