My Uber ride starts the same way as they always do. I pull out my phone and fire up the app. I confirm my location, punch in my destination, and request a ride.
Then the robot shows up.
It's a white Ford Fusion, wearing an elaborate headdress of spinning lasers and enough cameras to document the Super Bowl. And it's the centerpiece of Uber's latest attempt to disrupt transportation. Starting this morning, pre-selected Uber users in a 12-square-mile chunk of downtown Pittsburgh will have the option to ride in a self-driving car---with a human engineer at the wheel who can take over if things get dicey.
Uber has a straightforward goal: become even more efficient and profitable by jettisoning the human drivers who take home the majority of their customers' money. Or, as one Uber engineer puts it to me: getting rid of the overhead. (Putting a dent in the annual global rate of 1.2 million road deaths every year would be nice, too.)
"That pilot really pushes the ball forward for us," says Raffi Krikorian, who runs Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, in Pittsburgh.
Sliding into the tan leather seats of the second row, I see the car's not so different from any other. A big red button has replaced the driver's cup holder (it's the autonomous mode kill switch). And there's a guy sitting shotgun, reading indecipherable (to me, at least) streams of data off a laptop. Otherwise, the only significant difference from a standard car is the iPad-sized tablet mounted between the front seats, facing me.
"Welcome, Alex," it reads. "Let's ride."
Unlike most of the companies chasing fully autonomous cars, Uber wants to bring its customers into the experience. Beyond the obvious publicity benefits of launching first, even with human backups, Uber engineers say they want to know how non-engineers feel about their product.
That backseat tablet is there to suit the regular folk. The tablet interface includes an FAQ section addressing concerns like vehicle speed (25-30 mph, and yes, it'll break the speed limit) and what all the sensors on the roof are for. "We're working towards developing a transparent experience that provides riders with enough information about the trip and the vehicle system to feel safe and confident," says Emily Bartel, an Uber product manager.
The screen tells you when the car's driving itself, your speed, and your route. The lower two-thirds of the screen depict the car and its surroundings as understood by the spinning LIDAR unit on the roof. The idea is to give riders an idea of what the car sees, so they don't wonder if the robot has noticed that truck up ahead.
My ride starts with a tour of Pittsburgh's warehouse-filled Polish Hill, before we use one of the city's many bridges to cross the Allegheny River. As the car navigates four-way stops and traffic light-controlled intersections, the ride is mostly smooth, with scattered moments of aggressive acceleration or braking. The engineer at the wheel takes over control every few minutes. Once, he's not happy with how long the car is waiting before slowing for a pedestrian. Another time, he manually steers around a double parked truck, knowing the system will just stop and wait for it to move.
All along the route, passers-by gawk and take photos---Uber has been working in Pittsburgh for 18 months, but autonomous cars still aren't as common here as they are in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco-born company chose Pittsburgh for a few reasons. The City of Bridges is home to Carnegie Mellon University, with which Uber partnered on autonomous tech, and from which Uber poached dozens of researchers. And the city offers challenging test conditions, from rain and snow to a tangled grid of narrow streets. Maybe best of all, it's enthusiastically pro-tech.
"Startups will choose places based upon the ability to be innovative and there's never a time where regulation comes before innovation," says Mayor Bill Peduto. "If you stop the clock all you're doing is assuring that that tech and those jobs will be in another city."
While states like California, Michigan, and Nevada encourage and regulate autonomous tech, Pennsylvania's been all cheerleader. The state has no real rules about who can operate these things, or where. Which is extra cool, because it means that after half an hour in the back seat, an Uber rep asks if I'm interested in taking the wheel---or, you know, sitting in front of it.
Still, after hitting the nickel-sized silver button that makes the car drive itself, I can't demand a trip back to San Francisco. Like just about everyone working on full autonomy, Uber runs its car only in areas mapped in extreme detail. Those maps provide key context for the cars and let them focus on temporary obstacles like other cars and people.
Building those maps requires sending a human-driven, sensor-laden car down a stretch of road seven or eight times; using software to extract the important stuff like traffic light locations, crosswalks, and speed limits; having a human vet all that; and getting it onto the car. Uber will soon expand the cars' territory to include the main road connecting downtown to the airport, and Pittsburgh's bar- and student-filled South Side. But figuring out how to streamline that mapping process is key to the company's dreams of replacing a planet's worth of Uber drivers with software.
Uber won't say when, exactly, it expects to remove the bags of meat from the driver's seat. Its competitors are promising fully autonomous, market-ready cars in the next three to five years, and the ridesharing behemoth is likely on a similar timeline. But Uber has already managed to translate its experience to the autonomous age, complete with a "driver" rating. And no small talk required.
