In today’s world take Uber for example. Do you still need to bend over and pay an arm and a leg for regular yellow cab? What do you think Uber has done to the traditional cab business model? And now let’s suppose Lyft or Uber is interested creating a autonomous ride sharing service that requires no driver. Then what? What do you think naturally happens to the the folks that were cab drivers. Lyft and Uber might need to hire more R&D engineers to build this.
Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
The autonomous cars, launching this summer, are custom Volvo XC90s, supervised by humans in the driver’s seat.
Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project’s former director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”
