Learning from the past to move forward

By: Eric Meyhofer, CEO of Uber Advanced Technologies Group

Developing self-driving technology is one of the biggest technical challenges of our time. If successful, these vehicles have the potential to make our roads safer and transportation more affordable for everyone. With these big challenges and possibilities come an even greater responsibility: that of deploying a safe, reliable, and trustworthy self-driving system. That’s what we are building at ATG.

Over the past nine months, we’ve made safety core to everything we do. We announced our first set of safeguards in July, completed comprehensive internal and external safety reviews, and released our Safety Report in November. We implemented recommendations from our review processes, spanning technical, operational and organizational improvements. This required a lot of introspection and took some time. Now we are ready to move forward.

Today we are resuming on-road testing of self-driving operations in Pittsburgh. This follows the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s approval and months of vehicle testing on our track and manual driving on Pittsburgh streets.

Improving our self-driving system’s safety and performance has been our primary focus this year.