Gadgetory

self-driving cars are the future of Transportation and a lot of experts say that we're not going to see them on the road for at least another 10 years but some companies just can't wait like uber uber started playing around with the idea of self-driving cars a few years ago then last September it launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh as a way to give a select group of riders their first taste of an autonomous future today uber is ready to launch its second self-driving service here in San Francisco we spoke to Lee or Ron one of the heads of uber self-driving program who explained how their partnership with Volvo is a key step towards pushing autonomous driving on two public roads aesthetically we were able to actually integrate the technology much more seamlessly into the cover we have as many of the sensors embedded into the car also for example the front aerators will not sort of show up randomly on the front but they'll be integrated into the grid of the car and everything we need in terms of sensors all the antennas the GPS everything you've seen on diffusion is now nicely compactly integrated into the pod uber doesn't want to unnecessarily accelerate the adoption but rather take its time focusing on particular cities and neighborhoods while building a database of driving patterns and for a number of reasons San Francisco seems like a great city to start the program we can now have those cows close to the urban engineers to the other team to the uber self driving engineers feel we can experience a much bigger city with a lot of different permutations a lot of different neighbors a lot of different street formation a lot of unique or more comments and Francisco sites such as Michaels and heavy traffic and heavy pedestrian detail a steep hills that they have a lot of fun dealing with cable cars it's just a a much wider I am basically operational area that we can iterate on the technology naturally we took a test ride to see how it all works sands of Aruba has arrived excellent I didn't have to hail it huh all right where would you like to go we're going to get a pizza he took yeah it sounds good to me how does it work when you're already in the car zero minutes away yeah makes sense we in the car the life will be self driven as much as possible but not all of it this is about operating in iterating on the technology so the drivers are they'll - it'll take control when needed all sort of man you'd live in the portions aim of the route that is needed the xc90 was way more streamlined than the self-driving Ford fusions uber is using in Pittsburgh there are only seven cameras down from 22 on the Ford Fusion and 3d video for a wider field of vision radar sensors are mounted behind the plastic bumper rather than protruding off the side of the vehicle and the spinning lidar detector and camera suite on the roof is way more compact so what about the ride in general it was pretty uneventful uber self-driving cars in San Francisco will always feature two safety engineers in the front seats to take over just in case things get complicated and during our ride the driver did just that occasionally taking control when conditions got tricky but for the most part the car drove itself seamlessly navigating through bad weather and distracted pedestrians with relative ease but as convenient as self-driving could be there will be a lot of controversy that follows how safe will it all be once it becomes widely adopted can the cars be programmed to make ethical choices and most importantly what will happen to all those jobs it's going to be a hybrid network regardless it's not going to be all either all black or white there's always going to be room for a drivers to carville maybe some difficult areas maybe some snow you're some a challenging condition maybe peak demand or time will sort of the self-driving cars cannot actually fulfill that request so regardless the future is going to be hybrid and it's going to take us a while nothing to get them for now only a limited number of people will get a taste of uber self-driving future but eventually everyone may experience the shock of hailing a ride on their smartphone only to have a car with no one inside show up I feel if you guys can build a self-driving car that can also flick off people when they drive like assholes that you will have achieved the type of thing we will want to have and right in the most