Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Behind the wheel of Uber’s first self-driving car”.
So a lot of people say that the future of Transportation is self-driving cars, we’re standing next to one right here in Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania, it’s owned by uber and we’re going to get behind the wheel and drive it ourselves. Well, I guess it’s cars gon na actually drive itself and I’m just going to be sitting there. Let’S go check it out. Oh – and I mention I don’t know how to drive all right, I’m ready to engage I’m good, I’m going to engage the car into self-driving, and I do that by pushing the silver button to my right. The white light turned in and turned on from, blue the car is now driving itself passing by some.
Some factories here are some beautiful oil. This is the Heinz Factory here to the left. They definitely have the impulse to put my foot on the gas, even though it’s doing it all itself. So I’ll turn back here and say: hey what’s up, but I’m not going to do that and it’s accelerating a little bit as we going up a hill.
But now it’s slowing down and it’s stopping and I did it all by itself – I’m very proud of your car. The turn signal came on automatically and now it’s turning itself on to this bridge, and it just did that all by that’s incredible. Okay, so this this guy jag doubt into our lane, so I decided to take control of the car so that we don’t die what what they’re telling me is that it knows how fast to go. It knows what the speed limit is because uber has mapped the city, and so it has programmed into its software how fast we can go depending on where we are in the city.
If we were to go somewhere that was unmapped, the car would refuse to go into autonomy mode. I think it’s a little close to those parked cars, but okay kind of moved to the left there a little bit. I kicked us out again. That’S all right! There’S a there’s a lot of obstacles on this road, so maybe this is a road that you would want to be in control yourself.
I’M now driving the self-driving car and I just want to say screw you robots all right now it is driving itself or approaching ubers Technology Center here and we’re here success. We survived cool so over says that the ultimate goal is to have a system in place where there’s no drivers in these cars that you basically pull out your phone. Pat, the app and a car comes to your home with nobody in it and I’ll. Take you to your destination, Travis kalanick, the CEO of uber, has talked about an idea of Perpetual trips that the cars are just constantly picking people up, dropping them off sort of akin to mass transit in a way, but obviously automated totally automated and running itself.
We got a chance to see some of that up close, it’s obviously in its very early stages here, but it was really cool to see especially be behind the wheel. As the car was driving itself, I felt very fluid very natural. I was always scared. Maybe half a second when it got a little bit close to some parked cars, but other than that.
It’S clear that this is a technology. That’S well on its way and it’ll be really interesting to see how Eber rolls in sat in the future. So for more videos like this go to the verge, calm or youtube.com, slash the verge .