day it launched, a car ran straight through a red light.
Uber has since said the incident was due to human error, but it's not clear whether that means a person drove through the light or failed to stop the car from doing so while it was in autonomous mode. Either way, Uber knows its cars will fail from time-to-time, which is why a safety driver and engineer sit upfront while the cars autonomously drive people.
(Uber shut down the San Francisco pilot program on Wednesday after the California DMV revoked the cars' registration.)
Uber let us get behind the wheel for the launch of its pilot program in Pittsburgh in September, and we got to see firsthand what it's like when the car fails and needs a driver to take over.
Keep in mind that Uber used self-driving Volvo XC90s for the San Francisco pilot instead of the self-driving Ford Fusions in Pittsburgh. As a result, the interface we experienced is slightly different from the one in the Volvo cars.
But you can scroll down to get a basic sense of what it's like when the robot cars need help:
First, a brief introduction to Uber's self-driving car in Pittsburgh: a Ford Fusion retrofitted with autonomous tech. The car has a massive, spinning lidar on top and 20 cameras. That doesn't even factor in the several radar and lidar modules on the side and GPS units helping the car drive safely.
Lidar is an acronym for light-sensing radar, a remote-sensing technology that uses lasers to map out the world around the car so it can "see" obstacles.
That lidar on top is exceptionally powerful. Eric Meyhofer, the engineering lead for the self-driving-car project, says it's capable of firing 1.4 million laser points per second to build a 3D view of the car's surroundings. A camera under the giant lidar machinery transforms that black-and-white 3D view into color so it can sense things like traffic-light changes.
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