Uber’s self-driving cars debut in Pittsburgh
Up to 1,000 Uber customers will be part of the first real-world test in the US for regular people
When local residents begin riding in Uber Technologies Inc.’s self-driving cars, they may find the robots operate like driver’s-ed students.
On Monday, autonomous Ford Fusions owned by Uber, manned by a backup driver and an engineer in the front seat for safety, rolled slowly and cautiously through some of the city’s grittier neighborhoods as pedestrians curiously looked on. During a demonstration ride for The Wall Street Journal, our robo-taxi obeyed speed limits, stayed in its lane and never shot through yellow lights. It struggled with some obstacles and once jarringly hit the brakes.
The test represents Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick’s audacious vision to one day roll out an entire fleet of autonomous vehicles to replace the company’s roughly 1.5 million drivers and to ferry commuters, packages and food around urban centers. It is a dream shared by Detroit auto makers, Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 0.18 % ’s Elon Musk and a host of startups, which believe such driverless autos will one day be safer than manned vehicles.
It isn’t clear when fully autonomous vehicles will roam city streets, although Ford Motor Co. F -1.94 % has a five-year goal. In the meantime, Uber is turning Pittsburgh into an experimental lab, summoning the public to participate before any laws have been written. Uber invited up to 1,000 of its “most loyal” Pittsburgh customers to experience the futuristic vehicles in the first U.S. real-world test of selfdriving cars for regular people.
"It seems the testing could all be done in an urban environment without having human passengers, so this may be more marketing than real-world testing,” said David Zuby, executive vice president and chief research officer for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Uber said the test lets it gather valuable feedback from customers. “We’ve done extensive testing for 18 months and several members of our team have dedicated their careers to this kind of technology,” an Uber spokeswoman said.
An early view shows there are still kinks to work out. During our run, the sedan drove only about 20 yards before encountering an obstacle that caused it to halt: a large truck was stopped in the middle of a side street, straddling the center lane. The cars are programmed to stop and remain in their lanes in such cases, so the backup driver had to take control to scoot around the truck.
The car drove itself through a warehouse district and into the heavier traffic of downtown Pittsburgh. When several pedestrians spotted the radar device spinning on top of the Fusion, they stopped in the middle of the street to gape. The car waited for them to move. Minutes later, the car braked suddenly at the approach of a vehicle that appeared briefly to be veering into its path, jostling its passengers. Uber software writers are tweaking their programs to help the car distinguish between likely and unlikely threats. “We’re still rapidly learning,” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber’s Pittsburgh Advanced Technologies Center.
The cars can’t yet make right turns at red lights, which may frustrate impatient passengers and cars behind them. The move, which requires edging forward and carefully scanning for traffic, is beyond the program’s limits. Uber managers promised to rectify this soon.
Uber generally has programmed its cars to drive within speed limits, but it is considering making the cars a bit more aggressive to blend with traffic flows where people routinely speed. The driverless service won’t cover the entire city at first. The initial boundaries will encompass downtown Pittsburgh and several neighborhoods within a few miles. Uber said it hopes to drive to the airport within months and include the entire metropolitan area in a year.
The Fusions look normal, except for hardware on top of the roof that Uber developed itself. A spinning laser device sits on top of banks of cameras and other electronic devices.
Only four of the cars will be on the road initially, though Uber has more than a dozen Fusions available and said it plans as many as 100 specially equipped Volvo XC90s in Pittsburgh. Similar vehicles have been spotted driving around San Francisco.
Uber said it chose Pittsburgh for its research and development center partly because the city is home to Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top centers of autonomous-driving technology, creating a pool of talent for the company to tap.
Pittsburgh also has its own quirks. It is customary for the first driver at a stoplight who is signaling a left turn to have priority over oncoming traffic when the light turns green. People in the oncoming lanes generally allow that leftward dash and are puzzled or even angry if it doesn’t occur. Uber has programmed its cars to allow other cars to make the “Pittsburgh left” but not to make it themselves.
The city is also notoriously difficult to drive through with steep hills and three rivers that make streets twist and turn unpredictably. Crumbling bridges and potholes provide added thrills. Roads that appear to intersect on a map don’t meet in real life because they are at vastly different elevations. Lush weeds tend to obscure landmarks in the summer; ice makes the hills deadly in winter.
“If you can drive successfully in Pittsburgh, you’re pretty much done,” said Ragunathan Rajkumar, a professor at CMU who specializes in autonomous vehicles.