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Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

289 points by ghosh 10y ago

seren 10y ago
It is more a test run. It is self-driving but each vehicle will have a pilot and a co-pilot.
thearn4 10y ago
Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.
- tajen 10y ago
  I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?
  - rattray 10y ago
    It's possible that they don't rely on the minutiae of the maps, just use them for planning. For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly". On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.
    - cgearhart 10y ago
      They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        The car can't follow the lane markings?
        JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Lane markings are good if they're there. Often they get obliterated by construction, wear, weather, precipitation. Sometimes there are several sets, rewritten after construction and only partly erased. Humans can have a hard time following them.
        millcoo 10y ago
        Most residential streets in Pittsburgh, as in a great deal of the rest of the world, do not have lane markings, though many are two-way and have parked cars on one or both sides of the road. Pittsburgh provides an additional difficulty, that many of these roads are too narrow for what is asked of them. Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9.95h,83.68t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sQ2hkTTCoyRis7gRHayh7OQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9... One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime. The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough. This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - jayjay71 10y ago
    This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations. Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet). But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project. Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.
    - Retric 10y ago
      You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.
        Retric 10y ago
        2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.
        10y ago
  - rsfern 10y ago
    You have to start somewhere. In addition to bootstrapping the program in a few cities, they are probably using this data to improve their pothole detection systems. Pittsburgh's a great city for that sort of thing.
  - cgearhart 10y ago
    > ...will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks. > can't they do like the Kinect This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    If you have a fleet of networked cars, then as soon as one car encounters a new pothole, all the cars know about it.
jayjay71 10y ago
I'd love to sit in one of those cars and see how well the cars can drive themselves, especially during the winter. It's just a really awesome experience being in a self-driving car - it'd be amazing if you could just hail one with an app. The acquisition of Otto is interesting. I think Anthony Levandowski is incredible and the trucking industry is perfect for automation given the state of the technology and for logistical reasons. But it seems odd that Uber wants to branch out at this point.
deleted 10y ago
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nxzero 10y ago
As someone that follows lots of tech "trying to see the future" - to me Uber has the greatest hope of bring driving to the mainstream due to a number of factors. First, they have a lot of experience with litigation and working with local laws. They need to replace drivers, but unlike truck drivers - Uber will drive anywhere. Unlike trucks, there's the potential to allow the passenger to drive the car. Many more key reasons why Uber's efforts are worth watching, but really do hope they're able to make serious progress in bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream.
- johnward 10y ago
  > bring driving to the mainstream Did you mean self-driving ?
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Yes, that's correct.
sbarre 10y ago
I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.
- Roritharr 10y ago
  Most Uber drivers i've talked to about this, and i basically always talk about this when using Uber, all see themselves as just doing this for a short while, 2-3 years, so they don't see themselves being affected by this.
  - bmj 10y ago
    But that's a short view, right? As Uber moves into more and more places, that means more and more drivers that will eventually be replaced. You're absolutely correct that it will not affect people driving for Uber right now, but it certainly will affect those who start driving in three years[0]. [0] This, of course, assumes that driver-less cars will be ready for prime time in three years.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  I always talk to the drivers about their feelings and so on when taking Uber. Maybe my data is skewed but most accept it as inevitable and are not worried much as they have other side jobs. The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation. We simply cannot afford to leave people out as we move on to other things. Outsourcing moved manufacturing jobs to China, our focus on climate and global warming will leading to moving out of coal leaving coal miners behind, Amazon is automating their warehouses, Self driving will leave cab drivers behind...So, how do we create new type of jobs for these people? Humanity cannot progress by leaving people behind.
  - taxicabjesus 10y ago
jbb555 10y ago
I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does. There are cones and roadworks quite often. I have significant difficulty driving down there, I don't see how an automatic car could any time soon at all. This might not be an issue if I owned the car. I could turn it off and drive down there myself but an automatic taxi couldnt do that unless there was a driver waiting in the car to do that if required. And if there is, he might as well drive it all and save thousands of [currency]
- rsfern 10y ago
  All these challenges are exactly why one would want to collect driving data in Pittsburgh, it seems to me. I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.
  - jbb555 10y ago
    I guess that makes sense. And they can solve issues and make improvements one at a time untill it's good enough I guess. But I doubt that will be any time soon
- jonknee 10y ago
  > My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Somewhat ironically, once self driving cars figure out how to do this at scale there won't be cars parked on both sides of the road.
- grecy 10y ago
  > I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. I can understand planes eventually being practical for transport, but the wind and noise and short distances they fly make them useless for passenger transport. I can understand computers eventually being practical for business-y folks, but the rooms they take up make them useless for normal folk. I can understand this internet thing is useful for nerds, but I can't see how regular people will ever use it. I can understand a "portable" telephone is a nice idea, but the breifcase of a battery I have to carry around makes it's way to big and heavy. ... need I go on? It's happening, whether you can imagine it or not.
hokkos 10y ago
What is smart with Uber pushing this tech is they have incentive to test a lot with a human operator, they can earn money driving people during the test, but Google doesn't earn anything when they do, limiting their tests.
- eloisant 10y ago
  Google is already driving cars everywhere for Google Maps, so if they want to test it they can put it in Maps cars. Uber is not going to make anymore money with those than their regular service, since they have to pay the driver anyway.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Two safety drivers, according to the article, and the ride is free.
aedron 10y ago
It feels like a lot of what Uber does these days is just hyping up the stock price. Of course that is a very short term strategy, if your ever more audacious announcements keep falling flat. We saw a lot of this in the last throes of the dot-com bubble, before the inevitable implosion. As for this announcement, does Uber have any credibility in this field, which combines the most individually complex AI, robotics and regulatory work that has ever been attempted? Hell, in any non-trivial engineering feats? Also, Volvo has very active ongoing self-driving research going on. I have to wonder how much of this is Uber's supposed crack team of field experts, and how much is simply a partnership with Volvo delivering the technology.
- linkregister 10y ago
  They have acquired their way into credibility. They controversially hired the majority of the CMU robotics laboratory in order to start ATC. They also hired a number of Google self-driving engineers, including the former head of the self-driving effort. Today Uber announced their acquisition of Otto, a self-driving truck company. The ATC is isolated from the rest of Uber. Volvo has been working on self-driving cars for years; before the Uber ATC effort. Regulatory work is one thing that Uber excels at. To be fair, Google also hired/poached most of its self-driving experts from university robotics laboratories.
nkoren 10y ago
Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms. This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    What you need to understand the auto industry plans their product lines 20 years in advance. Design/testing of components takes a non-trivial amount of time. When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame. Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    Everybody wants to jump straight to 4, because 3 is actually dangerous and likely to cause deaths as people are lulled into a false sense of safety. The question is how long will it take? Some people say 2 years, some people say 20.
    - puranjay 10y ago
      How much has the recent interest and investment in self-driving cars impacted this estimate? 5 years ago, I would have said that level 4 automation is 20 years away. With all these billions pouring in, I'd cut that projection in less than half. I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030
uptown 10y ago
Are self-driving cars legal in the United States by law, or just due to the absence of law? Seems like vehicular traffic has always had fairly tight regulations around their operation, but I'm stunned by the speed at which cars that drive themselves are hitting the road. Sure, we've had cruise-control, and cars have been adding things like auto-braking and lane-assist. Have they just taken that feature-creep further to facilitate self-driving under existing laws? Or are they simply able to do-so because they all necessitate a human driver to supposedly be alert, awake and aware? Maybe I missed it, but to me this just seems like something that would warrant some discussion before self-driving vehicles are allowed on the roads, even if the conclusion is the same.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Wikipedia covers the legal aspects reasonably well, with a map of state laws. "In 2016, 7 states (Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, and Tennessee), along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws for autonomous vehicles." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation
  - uptown 10y ago
    So basically just spending cash lobbying politicians. Thanks for the link. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-dri...
  - jonknee 10y ago
    Interesting that Pennsylvania is not on this list considering Uber is doing this in Pittsburgh.
    - epistemenical 10y ago
      There's a pending bill: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?syear=2015&sind=0&body=S&type=B&bn=1268 http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?sy....
theandrewbailey 10y ago
I saw one of these a month ago when I was biking around the North Shore (downtown Pittsburgh). Its cameras on top were far more conspicuous than the renders in the article, though. This article said it would pick people up downtown, but how far would they go to drop off? The golden triangle is mostly grid-based, but go elsewhere in the city and the road topology gets jacked up fast (like Boston), especially in the south and west. Its idiosyncrasies took some getting used to, after living in flatter regions with gridded streets for several years (central Ohio, Salt Lake). In those places, if you want to go somewhere, you start driving in its general direction; in Pittsburgh, it's not uncommon to go in the opposite direction for a while, since the roads don't connect that way. The article also mentioned bridges being a problem. In Pittsburgh, that's a big problem, since it supposedly has more bridges than any other city in the world.
- rando444 10y ago
  Knowing Pittsburgh, the amount of road and bridge construction that goes on there would also concern me, not to mention the condition of the roads. There's also a ton of roads that are extremely steep (multiple residential streets with an over 30% grade) which can be extremely dangerous in the winter. It's an interesting choice of a city for this for sure.
  - johnward 10y ago
    I'm sure they chose the city for CMU but I wonder if the driving challenges played a roll. Navigating downtown Pittsburgh is no fun if you aren't familiar with it. I mean it's not really fun if you are familiar either.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    The roads are getting better. It seems like half the roads are, will be, or have been closed at some point just this year and you can't drive more than 30 minutes without encountering a detour or being taken on one. My 10 minute commute to work is mostly streets that have had ongoing nightly or weekend work for almost a month. The steepest street in the US is in Pittsburgh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
bogomipz 10y ago
Can anyone comment on the connection between Uber a company based in S.F. and Pittsburgh? Does this have to with proximity to CMU? Something else?
- kartD 10y ago
  They hired a significant portion of their staff from CMU's robotics division. http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582 http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carne...
- raphaelj 10y ago
  Maybe more open regulations, smaller city (they seem to be mapping all the streets) or better road-markings. Or a combination of these three.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  It's in the article. They hired a big part of CMU's robotics division, which made quite the headlines a while back. They were (and maybe still are?) based in Pittsburgh. It's also imaginable that Pittsburgh has some features that make it interesting, such as cold winters, loads of bridges (difficult!), and both grid and messy road patterns.
bennettfeely 10y ago
Last summer I saw one of these autonomous Uber cars driving on a side road when I was leaving my office in the Lawrenceville neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Was tempted to motion to jump in front of it to see how the car would react, but didn't...
kdamken 10y ago
How dare you say that. Don't you know that every single job is legally required to provide you with enough money to support a family of six while living in the Bay Area and driving Escalades?
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311880 and marked it off-topic. Please don't derail threads with unsubstantive inflammatory comments.
ap22213 10y ago
It's interesting that they chose Pittsburgh. Having grown up there and they having lived in many different places since, I have learned to appreciate having learned to drive on those roads, especially during winter. Many roads in Pittsburgh, and western PA in general, can be very curvy and have tight-radius. They're also often steep. The on-ramps are peculiar because merging traffic must yield, visibility can be poor, and since some on-ramps can have tight radius and be steep, it makes it a little more challenging to merge. However, all of that is not that difficult to learn. It's much more interesting when you add in a foot of snow and ice and blowing snow. Also, Pittsburgh is an 'older city' so large parts of it were built before cars. Highways have been 'bolted on' in some places, especially the ones that bisect downtown. Many people unfamiliar with Pittsburgh can get lost when coming in from 376 because on entering downtown, there are several quick exits and lots of lane switching. It makes sense since CMU is there and a lot of robotics people, but interesting nonetheless.
- johnward 10y ago
  I imagine navigating 376 coming into Downtown out the of Fort Pitt tunnel to be insane. I can barely do it as a human. Everyone is entering and trying to cross the 4 lanes to exit on the opposite side with in about 100 yards of roadway.
jdhawk 10y ago
Ah, I spotted one of these the other day cruising around Austin. Pretty slick looking vehicle.
mdasen 10y ago
Uber has to work on self-driving technology, but in a certain way doesn't self-driving technology seem like something that will eliminate Uber's market advantage? Right now, Uber is the go-to choice in most areas because of network effects. They have the most drivers because they have the most users. They have the most users because they have the most drivers. In a world of self-driving vehicles, anyone with capital can buy a fleet to blanket a city. If you can finance a self-driving vehicle for $400/mo, it's not that hard to launch in a new city. Sidecar operated in my top-10 city with what seemed like 5 drivers. That was too few and it was terrible (given that a lot of the time they might not be on-duty). But if one could get 20 self-driving vehicles for $8,000/mo, it's an easy way to launch. If adding new vehicles is as easy as going to a local dealership and putting down your VC money, you could get more on the road within a day to meet demand. In the early days, you could keep a close eye on demand and over-provision a little. Self-driving vehicles change the market from being one of network effects (where Uber has a huge advantage) to one of capital spend. Uber does have a lot of capital, but what if GM wants to get into the game? GM gets cars at cost and GM has a brand that people know/trust (they're not some no-name I'm-Uber-Too). Worse, it's a market of variable capital expenditure. With cable TV/internet, a lot of the costs are fixed costs (actually laying all the cable and such). With wireless service, there's a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of fixed costs creating the network. With self-driving taxis, it seems like the vast majority of the costs are variable costs that go up with the number of riders. There's really nothing stoping a city from having dozens or even a hundred different self-driving taxi companies. I doubt it will be hundreds as it's hard to run a good company, but it does mean there won't be a good opportunity to push high margins onto consumers. An attempt at high margins would mean another company scooping up that business. I guess I just don't see how Uber maintains high enough margins in what will become an incredibly price-competitive market where it's relatively cheap for new players to join. If Sidecar could have spent $8,000/mo to launch in my city with good coverage, they would have made users happy rather than frustrated that there were no drivers around. They could have been successful. $96,000 isn't a lot of capital needed to start up for your first year. A Dunkin' Donuts franchise costs more than that to start up (from a little Googling). At $5/ride, vehicles would only need to do 3 rides a day to justify a $400/mo price tag. Even at $2/ride (less than public transit), you'd only need to do 7 rides a day for that $400/mo vehicle. That doesn't deal with fuel costs, but you can see how you don't need a lot of usage to cover the cost of the vehicle. If you think about fuel costs on a Prius and a maybe a 5 mile average trip (which seems quite long), you're talking about 1/10th of a gallon or around 20 cents for fuel. A trip that might cost $15 on UberX drops to under $2.50 at-cost for a service that isn't popular (its vehicles only do 7 rides/day) and way lower cost for popular services. So, Uber is going to have to push its margins way down (and keep them down) to prevent someone from wanting to enter a market that requires such little capital.
n72 10y ago
I wonder how this will affect crime. With a driverless car, if someone wanted to hold you up, all they have to do is walk in front of the car, which will then obediently stop.
- 794CD01 10y ago
  As opposed to human-driven cars, which keep going and run you over?
  - n72 10y ago
    If I'm in a shady neighborhood and a drunk or threatening guy or whatever starts meandering towards me, if I'm driving I have the power to turn/drive around him/accelerate or whatever. If I'm sitting in the backseat of a driverless car, I don't have that option.
    - mdrzn 10y ago
      What if the car is already locked and can detect if the drunk guy hits on the car? Would you be safe enough?
- stale2002 10y ago
  Or they could just pull out a gun and shoot the driver? It is already easy to do terrible things if you want.
elmar 10y ago
Forget Self-Driving Cars. Airbus Says a Legit Flying Taxi Is Coming http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving-cars/ http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving-...
gmisra 10y ago
> "Supervised by humans in the drivers seat" Ah, borrowing from the Musk marketing playbook, just say "self-driving" often enough, and enough uninformed people who have never seen contemporary luxury assisted-driving features will be impressed. Calling out Autopilot as "souped-up cruise control" is a nice touch. > For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. 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. That doesn't seem very scalable. How many cars are in this so-called "fleet"? Is there anybody working on autonomous vehicle tech that believes there's any substance here, or is it just adverjournalism?
- CardenB 10y ago
  The level of autonomy exhibited by these vehicles are much greater than that of the Model S
  - gmisra 10y ago
    Can you elaborate? What driving maneuvers do you expect these vehicles to be able to perform? Where is that feature set documented?
- jrussino 10y ago
  I worked on a team at NREC that was building self-driving trucks for use in surface mines. The project was a descendant of CMU's work on the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges. These vehicles actually went into production and are being used at a few mining sites around the world. Most of that team is now at Uber. I can tell you that there is absolutely substance here. I have no idea what's going on inside Uber, but they have a group of people there (some of the only ones in the world) with experience building actual production-worthy fully-autonomous ground vehicles. Having a safety driver in place during development and testing is common practice, and for sure they're still very much in the development and testing phase. Full autonomy on public roads is a harder problem that full autonomy in a more controlled environment like a mine site, for reasons that have discussed here and elsewhere, and I don't know how much progress they have made in dealing with those challenges. However, I have no doubt that they are working toward the goal of a fully-autonomous no-driver vehicle, not just the type of assisted-driving features you may have already seen in production.
wehadfun 10y ago
What happens if someone is in one of these and it needs gas? What happens if these things get a flat tires? What if the police want to pull one of these things over? Can drivers exit this thing at will or are they trapped until some computer in California thinks it is safe? Uber does know that their drivers do lot more then drive
- stale2002 10y ago
  1) Uber keeps tracks of the fuel ahead of time, and goes to an Uber refuel station automatically before it gets anywhere near low fuel. 2) The computer detects that the flat tire happened, pulls off to the side, and autodials the Uber triple A repair crew. 3) This one is hard actually. Perhaps the cameras could detect the flashing lights and sound of a police car, and automatically pull over? Or maybe there is just an emergency pull over button that the passenger presses? 4) Aforementioned emergency pull over button.
  - wehadfun 10y ago
    These are good solutions.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
Definitely not better road markings. I'm a Pittsburgh native, having spent most of my life there, and if anything the immaculate roads here in NorCal are a part of the ongoing skewed optimism regarding self-driving vehicles. In Pittsburgh, you have potholes, ubiquitous construction (especially on PA-28), bridges (and I'm not talking Bay Bridge esque suspension bridges here), windy single lane dirt roads without markings, to say nothing of winter (snow usually obstructs what little markings there are 6-8 months out of the year), and a completely different driving style than in NorCal. Most people in Pittsburgh drive trucks or four-wheel drive Subarus (indeed, Pittsburgh has been a good niche market for Subaru -- they focus a lot of their advertising there). In Pittsburgh, roads only have two lanes max in each direction (and that's the highways). Even downtown has its fair share of dirt roads (near Allegheny River) and brick roads (roads that are made of bricks). I was shell shocked when I first moved to California and drove on the 101 with its 4 perfectly paved lanes filled with drivers exceeding 50 MPH. Precipitation is a nightmare for self-driving cars' LADAR sensors, rendering them completely unusable. Drought-afflicted SV has zero precipitation, and Pittsburgh has almost as much as Seattle. Driving in snow is such a drastically different task/skill than driving in perfect weather that most people in California don't even know how to drive in Tahoe on their skiing trips (and the "snow" there is maintained by humans!). If anything, us Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle researchers are the ones more grounded in reality. Elon hasn't even seen "the Turnpike" -- it is sad to say that the rather unfortunate fatal Tesla autopilot accident happened here in Pittsburgh. As aside, Sebastian Thrun was in snow-laden Boston, and he and his lab also have a more realistic time estimate for driverless vehicles hitting the road than TechCrunch. Anytime anyone in California complains about the roads (and believe it or not, people do complain about them here a lot), I just laugh.
- Nutomic 10y ago
  What do you think is a realistic time frame for self-driving cars?
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-would-be-here http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-wo... Infamous Pgh driving scenario: "Left lanes need to exit right, right lanes need to exit left, here's 300 ft, make it happen" Also, there are a number of short merge on-ramps that have Stop signs instead of Yield signs where you are required to come to a complete stop before merging onto high speed traffic.
bogomipz 10y ago
If the adoption of driverless cars succeeds this translates into less automobiles sold by manufacturers to the general public. Won't the auto manufacturers then need to increase the price of each unit sold? Eventually wouldn't Uber's savings from no longer having pay labor costs be lost due to auto makers increase in price per unit of each(now driverless) car sold? This seems to be a lot exposure for Uber unless they get into the manufacturing business which seems like a rabbit hole. This type of exposure is the same as say a music streaming business that has to pay for content - i.e your business model is predicated on favorable enough terms from a third party in order to make a profit. And we've seen that the way around this is by being vertically integrated such as what Netflix has done with creating its own content.
thevibesman 10y ago
Anyone heard when "later this month" is? I'm going to be in Pittsburgh this weekend; I hope it is later enough to try it out.
irfansharif 10y ago
great decision teaming up with Volvo for self-driving car experiments, Volvo has an excellent reputation for safety.
astazangasta 10y ago
This is a no-lose situation for Uber. If it goes well, then Uber has suddenly pushed forward autonomous driving and set itself at the forefront of commercial adoption. If it is a disaster and many accidents result, Uber will set back driverless cars by a decade, burying it under a wave of pessimism, allowing their current business model to persist well into the future.
nicwolff 10y ago
Doesn't this upend Uber's whole model of non-ownership of vehicles and rejection of liability? Unless the driver is just there to be liable for having "allowed" the AI to intentionally hit something or someone! Also, as a NYC driver, I wonder how aggressively a self-driving car could legally be programmed to defend its lane. I'm picturing Uberbots sitting still in traffic while streams of human drivers gleefully cut them off. City driving is basically a game of chicken every 10 seconds; winning at chicken depends on convincing your opponent that you are willing to have an accident.
- wehadfun 10y ago
  It does. I wonder if Uber's accounting department really thinks this is a good idea. If Uber has to pay for gas, spare tires, oil changes, cleaning, theft, vandalism, insurance, moving violations, taxes, plus maintenance of what ever gizmos and gadgets it takes to auto drive these XC90s they may find it is cheaper to just underpay regular drivers.
Animats 10y ago
Well, they've got the right people on the project, and the right sensors. This is ahead of Tesla.

289 points by ghosh 10y ago

seren 10y ago

It is more a test run. It is self-driving but each vehicle will have a pilot and a co-pilot.

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

tajen 10y ago
I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?
- rattray 10y ago
  It's possible that they don't rely on the minutiae of the maps, just use them for planning. For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly". On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.
  - cgearhart 10y ago
    They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      The car can't follow the lane markings?
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Lane markings are good if they're there. Often they get obliterated by construction, wear, weather, precipitation. Sometimes there are several sets, rewritten after construction and only partly erased. Humans can have a hard time following them.
      - millcoo 10y ago
        Most residential streets in Pittsburgh, as in a great deal of the rest of the world, do not have lane markings, though many are two-way and have parked cars on one or both sides of the road. Pittsburgh provides an additional difficulty, that many of these roads are too narrow for what is asked of them. Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9.95h,83.68t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sQ2hkTTCoyRis7gRHayh7OQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9... One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime. The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough. This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jayjay71 10y ago
  This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations. Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet). But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project. Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.
  - Retric 10y ago
    You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.
      - Retric 10y ago
        2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.
        10y ago
- rsfern 10y ago
  You have to start somewhere. In addition to bootstrapping the program in a few cities, they are probably using this data to improve their pothole detection systems. Pittsburgh's a great city for that sort of thing.
- cgearhart 10y ago
  > ...will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks. > can't they do like the Kinect This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.
- danielweber 10y ago
  If you have a fleet of networked cars, then as soon as one car encounters a new pothole, all the cars know about it.

jayjay71 10y ago

I'd love to sit in one of those cars and see how well the cars can drive themselves, especially during the winter. It's just a really awesome experience being in a self-driving car - it'd be amazing if you could just hail one with an app. The acquisition of Otto is interesting. I think Anthony Levandowski is incredible and the trucking industry is perfect for automation given the state of the technology and for logistical reasons. But it seems odd that Uber wants to branch out at this point.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nxzero 10y ago

As someone that follows lots of tech "trying to see the future" - to me Uber has the greatest hope of bring driving to the mainstream due to a number of factors. First, they have a lot of experience with litigation and working with local laws. They need to replace drivers, but unlike truck drivers - Uber will drive anywhere. Unlike trucks, there's the potential to allow the passenger to drive the car. Many more key reasons why Uber's efforts are worth watching, but really do hope they're able to make serious progress in bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream.

johnward 10y ago
> bring driving to the mainstream Did you mean self-driving ?
- nxzero 10y ago
  Yes, that's correct.

sbarre 10y ago

I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

Roritharr 10y ago
Most Uber drivers i've talked to about this, and i basically always talk about this when using Uber, all see themselves as just doing this for a short while, 2-3 years, so they don't see themselves being affected by this.
- bmj 10y ago
  But that's a short view, right? As Uber moves into more and more places, that means more and more drivers that will eventually be replaced. You're absolutely correct that it will not affect people driving for Uber right now, but it certainly will affect those who start driving in three years[0]. [0] This, of course, assumes that driver-less cars will be ready for prime time in three years.
perseusprime11 10y ago
I always talk to the drivers about their feelings and so on when taking Uber. Maybe my data is skewed but most accept it as inevitable and are not worried much as they have other side jobs. The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation. We simply cannot afford to leave people out as we move on to other things. Outsourcing moved manufacturing jobs to China, our focus on climate and global warming will leading to moving out of coal leaving coal miners behind, Amazon is automating their warehouses, Self driving will leave cab drivers behind...So, how do we create new type of jobs for these people? Humanity cannot progress by leaving people behind.
- taxicabjesus 10y ago

jbb555 10y ago

I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does. There are cones and roadworks quite often. I have significant difficulty driving down there, I don't see how an automatic car could any time soon at all. This might not be an issue if I owned the car. I could turn it off and drive down there myself but an automatic taxi couldnt do that unless there was a driver waiting in the car to do that if required. And if there is, he might as well drive it all and save thousands of [currency]

rsfern 10y ago
All these challenges are exactly why one would want to collect driving data in Pittsburgh, it seems to me. I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.
- jbb555 10y ago
  I guess that makes sense. And they can solve issues and make improvements one at a time untill it's good enough I guess. But I doubt that will be any time soon
jonknee 10y ago
> My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Somewhat ironically, once self driving cars figure out how to do this at scale there won't be cars parked on both sides of the road.
grecy 10y ago
> I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. I can understand planes eventually being practical for transport, but the wind and noise and short distances they fly make them useless for passenger transport. I can understand computers eventually being practical for business-y folks, but the rooms they take up make them useless for normal folk. I can understand this internet thing is useful for nerds, but I can't see how regular people will ever use it. I can understand a "portable" telephone is a nice idea, but the breifcase of a battery I have to carry around makes it's way to big and heavy. ... need I go on? It's happening, whether you can imagine it or not.

hokkos 10y ago

What is smart with Uber pushing this tech is they have incentive to test a lot with a human operator, they can earn money driving people during the test, but Google doesn't earn anything when they do, limiting their tests.

eloisant 10y ago
Google is already driving cars everywhere for Google Maps, so if they want to test it they can put it in Maps cars. Uber is not going to make anymore money with those than their regular service, since they have to pay the driver anyway.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Two safety drivers, according to the article, and the ride is free.

aedron 10y ago

It feels like a lot of what Uber does these days is just hyping up the stock price. Of course that is a very short term strategy, if your ever more audacious announcements keep falling flat. We saw a lot of this in the last throes of the dot-com bubble, before the inevitable implosion. As for this announcement, does Uber have any credibility in this field, which combines the most individually complex AI, robotics and regulatory work that has ever been attempted? Hell, in any non-trivial engineering feats? Also, Volvo has very active ongoing self-driving research going on. I have to wonder how much of this is Uber's supposed crack team of field experts, and how much is simply a partnership with Volvo delivering the technology.

linkregister 10y ago
They have acquired their way into credibility. They controversially hired the majority of the CMU robotics laboratory in order to start ATC. They also hired a number of Google self-driving engineers, including the former head of the self-driving effort. Today Uber announced their acquisition of Otto, a self-driving truck company. The ATC is isolated from the rest of Uber. Volvo has been working on self-driving cars for years; before the Uber ATC effort. Regulatory work is one thing that Uber excels at. To be fair, Google also hired/poached most of its self-driving experts from university robotics laboratories.

nkoren 10y ago

Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms. This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.

agumonkey 10y ago
What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).
- valarauca1 10y ago
  What you need to understand the auto industry plans their product lines 20 years in advance. Design/testing of components takes a non-trivial amount of time. When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame. Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  Everybody wants to jump straight to 4, because 3 is actually dangerous and likely to cause deaths as people are lulled into a false sense of safety. The question is how long will it take? Some people say 2 years, some people say 20.
  - puranjay 10y ago
    How much has the recent interest and investment in self-driving cars impacted this estimate? 5 years ago, I would have said that level 4 automation is 20 years away. With all these billions pouring in, I'd cut that projection in less than half. I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030

uptown 10y ago

Are self-driving cars legal in the United States by law, or just due to the absence of law? Seems like vehicular traffic has always had fairly tight regulations around their operation, but I'm stunned by the speed at which cars that drive themselves are hitting the road. Sure, we've had cruise-control, and cars have been adding things like auto-braking and lane-assist. Have they just taken that feature-creep further to facilitate self-driving under existing laws? Or are they simply able to do-so because they all necessitate a human driver to supposedly be alert, awake and aware? Maybe I missed it, but to me this just seems like something that would warrant some discussion before self-driving vehicles are allowed on the roads, even if the conclusion is the same.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Wikipedia covers the legal aspects reasonably well, with a map of state laws. "In 2016, 7 states (Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, and Tennessee), along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws for autonomous vehicles." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation
- uptown 10y ago
  So basically just spending cash lobbying politicians. Thanks for the link. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-dri...
- jonknee 10y ago
  Interesting that Pennsylvania is not on this list considering Uber is doing this in Pittsburgh.
  - epistemenical 10y ago
    There's a pending bill: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?syear=2015&sind=0&body=S&type=B&bn=1268 http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?sy....

theandrewbailey 10y ago

I saw one of these a month ago when I was biking around the North Shore (downtown Pittsburgh). Its cameras on top were far more conspicuous than the renders in the article, though. This article said it would pick people up downtown, but how far would they go to drop off? The golden triangle is mostly grid-based, but go elsewhere in the city and the road topology gets jacked up fast (like Boston), especially in the south and west. Its idiosyncrasies took some getting used to, after living in flatter regions with gridded streets for several years (central Ohio, Salt Lake). In those places, if you want to go somewhere, you start driving in its general direction; in Pittsburgh, it's not uncommon to go in the opposite direction for a while, since the roads don't connect that way. The article also mentioned bridges being a problem. In Pittsburgh, that's a big problem, since it supposedly has more bridges than any other city in the world.

rando444 10y ago
Knowing Pittsburgh, the amount of road and bridge construction that goes on there would also concern me, not to mention the condition of the roads. There's also a ton of roads that are extremely steep (multiple residential streets with an over 30% grade) which can be extremely dangerous in the winter. It's an interesting choice of a city for this for sure.
- johnward 10y ago
  I'm sure they chose the city for CMU but I wonder if the driving challenges played a roll. Navigating downtown Pittsburgh is no fun if you aren't familiar with it. I mean it's not really fun if you are familiar either.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  The roads are getting better. It seems like half the roads are, will be, or have been closed at some point just this year and you can't drive more than 30 minutes without encountering a detour or being taken on one. My 10 minute commute to work is mostly streets that have had ongoing nightly or weekend work for almost a month. The steepest street in the US is in Pittsburgh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue

bogomipz 10y ago

Can anyone comment on the connection between Uber a company based in S.F. and Pittsburgh? Does this have to with proximity to CMU? Something else?

kartD 10y ago
They hired a significant portion of their staff from CMU's robotics division. http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582 http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carne...
raphaelj 10y ago
Maybe more open regulations, smaller city (they seem to be mapping all the streets) or better road-markings. Or a combination of these three.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lorenzhs 10y ago
It's in the article. They hired a big part of CMU's robotics division, which made quite the headlines a while back. They were (and maybe still are?) based in Pittsburgh. It's also imaginable that Pittsburgh has some features that make it interesting, such as cold winters, loads of bridges (difficult!), and both grid and messy road patterns.

bennettfeely 10y ago

Last summer I saw one of these autonomous Uber cars driving on a side road when I was leaving my office in the Lawrenceville neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Was tempted to motion to jump in front of it to see how the car would react, but didn't...

kdamken 10y ago

How dare you say that. Don't you know that every single job is legally required to provide you with enough money to support a family of six while living in the Bay Area and driving Escalades?

sctb 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311880 and marked it off-topic. Please don't derail threads with unsubstantive inflammatory comments.

ap22213 10y ago

It's interesting that they chose Pittsburgh. Having grown up there and they having lived in many different places since, I have learned to appreciate having learned to drive on those roads, especially during winter. Many roads in Pittsburgh, and western PA in general, can be very curvy and have tight-radius. They're also often steep. The on-ramps are peculiar because merging traffic must yield, visibility can be poor, and since some on-ramps can have tight radius and be steep, it makes it a little more challenging to merge. However, all of that is not that difficult to learn. It's much more interesting when you add in a foot of snow and ice and blowing snow. Also, Pittsburgh is an 'older city' so large parts of it were built before cars. Highways have been 'bolted on' in some places, especially the ones that bisect downtown. Many people unfamiliar with Pittsburgh can get lost when coming in from 376 because on entering downtown, there are several quick exits and lots of lane switching. It makes sense since CMU is there and a lot of robotics people, but interesting nonetheless.

johnward 10y ago
I imagine navigating 376 coming into Downtown out the of Fort Pitt tunnel to be insane. I can barely do it as a human. Everyone is entering and trying to cross the 4 lanes to exit on the opposite side with in about 100 yards of roadway.

jdhawk 10y ago

Ah, I spotted one of these the other day cruising around Austin. Pretty slick looking vehicle.

mdasen 10y ago

Uber has to work on self-driving technology, but in a certain way doesn't self-driving technology seem like something that will eliminate Uber's market advantage? Right now, Uber is the go-to choice in most areas because of network effects. They have the most drivers because they have the most users. They have the most users because they have the most drivers. In a world of self-driving vehicles, anyone with capital can buy a fleet to blanket a city. If you can finance a self-driving vehicle for $400/mo, it's not that hard to launch in a new city. Sidecar operated in my top-10 city with what seemed like 5 drivers. That was too few and it was terrible (given that a lot of the time they might not be on-duty). But if one could get 20 self-driving vehicles for $8,000/mo, it's an easy way to launch. If adding new vehicles is as easy as going to a local dealership and putting down your VC money, you could get more on the road within a day to meet demand. In the early days, you could keep a close eye on demand and over-provision a little. Self-driving vehicles change the market from being one of network effects (where Uber has a huge advantage) to one of capital spend. Uber does have a lot of capital, but what if GM wants to get into the game? GM gets cars at cost and GM has a brand that people know/trust (they're not some no-name I'm-Uber-Too). Worse, it's a market of variable capital expenditure. With cable TV/internet, a lot of the costs are fixed costs (actually laying all the cable and such). With wireless service, there's a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of fixed costs creating the network. With self-driving taxis, it seems like the vast majority of the costs are variable costs that go up with the number of riders. There's really nothing stoping a city from having dozens or even a hundred different self-driving taxi companies. I doubt it will be hundreds as it's hard to run a good company, but it does mean there won't be a good opportunity to push high margins onto consumers. An attempt at high margins would mean another company scooping up that business. I guess I just don't see how Uber maintains high enough margins in what will become an incredibly price-competitive market where it's relatively cheap for new players to join. If Sidecar could have spent $8,000/mo to launch in my city with good coverage, they would have made users happy rather than frustrated that there were no drivers around. They could have been successful. $96,000 isn't a lot of capital needed to start up for your first year. A Dunkin' Donuts franchise costs more than that to start up (from a little Googling). At $5/ride, vehicles would only need to do 3 rides a day to justify a $400/mo price tag. Even at $2/ride (less than public transit), you'd only need to do 7 rides a day for that $400/mo vehicle. That doesn't deal with fuel costs, but you can see how you don't need a lot of usage to cover the cost of the vehicle. If you think about fuel costs on a Prius and a maybe a 5 mile average trip (which seems quite long), you're talking about 1/10th of a gallon or around 20 cents for fuel. A trip that might cost $15 on UberX drops to under $2.50 at-cost for a service that isn't popular (its vehicles only do 7 rides/day) and way lower cost for popular services. So, Uber is going to have to push its margins way down (and keep them down) to prevent someone from wanting to enter a market that requires such little capital.

n72 10y ago

I wonder how this will affect crime. With a driverless car, if someone wanted to hold you up, all they have to do is walk in front of the car, which will then obediently stop.

794CD01 10y ago
As opposed to human-driven cars, which keep going and run you over?
- n72 10y ago
  If I'm in a shady neighborhood and a drunk or threatening guy or whatever starts meandering towards me, if I'm driving I have the power to turn/drive around him/accelerate or whatever. If I'm sitting in the backseat of a driverless car, I don't have that option.
  - mdrzn 10y ago
    What if the car is already locked and can detect if the drunk guy hits on the car? Would you be safe enough?
stale2002 10y ago
Or they could just pull out a gun and shoot the driver? It is already easy to do terrible things if you want.

elmar 10y ago

Forget Self-Driving Cars. Airbus Says a Legit Flying Taxi Is Coming http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving-cars/ http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving-...

gmisra 10y ago

> "Supervised by humans in the drivers seat" Ah, borrowing from the Musk marketing playbook, just say "self-driving" often enough, and enough uninformed people who have never seen contemporary luxury assisted-driving features will be impressed. Calling out Autopilot as "souped-up cruise control" is a nice touch. > For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. 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. That doesn't seem very scalable. How many cars are in this so-called "fleet"? Is there anybody working on autonomous vehicle tech that believes there's any substance here, or is it just adverjournalism?

CardenB 10y ago
The level of autonomy exhibited by these vehicles are much greater than that of the Model S
- gmisra 10y ago
  Can you elaborate? What driving maneuvers do you expect these vehicles to be able to perform? Where is that feature set documented?
jrussino 10y ago
I worked on a team at NREC that was building self-driving trucks for use in surface mines. The project was a descendant of CMU's work on the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges. These vehicles actually went into production and are being used at a few mining sites around the world. Most of that team is now at Uber. I can tell you that there is absolutely substance here. I have no idea what's going on inside Uber, but they have a group of people there (some of the only ones in the world) with experience building actual production-worthy fully-autonomous ground vehicles. Having a safety driver in place during development and testing is common practice, and for sure they're still very much in the development and testing phase. Full autonomy on public roads is a harder problem that full autonomy in a more controlled environment like a mine site, for reasons that have discussed here and elsewhere, and I don't know how much progress they have made in dealing with those challenges. However, I have no doubt that they are working toward the goal of a fully-autonomous no-driver vehicle, not just the type of assisted-driving features you may have already seen in production.

wehadfun 10y ago

What happens if someone is in one of these and it needs gas? What happens if these things get a flat tires? What if the police want to pull one of these things over? Can drivers exit this thing at will or are they trapped until some computer in California thinks it is safe? Uber does know that their drivers do lot more then drive

stale2002 10y ago
1) Uber keeps tracks of the fuel ahead of time, and goes to an Uber refuel station automatically before it gets anywhere near low fuel. 2) The computer detects that the flat tire happened, pulls off to the side, and autodials the Uber triple A repair crew. 3) This one is hard actually. Perhaps the cameras could detect the flashing lights and sound of a police car, and automatically pull over? Or maybe there is just an emergency pull over button that the passenger presses? 4) Aforementioned emergency pull over button.
- wehadfun 10y ago
  These are good solutions.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

Definitely not better road markings. I'm a Pittsburgh native, having spent most of my life there, and if anything the immaculate roads here in NorCal are a part of the ongoing skewed optimism regarding self-driving vehicles. In Pittsburgh, you have potholes, ubiquitous construction (especially on PA-28), bridges (and I'm not talking Bay Bridge esque suspension bridges here), windy single lane dirt roads without markings, to say nothing of winter (snow usually obstructs what little markings there are 6-8 months out of the year), and a completely different driving style than in NorCal. Most people in Pittsburgh drive trucks or four-wheel drive Subarus (indeed, Pittsburgh has been a good niche market for Subaru -- they focus a lot of their advertising there). In Pittsburgh, roads only have two lanes max in each direction (and that's the highways). Even downtown has its fair share of dirt roads (near Allegheny River) and brick roads (roads that are made of bricks). I was shell shocked when I first moved to California and drove on the 101 with its 4 perfectly paved lanes filled with drivers exceeding 50 MPH. Precipitation is a nightmare for self-driving cars' LADAR sensors, rendering them completely unusable. Drought-afflicted SV has zero precipitation, and Pittsburgh has almost as much as Seattle. Driving in snow is such a drastically different task/skill than driving in perfect weather that most people in California don't even know how to drive in Tahoe on their skiing trips (and the "snow" there is maintained by humans!). If anything, us Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle researchers are the ones more grounded in reality. Elon hasn't even seen "the Turnpike" -- it is sad to say that the rather unfortunate fatal Tesla autopilot accident happened here in Pittsburgh. As aside, Sebastian Thrun was in snow-laden Boston, and he and his lab also have a more realistic time estimate for driverless vehicles hitting the road than TechCrunch. Anytime anyone in California complains about the roads (and believe it or not, people do complain about them here a lot), I just laugh.

Nutomic 10y ago
What do you think is a realistic time frame for self-driving cars?
Hydraulix989 10y ago
http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-would-be-here http://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/50986812907/you-knew-this-wo... Infamous Pgh driving scenario: "Left lanes need to exit right, right lanes need to exit left, here's 300 ft, make it happen" Also, there are a number of short merge on-ramps that have Stop signs instead of Yield signs where you are required to come to a complete stop before merging onto high speed traffic.

bogomipz 10y ago

If the adoption of driverless cars succeeds this translates into less automobiles sold by manufacturers to the general public. Won't the auto manufacturers then need to increase the price of each unit sold? Eventually wouldn't Uber's savings from no longer having pay labor costs be lost due to auto makers increase in price per unit of each(now driverless) car sold? This seems to be a lot exposure for Uber unless they get into the manufacturing business which seems like a rabbit hole. This type of exposure is the same as say a music streaming business that has to pay for content - i.e your business model is predicated on favorable enough terms from a third party in order to make a profit. And we've seen that the way around this is by being vertically integrated such as what Netflix has done with creating its own content.

thevibesman 10y ago

Anyone heard when "later this month" is? I'm going to be in Pittsburgh this weekend; I hope it is later enough to try it out.

irfansharif 10y ago

great decision teaming up with Volvo for self-driving car experiments, Volvo has an excellent reputation for safety.

astazangasta 10y ago

This is a no-lose situation for Uber. If it goes well, then Uber has suddenly pushed forward autonomous driving and set itself at the forefront of commercial adoption. If it is a disaster and many accidents result, Uber will set back driverless cars by a decade, burying it under a wave of pessimism, allowing their current business model to persist well into the future.

nicwolff 10y ago

Doesn't this upend Uber's whole model of non-ownership of vehicles and rejection of liability? Unless the driver is just there to be liable for having "allowed" the AI to intentionally hit something or someone! Also, as a NYC driver, I wonder how aggressively a self-driving car could legally be programmed to defend its lane. I'm picturing Uberbots sitting still in traffic while streams of human drivers gleefully cut them off. City driving is basically a game of chicken every 10 seconds; winning at chicken depends on convincing your opponent that you are willing to have an accident.

wehadfun 10y ago
It does. I wonder if Uber's accounting department really thinks this is a good idea. If Uber has to pay for gas, spare tires, oil changes, cleaning, theft, vandalism, insurance, moving violations, taxes, plus maintenance of what ever gizmos and gadgets it takes to auto drive these XC90s they may find it is cheaper to just underpay regular drivers.

Animats 10y ago

Well, they've got the right people on the project, and the right sensors. This is ahead of Tesla.