Uber Promises Its Self-Driving Cars Will Be Cheaper, Safer, Better

Ahead of the launch, Uber met with the people of Dallas to discuss the future of the company, driverless cars and proposed goals. Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, led a town hall meeting at the Uber offices, taking questions posed online and by attendees, and revealing a 2022 deadline for bringing autonomous cars to the market.

In the first stage of the program, Volvo SUVs fitted with autonomous technology will take to the streets with a human operator behind the wheel, Meyhofer said, as cited by the Dallas News. There will be not any driverless driving at first, he assured everyone: the cars will be driven manually as the cars collected data and mapped the streets, and the routes will be recreated by computer software on a track in Pittsburgh.

Meyhofer believes it won’t be until 2020 that the cars will drive themselves in certain parts of Dallas, but then too, there will be a human operator at the wheel, ready to take control of the vehicle. That last part is essential, because there was a human operator too in the car during the fatal 2018 Tempe crash, but he was engrossed in his phone and didn’t see a cyclist walking next to her bike on the side of the road.

Meyhofer acknowledged the crash, which prompted a shut-down of the Arizona program, was a low point for the company, but he promises a similar incident won’t occur. When Uber self-driving cars come to market in 2021 or 2022, they will be better, safer and cheaper than anything else coming from the competitors.

However, it will be another while until that happens, he concedes.

“It's not an event where you wake up one day and it's The Jetsons and everything is flying and driving itself,” Meyhofer said. “Some of these concerns that you have, we are going to have to solve.”