Six years after scrapping custom cars for the autonomous vehicle market, Uber is back, although not in the way expected. The ride-sharing giant has revealed a prototype version of Hyundai Ioniq 5 which will be used to collect autonomous driving data for partners like Waymo and WeRide.
He custom electric vehicle It adds eight lidar sensors (laser-based), nine radar sensors and 14 cameras through an alliance with the tuning company Roush Performance. One of NVIDIA’s Dual Drive Thor computers will process the collected data.
A total of 500 examples will begin circulating around the world this year, Uber says, and the first 50 will hit the streets this summer.
The company hopes to collect about two million miles of “high fidelity” data each month and produce the most diverse training data set possible for autonomous vehicles. Partners can use the content to better understand how an autonomous vehicle navigates or reacts to unexpected situations.
Why Uber is launching its own cars again
Want to be your source for autonomous driving data
Uber has not operated customized vehicles since 2020, when it sold its self-driving unit to Aurora Innovation. The company initially hoped to operate a full service with its own cars, but those plans were halted after an incident in 2018 in which a test car struck and killed a pedestrian.
Instead, the company began offering ride-sharing services for partners who were potential competitorssuch as Waymo, WeRide and Nuro. You may not be sitting in an Uber car, but you are using their app to book rides.
Uber expanded its ambitions earlier this year when it launched an AV Labs division aimed at collecting and sharing data. Ideally, the company becomes even more indispensable as robotaxi operators depend on it to gain real-world driving knowledge that they cannot obtain through their own cars or simulations.
Leading from behind the scenes
With this approach, Uber theoretically succeeds even if it never deploys its own robotaxis. The more an autonomous vehicle brand grows, the more likely it is to need data to improve its efficiency and safety. While larger companies like Waymo and Volkswagen are typically large enough to rely on their own knowledge, this helps them speed up their implementations; As a result, you might be hailing a self-driving ride much sooner.
Fountain: Uber
