Inside Uber's Driverless Car Experiment

Uber’s director of engineering Raffi Krikorian puts innovation on autopilot

- Xavier Harding

NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, UBER ROLLED INTO PENNSYLVANIA, POACHED RESEARCHERS FROM Carnegie Mellon University’s famed robotics program, and set up a secret facility to build an army of autonomous cars. In September, the company made history and finally dispatched its fleet of self-piloting cabs in Pittsburgh to pick up actual passengers. The cars rely on numerous sensors—cameras, lidar, GPS—to see where they’re going and avoid the number-one scourge of roadways everywhere: human error. Uber’s success could mean countless lives saved and the beginning of the end of human driving. Piloting the project is director of engineering Raffi Krikorian. He sat down with Popular Science to explain how his cars work, what the company will do in case of a crash, and what it’s like to commute to work each day in a self-driving vehicle.

The driverless-car business is getting crowded. Google, Lyft, Tesla— everyone is chasing this technology. You obviously don’t want to be left behind or left at the mercy of someone else’s tech. Is that the reason you’re doing this? What are the benefits to you?

Think of it this way: Driving is actually a pretty dangerous thing. I think something like more than a million people die in car accidents each year. Ninety percent of those are from human error. So if you think of the number of rides Uber offers on a daily basis— 5 million rides, on average— part of it ends up being a safety issue for us.

What other benefits are there besides safety?

We also think autonomous vehicles can do better than human drivers in cities. We think we can do much better congestion planning. We can be smart about how to move people around.