Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.
Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver’s seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.
The Volvo deal isn’t exclusive; Uber plans to partner with other automakers as it races to recruit more engineers. In July the company reached an agreement to buy Otto, a 91-employee driverless truck startup that was founded earlier this year and includes engineers from a number of high-profile tech companies attempting to bring driverless cars to market, including Google, Apple, and Tesla. Uber declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, but a person familiar with the deal says that if targets are met, it would be worth 1 percent of Uber’s most recent valuation. That would imply a price of about $680 million. Otto’s current employees will also collectively receive 20 percent of any profits Uber earns from building an autonomous trucking business.
Otto has developed a kit that allows big-rig trucks to steer themselves on highways, in theory freeing up the driver to nap in the back of the cabin. The system is being tested on highways around San Francisco. Aspects of the technology will be incorporated into Uber’s robot livery cabs and will be used to start an Uber-like service for long-haul trucking in the U.S., building on the intracity delivery services, like Uber Eats, that the company already offers.
The Otto deal is a coup for Uber in its simmering battle with Google, which has been plotting its own ride-sharing service using self-driving cars. Otto’s founders were key members of Google’s operation who decamped in January, because, according to Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski, “We were really excited about building something that could be launched early.”
Levandowski, one of the original engineers on the self-driving team at Google, started Otto with Lior Ron, who served as the head of product for Google Maps for five years; Claire Delaunay, a Google robotics lead; and Don Burnette, another veteran Google engineer. Google suffered another departure earlier this month when Urmson announced that he, too, was leaving.
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.” (Google also invests in Uber through Alphabet’s venture capital division, GV.)
Unlike Google and Tesla, Uber has no intention of manufacturing its own cars, Kalanick says. Instead, the company will strike deals with auto manufacturers, starting with Volvo Cars, and will develop kits for other models. The Otto deal will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
In Pittsburgh, customers will request cars the normal way, via Uber’s app, and will be paired with a driverless car at random. Trips will be free for the time being, rather than the standard local rate of $1.05 per mile. In the long run, Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”
Although Kalanick and other self-driving car advocates say the vehicles will ultimately save lives, they face harsh scrutiny for now. In July a driver using Tesla’s Autopilot service died after colliding with a tractor-trailer, apparently because both the driver and the car’s computers didn’t see it. (The crash is currently being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.) Google has seen a handful of accidents, but they’ve been less severe, in part because it limits its prototype cars to 25 miles per hour. Uber’s cars haven’t had any fender benders since they began road-testing in Pittsburgh in May, but at some point something will go wrong, according to Raffi Krikorian, the company’s engineering director. “We’re interacting with reality every day,” he says. “It’s coming.”
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, and everything that happens is recorded by cameras inside and outside the car so that any glitches can be ironed out. Each car is also equipped with a tablet computer in the back seat, designed to tell riders that they’re in an autonomous car and to explain what’s happening. “The goal is to wean us off of having drivers in the car, so we don’t want the public talking to our safety drivers,” Krikorian says.
On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” Krikorian says. “And there are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”
Bridges are hard in part because of the way that Uber’s system works. Over the past year and a half, 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. As the car moves, it collects data, and then using a large, liquid-cooled computer in the trunk, it compares what it sees with the preexisting maps to identify (and avoid) pedestrians, cyclists, stray dogs, and anything else. Bridges, unlike normal streets, offer few environmental cues—there are no buildings, for instance—making it hard for the car to figure out exactly where it is. Uber cars have Global Positioning System sensors, but those are only accurate within about 10 feet; Uber’s systems strive for accuracy down to the inch.s new mission is to secure Uber’s self-driving car of tomorrow, they’ll have their work cut out for them.
Significance of Pittsburgh Experiment
IN THE NEXT few weeks, some Pittsburghers will get a bunch of surprises when they call an Uber. First, the car will be a Volvo XC90—a luxury SUV a good deal fancier than the seemingly standard-issue Prius. Second, the ride will be free. And third, it’ll be driven by a robot.
Yes, Uber is launching a pilot fleet of autonomous Volvos in Steel City. The $300 million project, funded by the two companies, is the most aggressive implementation of autonomous driving ever (even when you take into account the fact that a person will still be sitting in the driver’s seat, ready to take over if the computer fails).
Which is great. But it’s not even the most important part. This deployment shows just how radically autonomous vehicles are going to re-shape the world—starting with cities. Specifically starting with Pittsburgh, home to robotics powerhouse Carnegie Mellon University and (not coincidentally) Uber’s engineering team.
Build Out, Not Up
If you want to build self-driving cars, you have two routes. One is to build autonomy piecemeal: Give a car adaptive cruise control, then teach it to stay in its lane, then teach it to change lanes, and so on. The car can go anywhere, as long as a human can drive when the car encounters a situation it can’t handle. Most big automakers favor this approach. “We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system,” Thomas Ruchatz, head of driver assistance systems at Audi, has said. You can already buy cars that handle highway driving for you (from Tesla and Mercedes, with others soon to follow).
Then there’s what Google calls the moonshot approach: Build a car that’s so capable, it doesn’t even have a steering wheel and pedals. But if that’s going to work, you have to create the kind of spaces where the car can drive, and not let the cars go anywhere else. That’s called geo-fencing.
Edwin Olson, a University of Michigan researcher who works on Toyota’s autonomous efforts, calls geo-fencing a “scalpel for carving away the tricky areas.” The car doesn’t encounter terrain it might have trouble with, and you can give it extremely detailed maps of its known world. Throw in things like school speed zones and right turn only lanes, so the car can focus its sensors and computing power on temporary obstacles like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. The maps even double as a tool for determining the car’s exact location, since GPS isn’t precise enough to handle driving on a busy road.
Building those maps takes time and effort: LIDAR-equipped cars must shuttle through the area of interest, usually multiple times. Software and humans must translate the sea of data into maps cars can easily understand and companies can easily update. So it makes sense to start with a constrained area—say, a few neighborhoods in downtown Pittsburgh—and build from there.
City Slickers
Ride-sharing is the perfect application for cars that don’t need drivers but are limited to a few square miles. Most customers aren’t going too far, and you can send human drivers to those who are. Robot cars don’t cut into your profits or complain about being mistreated. The car can stay in service nearly endlessly, so the money keeps coming in.
But cities see an opportunity here, too. “The three areas that the world is moving is shared, electric, and autonomous,” says Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto. “We’ll be at the forefront of the building of this new economy.”
Uber says it chose to test its Volvos in Pittsburgh to be close to its engineers. But “you’ll be seeing them going to other cities in due time,” a company spokesperson says.
It might seem risky to let companies test their freaky robot cars on your city’s streets, but mayors seem to be jumping at the opportunity to make their roads—and regulations—droid-friendly. Each of the seven finalists in this year’s Smart City Challenge, hosted by the Department of Transportation, included proposals for semi- or fully autonomous vehicles in their bids. Columbus, which won the $50 million top prize, plans a fleet of connected, electric, autonomous shuttles to carry shoppers and workers around a bustling business district. Austin pitched robo-cars to transport people between transit hubs and the local airport (and hosts Google autonomous vehicles today). San Francisco cited partnerships with Google X, Zoox and UC Berkeley in its proposal to let driverless vehicles handle deliveries and municipal services.
These cities’ clamoring for vehicular autonomy is about more than getting residents sweet rides or reducing traffic deaths and congestion. An entire sector of the economy might be up for grabs. “I think the biggest question in this is: So now do we see a shift in the auto industry to different kinds of places?” says Richard Florida, an urbanist who directs the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute. “Electronics makes up more of the value of a car than metal or steel,” he says. Forget landing that new factory—as companies compete to put their own driverless models onto dense, city streets, your metropolis has an opportunity to get in on the software side, and maybe make a killing.
But folks who want to follow Pittsburgh can’t just hope a tech giant or automaker lands in their city. They’ll need regulations that encourage dropping the human driver. And they need to make themselves into places where young, talented engineers (and their families) will want to live.
The Steel City has clearly pulled that off already. “Pittsburgh is spectacularly beautiful,” says Florida, who taught at Carnegie Mellon for nearly two decades. “The neighborhoods are unbelievable, the housing stock is phenomenal, it’s really affordable.” And it’s got Carnegie Mellon, home to one of the world’s premiere robotics and engineering programs.
Other cities have a bit of time to lure the next company looking to set some self-driving cars loose. Industry supplier Delphi is launching robo-taxis in Singapore in 2019. Ford plans to launch a ride-sharing program in 2021. So does BMW. General Motors and its partner Lyft are planning something similar, though they haven’t set a date.
Pittsburgh’s ahead, thanks to Uber. But others are racing to catch up.