http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/technology/our-reporter-goes-for-a-spin-in-a-self-driving-uber-car.html 2016-09-14 12:34:49 Our Reporter Goes for a Spin in a Self-Driving Uber Car Uber is set to start its driverless car pilot program in Pittsburgh with a small fleet of modified Ford Fusions. === PITTSBURGH — I’m 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 For now, a few square miles in downtown Pittsburgh represent Uber’s dreams of a mobile future, in which people eschew car ownership in favor of hailing a safer, driverless ride directly from their smartphone. On Wednesday, “This is one of the most important things computers are going to do over the next 10 years,” said Anthony Levandowski, the leader of the company’s driverless car effort and a co-founder of Otto, For Uber, the stakes with the driverless experiment are high. Many have questioned why Uber is delving into autonomous vehicles, how much money the effort is costing and what the potential rewards might be. Not to mention that the company faces tough competition in the self-driving arena. Google has a seven-year head start on self-driving-car research. Automakers like Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Infiniti already offer semiautonomous driving features in some vehicles. Apple has been testing self-driving vehicles in an initiative called Project Titan, which has been having To catch up, Uber spent $680 million — roughly 1 percent of the company’s value — to buy Otto and its team of robotics veterans. Based in San Francisco, Uber has also poured millions of dollars into hiring hundreds of employees and spent more than 18 months getting the One lingering question over the effort is how driverless cars affect Uber’s business model. Much of the company’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. Uber also faces an uncertain regulatory environment for driverless vehicles, and that could impede rollouts of the cars across the country. “The regulatory barriers have to do with how big the risk can be and who will bear it,” said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who specializes in robotics. Government agencies like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will have to decide on minimum safety thresholds long before autonomous vehicles can see use on national highways, he said. Uber will start collecting data to answer some of those questions with its “It’s the ideal environment for testing,” said Raffi Krikorian, engineering director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center. “In a lot of ways, Pittsburgh is the double-black diamond of driving,” he said, using a ski analogy to underscore the challenge. I experienced that firsthand in nearly an hour of riding in Boron 6 in light downtown Pittsburgh traffic. Once the trial kicks off on Wednesday, a handful of test vehicles — At points during my ride, most of which I spent as a passenger in Boron 6’s back seat, my safety engineer 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, my safety engineer put his foot on the brake, immediately taking control of the car. If the safety engineer felt unsafe, he could at any time smack down a big red button in the center 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 3-D world updating in real time, and took a selfie from a camera built into the console. After the ride, Uber texts passengers an animated GIF of the 3-D modeled route taken, along with the selfie. But for most of the ride, I rarely felt unsafe. 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 near 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 Uber’s point of view, the self-driving vehicle operates more safely than any human driver. My driverless Uber stopped far behind cars in front of us at intersections. It stayed exactly at the speed limit — 25 miles per hour where we drove — even when there was no traffic around. At a stoplight, the car waited for the green signal before turning right, much to the irritation of human drivers behind us. Uber said autonomous cars can reduce vehicle-related deaths, including the nearly 40,000 that occurred in the United States last year, which was the deadliest for automotive-related deaths since 2008 and the largest year-over-year percentage increase in 50 years, according to Some of Uber’s driverless plans may have been overly ambitious. When As my ride in Boron 6 wound down — in total, I traveled roughly 20 miles 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 There will be bugs, such as the one I encountered my first time behind the wheel when the self-driving car didn’t drive itself. That’s the whole point of the pilot test. The wealth of sensors and recording equipment will see what happens — warts and all — “so we can learn more about what makes drivers and riders comfortable and safe,” said Emily Duff Bartel, a product manager at the Advanced Technologies Center. For me, it took about 10 minutes of troubleshooting to work through the glitches, but Boron 6 eventually turned on and started driving itself. That is, after a little bit of human intervention.