Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stated at a transport forum that he believes in the future of autonomous vehicles, given enough time.
Leave it up to UBER’s CEO to defend the ultimate goal of UBER in the future which is a carless society with passengers solely driven by autonomous vehicles. According to Reuters earlier today (Apr. 11, 2018) at a transport forum, UBER CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stated Uber is still counting on autonomous driving as a tenet of transport in the future.
“We believe in it,” he said, adding that Uber considered autonomous vehicles “part of the solution” and in the long-term key to eliminating individual car ownership.
“Autonomous (vehicles) at maturity will be safer,” he said.
This all comes off the heels of a 49-year old woman, Elaine Herzberg, being struck and killed by an Uber autonomous vehicle with a distracted driver behind the wheel. Since Elaine’s death, Arizona suspended Uber’s self-driving ca’s on public roads.
In response to Elaine’s death, at the very least, Khosrowshahi did acknowledge that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were independently investigating the incident and that Uber is taking the matter very seriously.
No one is discounting autonomous cars as being a part of transportation in the near future. Many car companies are preemptively embracing and infusing self-driving technology in all their cars. Honda announced earlier today that their suite of advanced safety that mimics some current self-driving technology, Honda Sensing, will be standard on all their cars in 2022.
What’s irking some watchdogs of self-driving technology is the amount of government regulation or the lack thereof, that’s dictating how quick this technology is already on public roads.
For the foreseeable future, regular cars will rule supreme. Uber’s CEO not addressing the mix of regular drivers and self-driving cars is a disservice to his company and mankind.
Sure, autonomous technology can advance but so must the regulation to match. In the meantime, regular driving skills should be just as important.
