In the next few weeks, some Pittsburghers will get a bunch of surprises when they call an Uber. First, the car will be a Volvo XC90—a luxury SUV a good deal fancier than the seemingly standard-issue Prius. Second, the ride will be free. And third, it'll be driven by a robot.

Yes, Uber is launching a pilot fleet of autonomous Volvos in Steel City. The $300 million project, funded by the two companies, is the most aggressive implementation of autonomous driving ever (even when you take into account the fact that a person will still be sitting in the driver's seat, ready to take over if the computer fails).

Which is great. But it's not even the most important part. This deployment shows just how radically autonomous vehicles are going to re-shape the world—starting with cities. Specifically starting with Pittsburgh, home to robotics powerhouse Carnegie Mellon University and (not coincidentally) Uber's engineering team.

Volvo's XC90 with Uber branding Volvo

Build Out, Not Up

If you want to build self-driving cars, you have two routes. One is to build autonomy piecemeal: Give a car adaptive cruise control, then teach it to stay in its lane, then teach it to change lanes, and so on. The car can go anywhere, as long as a human can drive when the car encounters a situation it can't handle. Most big automakers favor this approach. "We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system," Thomas Ruchatz, head of driver assistance systems at Audi, has said. You can already buy cars that handle highway driving for you (from Tesla and Mercedes, with others soon to follow).

Then there's what Google calls the moonshot approach: Build a car that's so capable, it doesn't even have a steering wheel and pedals. But if that's going to work, you have to create the kind of spaces where the car can drive, and not let the cars go anywhere else. That's called geo-fencing.

Edwin Olson, a University of Michigan researcher who works on Toyota’s autonomous efforts, calls geo-fencing a "scalpel for carving away the tricky areas." The car doesn't encounter terrain it might have trouble with, and you can give it extremely detailed maps of its known world. Throw in things like school speed zones and right turn only lanes, so the car can focus its sensors and computing power on temporary obstacles like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. The maps even double as a tool for determining the car's exact location, since GPS isn't precise enough to handle driving on a busy road.

Building those maps takes time and effort: LIDAR-equipped cars must shuttle through the area of interest, usually multiple times. Software and humans must translate the sea of data into maps cars can easily understand and companies can easily update. So it makes sense to start with a constrained area—say, a few neighborhoods in downtown Pittsburgh—and build from there.

City Slickers

Ride-sharing is the perfect application for cars that don't need drivers but are limited to a few square miles. Most customers aren't going too far, and you can send human drivers to those who are. Robot cars don't cut into your profits or complain about being mistreated. The car can stay in service nearly endlessly, so the money keeps coming in.

But cities see an opportunity here, too. “The three areas that the world is moving is shared, electric, and autonomous," says Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto. "We’ll be at the forefront of the building of this new economy.”

Uber says it chose to test its Volvos in Pittsburgh to be close to its engineers. But “you’ll be seeing them going to other cities in due time," a company spokesperson says.

It might seem risky to let companies test their freaky robot cars on your city's streets, but mayors seem to be jumping at the opportunity to make their roads—and regulations—droid-friendly. Each of the seven finalists in this year's Smart City Challenge, hosted by the Department of Transportation, included proposals for semi- or fully autonomous vehicles in their bids. Columbus, which won the $50 million top prize, plans a fleet of connected, electric, autonomous shuttles to carry shoppers and workers around a bustling business district. Austin pitched robo-cars to transport people between transit hubs and the local airport (and hosts Google autonomous vehicles today). San Francisco cited partnerships with Google X, Zoox and UC Berkeley in its proposal to let driverless vehicles handle deliveries and municipal services.

These cities' clamoring for vehicular autonomy is about more than getting residents sweet rides or reducing traffic deaths and congestion. An entire sector of the economy might be up for grabs. “I think the biggest question in this is: So now do we see a shift in the auto industry to different kinds of places?” says Richard Florida, an urbanist who directs the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute. "Electronics makes up more of the value of a car than metal or steel,” he says. Forget landing that new factory—as companies compete to put their own driverless models onto dense, city streets, your metropolis has an opportunity to get in on the software side, and maybe make a killing.

But folks who want to follow Pittsburgh can’t just hope a tech giant or automaker lands in their city. They'll need regulations that encourage dropping the human driver. And they need to make themselves into places where young, talented engineers (and their families) will want to live.

The Steel City has clearly pulled that off already. “Pittsburgh is spectacularly beautiful,” says Florida, who taught at Carnegie Mellon for nearly two decades. "The neighborhoods are unbelievable, the housing stock is phenomenal, it’s really affordable." And it's got Carnegie Mellon, home to one of the world's premiere robotics and engineering programs.

Other cities have a bit of time to lure the next company looking to set some self-driving cars loose. Industry supplier Delphi is launching robo-taxis in Singapore in 2019. Ford plans to launch a ride-sharing program in 2021. So does BMW. General Motors and its partner Lyft are planning something similar, though they haven't set a date.

Pittsburgh's ahead, thanks to Uber. But others are racing to catch up. Yinz enjoy your unique Volvo robots while yinz can.