Uber Gives First Glimpse Of Its Self-driving Ford Fusion In Pittsburgh

Uber is testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, far from the sunny highways of its Bay Area home where much of the autonomous vehicle action has been unfolding.

The San Francisco on-demand ride company took a Pittsburgh Tribune reporter for a spin in a Ford Fusion hybrid, which reportedly drove itself for some portions of the trip.

It’s the first time the company has publicly talked about the Advanced Technology Center it opened 15 months ago in Pittsburgh to develop autonomous vehicles.

John Bares, head of the Pittsburgh lab, said that Pittsburgh is a perfect place to test Uber’s autonomous vehicles because of its snowy and rainy weather, narrow and hilly streets and outdated infrastructure. Bares previously ran the National Robotics Engineer Center at Carnegie Mellon and 40 CMU researchers jumped to Uber after he did.

One of the knocks against testing of self-driving cars to date has been that it has come in friendly climates like California and Nevada. But programs like Uber’s in Pittsburgh and on a test track set up outside of the traditional U.S. auto headquarters in Detroit are expected to show whether such systems can work in the rest of the country.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is working on self-driving car guidelines that it hopes to have ready by July. Google, Uber, Lyft and others have formed a coalition to push for uniform federal laws to supercede a patchwork of state rules that are being put into effect.

California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, Michigan, Tennessee, Florida and Washington, D.C., already have autonomous vehicle legislation. But in California and most other states a driver must be in position at all times to take over when the technology doesn’t react to driving conditions correctly. Nevada has rules that allow testing of driverless vehicles.

The testing in Pennsylvania has come before that state’s leaders have put final rules in place.

“Our first and foremost responsibility is safety,” Kurt Myers, the deputy secretary of driver and vehicle services in Pennsylvania told the Tribune. “But we want to do everything that we can to encourage the testing of this technology.”

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Cromwell Schubarth
Photo: Uber confirmed for the first time that it is actually testing self-driving cars on the streets, releasing this photo of a Ford it is running around the streets of Pittsburgh. (Uber)