According to Discovery News, Uber has started testing its first self-driving car on the streets of Pittsburgh in the United States.

The test car, a hybrid Ford Fusion, from Uber's Advanced Technologies Center (ATC) took to the streets last Thursday (May 19). The car is equipped with a sensor that has a radar, 22 large lenses and an array of spinning lasers, which gives the car a 360-degree field of vision of up to 100 metres.

Uber told Discovery News that it was "still in the early days of our self-driving efforts," and that it was "focused on getting the technology right and ensuring it's safe for everyone on the road."

Is the future driver-less?

Uber joins a small list of companies currently trying to make self-driving cars a reality.

Apart from automakers like Toyota, General Motors, BMW, and Audi attempting to engineer self-driving capabilities into their cars, tech giants Google and Apple are also experimenting on autonomous cars.

Why is this significant?

Uber's core business is to match commuters to vehicles to get them from Point A to B. And going by its rapid growth and rate of adoption, it seems that their business proposition is something popular with commuters.

Should Uber successfully implement driver-less cars and should regulators allow Uber to ply the roads with unmanned vehicles, it would mean that the traditional public/private transport model will radically change.

For one thing, taxi and private hire drivers will be looking at possible unemployment. For another, if Uber can do unmanned private hire cars well, what is stopping them from going into bus services?

Unmanned in Singapore

In Singapore, we are undergoing or have done several self-driving vehicle initiatives.

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The first example is the Auto Rider – an unmanned vehicle providing visitors to Gardens By The Bay 15-minute rides around the park. This was piloted in Dec 2015.

The second example involves a two-year trial for driver-less shuttles in Sentosa which will complement the tram and monorail system. It is expected to be open to public use in 2018.

A third example is the driver-less cargo trucks, an initiative between PSA Singapore and the Ministry of Transport (MOT). This involves driver-less cargo trucks being led by a human driving a ‘lead’ cargo truck.

Unmanned Uber in Singapore?

Uber, thru Lion City Rentals, made the news recently for snapping up 840 out of 870 Certificates Of Entitlements (COEs) in the latest bidding exercise. In the space of two months, they have snapped up 1,700 COEs.

It remains to be seen if they would continue shoring up more cars in future bidding rounds, or whether Uber is able to fill those cars with drivers - a challenge some taxi companies are facing with some 2,000 taxis languishing at the yard.

Perhaps when Uber perfects driver-less technology, it does not have to worry about having a shortage of drivers to commandeer its fleet of cars. But of course, it remains to be seen whether our regulators will actually allow a private entity to run a fleet of unmanned vehicles on our roads.

Top image from Uber

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