Uber operates on an autonomous food delivery system

Uber has not completely abandoned its idea of ​​a self-driving car. At the moment, the US company wants to use it for a food delivery service called UberEats. The California-based company will no longer be building its own autonomous cars. Instead, it opted to partner with Motional, a company that specializes in the manufacture of autonomous vehicles.

This is the latter Officially announced on its website Uber’s upcoming project.

A pilot project was launched early next year

According to Motion, both companies will first work on a pilot project. It will come into effect in early 2022. Throughout the trial period, food will only be delivered to the city of Santa Monica, California. It is noteworthy that the city has a large staff of Motional.

On top of that, it should not allow users to benefit from all the food options available at Uber Eats. Instead, you should select food boxes from the set of restaurants selected for the project.

Motional plans to make its brand new, latest generation autonomous car available for the project. The latter is a fully electric vehicle called the Hyndai IONIQ 5. However, the company does not want to use them at present. He is thinking of making some changes to the models used throughout the project.

Tried to better explain the motion plan communicated by Engadget. What we can take from this interview is that cars are not really without a driver as one might think. The company, through one of its spokespersons, will have security operators in the delivery vehicles. They will act anyway if problems arise.

The project that wants to make the old Uber dream come true

At the beginning of the Uber adventure, the company’s top management clearly expressed its desire to eliminate human employees completely from its services. At that time, Uber Eats did not exist. The old management was talking about taxi drivers.

Through Travis Callanic, Uber’s former CEO, management has pointed out that self-driving vehicles reduce overhead costs. As a result, he noted, “the reason Uber is so expensive is because you pay the other person in the car.”

Following that, he added, “When there is no other person in the car, it is cheaper to carry the Uber anywhere.” In recent years, Uber has tried in vain to fulfill its founder’s dream, forcing Aurora to sell its branch of autonomous vehicles. The autonomous branch became known as the Advanced Technical Committee.

Thanks to this partnership with Motional, Uber has the opportunity to renew this old dream. An unprecedented partnership that transcends all. In fact, this is the first time a road distribution company and an autonomous vehicle supplier have actually worked on this type of project.

This is despite the fact that Uber has partnered with Waymo, another company that already specializes in the production of autonomous cars. For its part, Motional is a partner of Lyft, a service provider such as Uber. Motion’s partnership with the elevator will lead to the launch of an autonomous park. It should not come into force before 2023.

So let’s hope Uber never drops the project again. Although there are some gray areas in the project.

Source: Engadget