Gadgetory

everybody this is Sean with the birds we're at CES 2018 and I'm about to do what else ride in a self-driving car assault driving cars are at CES every year but this demo is gonna be different this is not just the self-driving ride around a parking lot or around the convention center this is the result of a partnership between the lifts and a company called active and what they're gonna do is actually offer semi autonomous car rides to people here at CES to one of 20 or more destinations across the week so people who are attending the show can actually sign up and just in the lyft app hail a self-driving car and take it to one of these destinations and we're about to get a preview of what that whole experience looks like so we just hop in the car tap confirm it's showing us our route smooth and simple yeah we're gonna go to Caesar's Palace I didn't bring any cash with me yeah oh and I get to start oh I didn't know that there was gonna be so much control all right the driver is actually driving right now because there's regulations that say that they can't do it on private property here one of the biggest challenges in Las Vegas would self-driving cars is that it doesn't have the same kind of lane lines that most roads have in America it has these things called Botts dots which are just little sequences of dots on the roads that separate the lanes and that's a bit of a challenge for self-driving systems which usually need lane markers to be able to know where the lanes are there we go and now we're here and now we're at autonomous driving code according to the loud computer voice behind my head so it's going well so far we stopped beautifully at a red light and some passengers crossed in front with no problems and now we're going again it's very smooth so far like many self-driving demos it's a little bit boring if you forget about the technology and that that's a little loud and boring it is giving us a lot of information about what's going on whether it's here on the screen in the backseat or in the screen and the front seat showing basically that the car knows what it's doing and trying to like constantly prove that the car knows that it's doing to the people who are inside of it the car we're in is BMW 5-series and the tech that's powering it is basically all the tech that this company active has provided they've been working on self-driving technology on a few different models this is just the one that they have here and active was a good choice for lyft because they've been here in different forms over the last couple years of CES doing rides demo rides and self-driving cars and so they have a lot of data about the challenging environment in Las Vegas in past experiences usually you feel some drifting left and right in a lane as the car tries to sort of keep itself planted in the right position and there's none of that which is good because that kind of stuff those little margins of error can make for motion sickness come up in people and when you're lift and you're a company that's trying to offer ads to people who are going you know out or back from a night on the town here wobbling them back and forth that's probably a bad idea another thing that can really challenge some of these systems is harsh lighting especially when there aren't solid lane lines and we've got a lot of light and shadow and cars breaking in front of us and it's reading the scene pretty well at least to the point that I'm not noticing the car reading it wrong look this guy actually has to talk to his taxi driver perfect Hey the taxi drivers give him the thumbs up I don't think he's doing worried about self-driving technology taking over his job name change checking it's amazing how much a car like this makes you realize all the terrible and terrifying things that are happening around you like that car that was just sort of like hanging off the edge of a curb like is he gonna pull out diseased not even paying attention to the road like that car that just crossed in front of us like it makes you so much more self aware of how much danger were constantly near when we're driving or riding in a car so that's it that completes our ride in a soft driving lift we got to Caesar's Palace and back without losing any money which is a pretty good feat in Las Vegas also no crashes for more self-driving cars weird self flying helicopters and flying cars and all that stuff from CES 2018 make sure you go to youtube.com slash the very click subscribe and the virtual calm slash CES that's where everything is thanks for watching