Uber has been working on self-driving car technology and it showed off its progress by putting self-driving cars on the road in Pittsburgh. It’s now expanding the service to another city in the United States. Self-driving Uber cars are now hitting the streets of San Francisco, California. San Francisco is now the second place in the world where Uber is allowing passengers to ride in cars that drive themselves.
Since Uber doesn’t make cars on its own, it’s using the Volvo CX90 SUV. It has attacked a lidar which relies on laser beams and advanced wireless technology to enable the car to drive itself.
Since regulators don’t allow self-driving cars to have full freedom out on the road, a human driver will be behind the wheel at all times to take over should something go wrong. That certainly doesn’t mean that something will go wrong.
Uber’s self-driving car launch in Pittsburgh was on a limited scale. Only a small number of self-driving cars were offered to some of the more frequent Uber users in the city. That’s not how it’s going to be in San Francisco.
Starting today, any passenger who requests an UberX ride could be picked up by a self-driving car. It will be left completely up to chance, and if the user is chosen for a self-driving car, they will receive a notification information them and they will have the ability to cancel and request a normal driver.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars and Uber. Source: newsroom.uber