With 'Millions' Of Miles Completed In Testing, Uber's Self Driving Cars Will Empower Its Upcoming IPO

At its recent investors meet, Tesla made it clear that the future of transportation is autonomous, at least as envisioned by the company. The stress on an autonomous future was so much that the company¡¯s CEO Elon Musk went on to suggest that humans might soon demand a complete ban on driving by humans. But if so, will Tesla be the only firm ready to step up with its autonomous capabilities?

Not really. There are several players hot on the heels of the US auto maker when it comes to autonomous driving. One of them is Uber, which is now ready to go public by as soon as next month. And one of the strongest points of its IPO announcement will be its intensive research and data on self-driving vehicles.

To begin with, Uber has managed to grow its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) ¡ª the entity responsible for the development of its driverless solutions ¡ª to a 1000 person workforce from a team of just 40 Pittsburgh-based researchers in 2015. For this, the ride sharing firm sustained an expense of $457 million in research and development within 2018.

Uber's Volvo XC90 self driving car. (Image: Reuters)

Also read: Future Of Tesla Looks Completely Autonomous As Elon Musk Wows Investors With Upcoming Features

The result? The firm claims that it now has a collected data of ¡°millions¡± of autonomous vehicle testing miles through the ¡°tens of thousands¡± of passenger tripos that its 250 autonomous vehicles have completed so far.

All this has not been easy though, as the company has been a subject of immense criticism when one of its autonomous cars crashed and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The autonomous Volvo XC90 involved in the crash did not have its emergency braking system activated at the time of the crash. The incident required Uber to shut all its self-driving tests across the U.S., following which the country laid off as much as 100 autonomous vehicle operators.

Uber was able to restart its trials only in December last year, after eight months of halt. This was made possible by the firm by conducting months of trials of its self driving technology on a closed track and coming up with a detailed internal review. In addition, it intended to form a safety advisory board outside of its panel of experts. It even hired former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Christopher Hart as an advisor to assess its safety culture.

A fleet of Uber's Ford Fusion self driving cars. (Image: Reuters)

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This has not had any negative impact on the investments though, as the firm might soon be funded by a group led by Toyota and SoftBank with a $1 billion backup.

Uber, however, does not mean to phase out the drivers from its fleet just yet. The company says that it understands the specific use case for self-driving vehicles and that it is expecting a ¡°long period of hybrid autonomy¡± first before completely autonomous vehicles roll out.

Hence, the firm is accounting on human drivers to accelerate its transition towards non-human driven vehicles, which will supposedly bring down the cost of ridesharing, meal delivery as well as logistics services.