<story><title>Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there&amp;#x27;s a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.&lt;p&gt;This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speleding</author><text>We don&amp;#x27;t need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to &amp;quot;pay for the other dude in the car&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there&amp;#x27;s a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.&lt;p&gt;This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agumonkey</author><text>What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they&amp;#x27;re skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).</text></comment>