Uber's Self-Driving Cars Will Be Picking Up Customers In 18 Months, Says CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

According to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, we’ve already reached a time in human history when new generations will not have to learn to drive anymore. 

He believes not only that self-driving cars are the future, like many others, but also that we’re on the cusp of having them be a normal part of civilization. He was happy to say as much at The Year Ahead 2018 conference this week.

“We will have autonomous cars on the road, I believe, within the next 18 months,” Khosrowshahi insisted. “Not as a test case but as a real case out there.” However, he did admit that we’re not 100 percent there, saying “true autonomy for every single use case is some ways away.”

Uber, for one, is already testing out self-driving cars, sending them to pick up users that volunteer in Tempe, Arizona. However, the customers are left completely to the devices of a machine, as the cars are sent with two Uber engineers in the front seats to deal with an emergency. The company is also testing out the technology in other cities like Phoenix and Pittsburgh, where its Advanced Technologies Group is located.

However, Khosrowshahi believes that when users opt for self-driving cars very rarely will it be realistically feasible, and 95 percent of the time weather, road conditions, or other variables will make a human driver necessary. “For five percent of cases, everything is going to fall into place and we will send an autonomous car,” he said.

But over time, as the autonomous vehicles learn the city they’re driving in better, that five percent will grow larger, probably in about five years Khosrowshahi says. And that five-year training period will need to happen in every city Uber deploys self-driving cars.

All in all Khosrowshahi believes Uber will take 10 to 15 years for its autonomous vehicles to become commonplace in America.

But that’s not Uber’s only plan for the future. It’ also working on something called Uber Elevate, a fleet of flying cars that would operate in the same way their road vehicles do. These VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft will have quieter rotors, allowing them to perform takeoffs and landings in populated areas, as long as there’s a designated landing space nearby.

“If you add sharing into the equation you can actually get the economics of going from A to B,” Khosrowshahi said. “We think within five-to-seven years to a place where normal people would think about taking these flying cars. That’ll be the beginning and then it’s about scaling.”