Uber's self-driving cars debut in Pittsburgh

When local residents begin riding in Uber Technologies Inc.'s self-driving cars, they may find the robots operate like driver's-ed students.

On Monday, autonomous Ford Fusions owned by Uber, manned by a backup driver and an engineer in the front seat for safety, rolled slowly and cautiously through some of the city's grittier neighborhoods as pedestrians curiously looked on. During a demonstration ride for The Wall Street Journal, our robo-taxi obeyed speed limits, stayed in its lane and never shot through yellow lights. It struggled with some obstacles and once jarringly hit the brakes.

The test represents Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick's audacious vision to one day roll out an entire fleet of autonomous vehicles to replace the company's roughly 1.5 million drivers and to ferry commuters, packages and food around urban centers. It is a dream shared by Detroit auto makers, Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 0.18 % 's Elon Musk and a host of startups, which believe such driverless autos will one day be safer than manned vehicles.

It isn't clear when fully autonomous vehicles will roam city streets, although Ford Motor Co. F -1.94 % has a five-year goal. In the meantime, Uber is turning Pittsburgh into an experimental lab, summoning the public to participate before any laws have been written. Uber invited up to 1,000 of its "most loyal" Pittsburgh customers to experience the futuristic vehicles in the first U.S. real-world test of self-driving cars for regular people.

"It seems the testing could all be done in an urban environment without having human passengers, so this may be more marketing than real-world testing," said David Zuby, executive vice president and chief research officer for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Uber said the test lets it gather valuable feedback from customers. "We've done extensive testing for 18 months and several members of our team have... read full story