I'm here at Uber's test facilities in Pittsburgh.
This week the company began picking up passengers
in specially equipped autonomous vehicles.
Let's go take a ride.
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.
At a press conference, an Uber executive called
the city the double black diamond of driving
because of its tricky weather and irregular
grid, making it an especially interesting
place to test this service.
Pittsburgh is home to world class research
and engineering talent, it has an organic
road network, it has real traffic conditions.
Uber started the ATC eighteen months ago,
with the specific purpose of getting self-driving
vehicles onto the road, so I'm so excited
that you guys are going to be some of the
first people in our self-driving fleet.
I hailed a ride from Uber's regular app, though
Pittsburgh users who book an UberX won't know
if they get an autonomous car until it shows
up.
Once in the back of the car, I touched a button
on a tablet to say I was ready to go.
The tablet showed me a live view of the car's
vision.
Blue for the road, red for objects.
Two engineers sat in the front seats taking
notes, and poised to take over if something
went wrong.
I felt a little nervous the first time the
car encountered an obstacle.
You don't notice how many unexpected things
happen on the road until you ask for robots
to take the wheel.
But the drive was so consistent, it quickly
felt like a normal car ride.
The car read traffic light colors and stopped
for one yellow light while driving through
a different yellow light.
It edged around other cars, and stopped for
pedestrians.
Then the engineers let me drive the car back
to the Uber campus.
Once a light turned blue on the dash, I could
hit a silver button in the center console
to go autonomous.
Breaking, accelerating, or hitting a red button,
brought driving back under my control.
We went manual several times to drive around
stopped cars, because otherwise the Uber would
just stop behind them and wait.
Sometimes it was gentle, sometimes it came
to a lurching halt.
It felt a lot like riding in a car with a
human driver.
At no point did Uber suggest the technology
found in its cars is ready to roll out to
the masses.
Like Google and many other labs developing
self driving technology, it's carefully logging
hours of road tests.
Its team is slowly working its way through
a long list of scenarios its cars should be
prepared to respond to in the wild.
Pittsburgh passengers are new scenarios.
Uber can introduce into its research.
Uber will also have to pay close attention
to public opinion.
This is the first time the world has seen
such a large fleet of
autonomous cars in one city.
A lot of people will have their first ride
along experience, which should promote enough
awareness to gauge if people are warming up
to autonomous cars.
