SAN FRANCISCO — Uber rolled out a fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco on Wednesday, bringing the industry one step closer to a world where robot cars shuttle passengers from place to place with no one behind the wheel.
Now anyone who orders a standard ride using the Uber app in San Francisco has a chance to be picked up in a semi-autonomous Volvo XC90. The cars won’t be driverless — there will be someone in the front seat ready to take control if necessary.
The launch comes three months after Uber debuted its first robot vehicles in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“In coming to San Francisco there are lots of new things that are being added,” Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), told a small gathering of reporters ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “We’re able to handle rain and more inclement weather, and we’re also able to handle now heavy bicycle traffic, which is much more prevalent in the city of San Francisco. … And of course the hills are kind of a fun thing.”
By expanding to a second market, Uber hopes to gather more data to improve its cars and software. The company is working toward a future where it will be commonplace for passengers to be picked up by Ubers with no one behind the wheel.
Riders can opt-out of the San Francisco pilot — if they are paired with a self-driving car, they will be notified and given the chance to cancel and request a regular ride. Each self-driving car is equipped with seven cameras and a radar sensor that let the car “see” obstacles, traffic lights and signs, a roof-mounted antenna for GPS positioning and a computer.
While companies such as Tesla Motors, Google and Nvidia have been awarded permits from the DMV to test autonomous vehicles on California roads, Uber says it didn’t seek such a permit, or any other special permission from the city or state before launching its San Francisco pilot program. Uber says it doesn’t need to because its cars are not fully autonomous, and they have drivers behind the wheel — similar to Teslas sold with an autopilot feature.
The law can be read that way, but doing so might cause tension between Uber and state regulators, according to Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and scholar with Stanford Law School who specializes in autonomous driving. He acknowledged that risk is unlikely to deter the company that built its entire ride-hailing business model by operating in a similar legal gray area.
Regulators responded to Uber’s pilot program in an emailed statement: “The DMV encourages the responsible exploration of self-driving cars,” the department wrote. “We have a permitting process in place to ensure public safety as this technology is being tested. Twenty manufacturers have already obtained permits to test hundreds of cars on California roads. Uber shall do the same.”
Levandowski announced the new Uber pilot program from the company’s ATG building in San Francisco — an unmarked warehouse on Harrison Street where self-driving Ubers lined up at the curb Tuesday, lidar sensors spinning on their roofs.
In a test drive with a reporter on board, one of the silver Volvo SUVs drove itself smoothly through stop-and-go traffic in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, gliding into a lane change while its driver’s hands hovered inches above the steering wheel that was turning itself.
Then the car encountered a parked truck that was blocking part of the lane. At the same time, a bird flew in front of its camera. It was too much — the car slammed on its brakes in the middle of the street, ceding control to its human driver.
But the car also “saw” pedestrians and bicycles and waited for them to pass before making turns. It noticed when the light turned green and started moving on its own, and once swerved to miss a truck sticking out into the road.
At one point during the trip, a man on the street stopped to take a picture with his smartphone, excited to see a self-driving car in action.
That’s the main benefit of Uber’s self-driving car programs — the publicity, Smith said. Uber is a long way from deploying cars that can operate entirely autonomously, he said, but putting semi-autonomous cars on the street is an “opportunity to expose the broader public to these technologies so that they’re not so strange and mystical.”
