Uber, the world most popular real-time taxi company is planning to retest it’s autonomous vehicles ones again after one of it’s vehicle killed a pedestrian on the street in Arizona some eight months ago. The time is long and the company feels it’s time to restart it’s autonomous tests and see if it’s perfected yet.
The plan is to be overly cautious not to hit and kill anymore pedestrians. The plans during this new test is to have their autonomous vehicles travel on a One-mile loop between two of the company’s offices in Pittsburgh and will only be allowed to do so in a broad daylight and in dry weather conditions. TirePost also got reports from AutoBlog that the max speed is limited to about 25 MPH for every car testing. Another thing is that there won’t be any rides given to passengers in these test vehicles too eventhough Uber never specified how many vehicles it would conduct the tests with.
But the reports we got is that the level of autonomous vehicle testing for the company had been seriously down-scaled unlike how easy it was for them to conduct such tests in the past.
The entire reduction can be attributed to the incident 8 months ago. Before that time, there were about 200 autonomous test vehicles being used by Uber during those periods in the roads of Arizona, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.
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But the crash made Uber keep it’s autonomous testing cars off public roads. Even though the company says it’s ready to start testing again, it still has to wait for approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to begin again in Pittsburgh.
Also, parts of the new development will see the autonomous Uber testing vehicles having two passengers who will control the vehicles in case of any unusual behaviors and safety. Unlike before when it was just a single passenger that mans an autonomous vehicle.
The fact that Uber’s autonomous vehicle accidentally killed a pedestrian earlier this year (March precisely), getting trusted by the public might be a bit of an hurdle from the company hence the need for better testing with best results.
The success of the autonomous vehicles could be the beginning of Uber’s profitability because Uber drivers are parts of the big payouts by the company and it’s been a big hurdle which could me a big upgrade for the company’s net values considering the fact that Uber lost about $1 Billion during it’s operation.