We’ve been pushing out tons of new regarding autonomous aka driverless cars in the last year or so. Google has been a frontrunner in this regard, but a number of other companies are working on such vehicles, from Chinese companies, all the way to Ford, for example. That being said, we’ve just received a new piece of info regarding driverless cars, and this time around Uber is in the middle of happenings, read on.
Bloomberg has just released a new piece of info regarding Uber and the company’s driverless cars. The source says that uber is planning to replace its 1 million human drivers with robots, and believe it or not, they intend to do that really soon. The company will push their driverless cars on the streets of Pittsburgh before the end of summer, and very few people could have expected this to happen so soon. In any case, Uber has also agreed to buy Otto, a driverless truck startup which was actually founded at the beginning of this year. We still don’t know how much will Uber pay for this acquisition ($680 is the rumored price), but this startup was founded by former members of Google’s self-driving car project.
Now, some of you might remember that Uber had signed an agreement with Volvo earlier this year, as per which, Volvo will develop a fully autonomous car which will be ready in 2021. Speaking of Volvo, the car that will be used in the streets of Pittsburgh soon is actually the Volvo XC90. We don’t know how many of these cars will be on the streets of Pittsburgh, but Volvo has delivered a handful of these cars to Uber, while the remaining ones will be shipped by the end of this year (there are 100 in total). Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, said that the company has no intention of mass-producing its own cars, so that basically means they’ll deal directly with car manufacturers, like Volvo.
On top of all this, it is also worth mentioning that Otto’s co-founder, Anthony Levandoski, will take charge of Uber’s driverless car operation the moment Uber-Otto deal closes. That is more or less it, in any case, those of you who live in Pittsburgh will be able to hail autonomous Uber cars soon, though they will be supervised by humans, of course.