Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

Re:Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh Thi... by jrussino on Thursday August 18, 2016 @04:22PM (#12316053)

This is not the former, this a step in the R&D process that is working toward the latter (and can act as PR in the meantime).

I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and collect data, figure out where the failure points are, etc.

But for sure they're building a fully-autonomous no-driver-needed car, and it's not ready yet so someone has to be there to take over when it fails.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh Thi... by Idontagree on Thursday August 18, 2016 @05:18PM (#12316395)

It's exactly the former, not sure why you say it isn't since you went on to explain the former and say that's what the car does.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh Thi... by jrussino on Thursday August 18, 2016 @05:51PM (#12316562)

I guess what I mean is, this is not a finished product that's a regular car with a "hands-free" mode; it's a prototype for a fully-autonomous driver-less car that's still under active development.

I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.

[ Parent | on HN ]