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Business News/ Science / Health/  A glimpse of the future in a driverless Uber
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A glimpse of the future in a driverless Uber

If the car works as advertised, someday neither I nor anybody else will sit in the driver's seat of a car again

A self driving Uber car drives down River Road on Pittsburgh’s Northside. A fleet of self-driving Ford Fusions began picking up Uber riders who opted to participate in a test programme. Photo: APPremium
A self driving Uber car drives down River Road on Pittsburgh’s Northside. A fleet of self-driving Ford Fusions began picking up Uber riders who opted to participate in a test programme. Photo: AP

Pittsburgh: I am parked on a patch of gravel outside the old Heinz ketchup bottling factory here early on a Monday morning, and I’m frustrated. My Uber self-driving car will not start driving itself.

The engineer in the passenger seat next to me, an Uber employee for all of three weeks who asked if I wanted to take a turn behind the wheel, chimes in to say I should turn the car off and start it again, as if rebooting a computer.

In this case, my “computer" is a modified Ford Fusion hybrid sedan code-named Boron 6, an atomic element often found in magnets, laundry detergent and nuclear reactors. Uber has outfitted it with more than 20 cameras, seven lasers, a spinning 360-degree laser-based detection system and 1,400 other aftermarket parts that render millions of bits of data about the environment in real time as I drive through it.

If the car works as advertised, someday neither I nor anybody else will sit in the driver’s seat of a car again.

For now, a few sq. km in Pittsburgh represent Uber’s dreams of a mobile future, in which people eschew car ownership in favour of hailing a safer, driverless ride directly from their smartphone.

I experienced those self-driving ambitions firsthand this week, riding in Boron 6 for about an hour in light downtown traffic. On Wednesday, Uber rolled out a pilot programme of its driverless cars to its most loyal customers in Pittsburgh, giving them the chance to hail an autonomous Uber for the first time.

With the trial, a handful of test vehicles—Ford Fusions at first—will roam the streets, each car coming with a human safety engineer who has undergone training to reassure riders that the process is safe.

During my ride, most of which I spent as a passenger in the back, my safety engineer proved his worth. At various moments, he had to take over the wheel and turn through intersections where locals are known to speed. When a truck driver backed out into the road illegally, he put his foot on the brake, immediately taking control of the car.

If the engineer felt unsafe, he could at any time smack down a big red button in the centre console—suspiciously similar to a seat ejector switch from a James Bond film—to disengage from self-driving mode. To turn the self-driving feature back on, he need only press a sleek steel button next to an embossed nameplate stamped on the console.

If I felt unsafe as a passenger, I could also request that the driver take over the vehicle, or press a button on a screen facing the back seat that would end the ride.

I also monitored the infrared environment the car had rendered from the screen, a 3D world updating in real time, and took a selfie from a camera built into the console.

After the ride, Uber texts to passengers an animated GIF of the 3D modelled route taken, along with the selfie.

But for most of the ride, I felt safe. In self-driving mode, turns and stops were near seamless, and I often had to check in with my driver to see whether he or the computer was steering the car.

I did grow a bit nervous a few times when watching how close the computer drove us to cars parked on the right side of a street. Though, admittedly, that could have been my mind playing tricks on me by being more vigilant than usual about my surroundings.

From the company’s point of view, the self-driving vehicle operates more safely than any human driver.

Uber said autonomous cars can reduce vehicle-related deaths, including the nearly 40,000 that occurred in the US last year, which was the deadliest for automotive-related deaths since 2008 and had the largest year-over-year percentage increase in 50 years, according to the National Safety Council.

My driverless Uber stopped far behind cars in front of us at intersections. It stayed exactly at the speed limit—40kmph where we drove—even when there was no traffic around. At one stoplight, the car waited for the green signal before turning right. The human drivers behind us were not pleased.

As my ride in Boron 6 wound down—in total, I travelled roughly 40km in the vehicle—it was hard not to feel like a celebrity, or perhaps more like a Martian. Other motorists gawked, and a boy on a Razor scooter gaped at me from a corner, waving to his mother to come look.

This future has been a long time coming. Advertising for self-driving cars goes at least as far back as the 1950s, with images of families in cars huddled around game boards in the back seat, playing dominoes. Some of the people involved in the Uber project have spent their entire careers working towards a day like Wednesday.

But how they will get rich from it remains unclear. Much of Uber’s success has been based on the premise that people could share their idle cars with the public by driving during their spare time. A self-driving car obviates the need for human drivers, a clear source of tension among Uber drivers today.

Company executives said self-driving cars would be only one part of Uber’s business in the future, with a mix of drivers and autonomous vehicles.

©2016/The New York Times

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Published: 16 Sep 2016, 01:10 AM IST
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