Uber rehired some of these drivers and gave them more training on safe operation of the vehicles. Now, months later, Uber is slowly rolling out a new, much more modest testing program.
The Verge reports that initially, “Uber’s self-driving Volvo SUVs will be confined to a one-mile loop around Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where the company’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) is headquartered.” Uber will only have two vehicles on the road at first, with a safety driver in the driver’s seat and a second Uber employee monitoring the car from the passenger seat. The cars will initially have a top speed of 25mph.
Uber’s engineers will need to work hard to regain the ground they lost over the last nine months; however, Uber’s competitors seem to be struggling as well.
A Tesla customer with Autopilot enabled died in a crash later the same month as Uber’s deadly crash. Later in the year, Tesla stopped selling its “full self-driving” upgrade, seemingly an admission that the company was nowhere close to shipping the capability.
Meanwhile, Waymo, long seen as an industry leader, did not reach its previously stated goal of launching a public, fully driverless taxi service by the end of 2018. Instead earlier this month Waymo launched a service with safety drivers behind the wheel that was only open to people already in its closed testing program.