An Uber autonomous vehicle in the streets of Pittsburgh in March 2018 (Illustration).
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Gene J. Puskar / AP / SIPA
Uber's research into autonomous cars is far from having been crowned with success despite an investment of 2.5 billion dollars (2.1 billion euros).
These expenses spread over five years did not allow engineers to make any real progress.
Worse, "the car does not drive well," said a manager of the relevant department, the Advanced Technologies Group, in an email to its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi three weeks ago.
In the message from
The Information
, the manager makes a discouraging observation.
The team "has simply failed to evolve and achieve significant success for such a long time that something has to be said before disaster strikes", warns the author of the email, relayed by
01net
.
He specifies that, in concrete terms, Uber's autonomous car "experiences difficulties with simple journeys or maneuvers".
One incident every 800 meters
Major internal dissensions could explain this glaring lack of progress.
While some see the development of autonomous driving tools as the only priority, others attach greater importance to safety.
The death of a woman run over in 2018 in the United States during a test phase of an autonomous Uber car also marked a halt in testing.
The investigation into this fatal accident is still ongoing.
Today, during experiments, an incident is recorded every 800 meters on average.
The objective that the company had set for 2019 was, however, one malfunction per section of 16 kilometers.
For this count, specialists list the minor problems observed such as too sudden gear changes.
Uber did not want to use its own models to ensure the round trips of its employees between two of its buildings in Pittsburgh (United States).
However, the two sites are only 1.5 kilometers apart.
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