D.C. will soon be a test bed for Uber’s self-driving cars, and the company will start setting the foundation on Friday.
Eric Meyhofer, the CEO of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), announced the rollout on Thursday at the Washington Auto Show. Uber ATG has already begun the testing process in five other cities: Dallas, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.
This doesn’t mean that self-driving cars are hitting D.C. streets right away. The initiative is a phased rollout that starts with Uber sending out cars manned and driven by safety-trained “Mission Specialist.” The aim of the first phase is to collect street data and build high-definition maps using cameras and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors equipped on the cars. The company says the data will eventually be used for virtual simulations and test track scenarios.
“Our hope is that this first round of manually driven data collection will lay the foundation for testing our vehicles in self-driving mode in Washington, DC. While we are excited about the possibilities, we remain committed to ensuring that every mile we drive on public roads contributes safe and meaningful learnings to inform our development work,” Danielle Burr, Uber’s head of federal affairs, said in a Medium post.
It’s not clear how long the first phase will take. The second development phase would have Uber’s cars driving autonomously, but still with two Uber workers in the car to observe and ensure safety. Pittsburgh is the only city where Uber has reached this phase. The company hopes to reach a point where self-driving cars staffed with a mission specialist can pick up and drop off passengers. The ultimate goal is to have completely self-driven, hailable cars without Uber reps in them.
According to the Washington Post, Uber ATG is starting slow in D.C. with just three manually driven cars.
The road to ubiquitous self-driving cars is long, and companies in the space have come across safety, financial and municipal obstacles to that end. Uber had to stop its autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona in 2018 when one of its cars struck and killed a pedestrian walking her bike. A federal investigation concluded that Uber, its safety driver, the pedestrian and the state all shared fault in the incident.
Waymo, a competitor in the self-driving space owned by Alphabet, abandoned its operations in Austin last year after years of testing and mapping the city. CNBC reported that the move was due to a slower than expected testing phase and a company devaluation.
Uber ATG won’t be alone in the District as it starts testing its vehicles. The District set up an Autonomous Vehicles Working Group in 2018 to explore how the technology can make the city safer, improve traffic, reduce carbon emissions and create workforce opportunities. Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company backed by Ford and Volkswagen, has been testing its tech in D.C. since 2018. HERE Technologies and VSI Labs have also done tests in Northern Virginia.
