Uber has announced the largest deal in the history of autonomous car industry on Monday, placing a record order of 24,000 cars with the leading Swedish vehicle manufacturer, Volvo. As per industry analysts, the deal is likely to radically alter the American self-driving vehicles market landscape and commence a revolution of sorts in the multi-billion dollar robotics industry.
For the record, the U.S. based ride-hailing giant already operates a driverless taxi service in few of the U.S. cities, however, the taxi is controlled by a human operator. With several cities in the U.S. contemplating to allow driverless taxis, the latest deal is slated to proliferate the autonomous car market, with Volvo cars being fully self-driven, that is ferrying passengers to their destinations with zero human intervention. Although Uber is reportedly fine-tuning its technological expertise of self-driving cars, officials of the company claimed to unveil the first robotically-driven taxi by early 2019.
Meanwhile, Uber’s head of automotive alliances, Jeff Miller was quoted stating that the company is yet to elect the cities to begin its operations of fully autonomous taxi service. Reportedly, he further stated that the company is moving forward aggressively with its plans and is hopeful to ply tens of thousands of self-driving cars on the road once the technology is completely organized.
In consequence, cite experts, the deal is likely to demonstrate itself to be a patchwork of a gradual shift, as other self-driving vehicles manufacturers adapt to technological, atmospheric, geographical, political and regulatory constraints across the major cities around the world. As per experts, the success of self-driving cars experiments ultimately hinges on the assistance of municipal policymakers, who are at loggerheads with ride-hailing firms such as Uber for a long time.
Industry analysts have termed the deal as the beginning of drastic paradigm shift in the autonomous car industry, with a slew of collaborations anticipated among automobile companies and silicon-valley tech firms in the immediate future.
