The New York Times
March 6, 2018 “Uber’s Self-Driving Trucks Hit the Highway, but Not Local Roads” Daisuke Wakabayashi The article is about “Uber Freight”, which is a sub company of the shuttle service “Uber”. Uber plans to use autonomous driving for their semi trucks, and officially tested it on the highways of Arizona. The current event that I chose is about “Uber Freight”, and how they managed to get their self driving semi truck on the highways of Arizona. “Uber Freight” is a sub company of “Uber”, the shuttling and food delivery company. They just recently developed and tested their own self driving, or autonomous, semi truck. They tested their truck on the highways or Arizona, but they say that it won’t be going on the streets any time soon. Self driving trucks aren't anything new from Uber however, about a year ago, Uber did something similar to this. They developed a self driving truck that delivered 2,000 cases of budweiser beer 120 miles across Colorado. Their trip was successful, but now Uber is trying it again, but on a larger and more mass produced scale. Uber hopes to have these trucks take over the trucking industry, by making it easier and safer to deliver with their self drivings trucks. Uber says that this will actually be creating more jobs, in part because of greater demands as delivery costs fall. Uber doesn’t plan for the truck to do everything either, it still requires somebody to be in the truck in case of an emergency at the moment, and it can’t make it to the loading docks and park itself or unload. As of right now, Uber doesn’t plan to do anything huge with their new technology, but it will definitely change the way things get delivered. This event happened on the highways of Arizona. Uber was testing its new self driving semi trucks in a fairly straight line, so they decided to use Arizona's highways. This event happened on Tuesday, March 6, 2017, when Uber successuly got their self driving truck from Point A to point B, roughly a 120 mile distance. Uber decided that it was time to change the way we delivered things. For so long, people have had to drive long hours, without sleep, to deliver something from point A to B. Not only is this not the best way to go about doing things, but it’s also not the safest. Those drivers could fall asleep at any moment, and it can’t be good to be sitting in the same spot for up to 18 hours. We’ve gone from horse drawn carriage, to train, to semi truck, and Uber decided to improve the semi once more. In my opinion, I think this is really big news for the trucking, and the automotive industry. Autonomous and self driving cars aren’t anything extremely new, but Uber is definitely moving things along with their self driving trucks. Even if it's only meant for highways, this is definitely still progress. Can’t wait for this technology to improve and be seen in all models of cars. Tesla is still the leading company in autonomous, self driving cars, but the idea of self driving cars is definitely becoming a reality. Link:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/technology/uber-self-driving-trucks.html
3 Comments
Elisabeth Dukes
3/9/2018 09:22:05 pm
At first, I thought that Uber was only a delivery service. I never knew that they were developing autonomous cars/semi-trucks. Your article really grabbed my attention because of the futuristic feel of the topic. I really like how you implied that our technology is improving and what we once imagined is becoming a reality. Overall I feel that your blog post was beautifully written. Plus I learned something new!!!
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Noah Godina
3/10/2018 11:31:08 am
You article really shows how this technology of autonomous driving is not only making its way to just cars but even greater things. I am also very interested in the idea of autonomous driving. This also makes me wonder when all these things will be something that we do not think twice about but it will just be normal. Great blog post very interesting. Really enjoyed it!
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Micah
3/20/2018 02:43:36 pm
I think it is really cool how you showed one innovation inspiring another. The topics you discussed really interested me and it makes me think about many aspects of autonomous driving. Really good.
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