Skip to main content

Ex-Uber engineer drove coast-to-coast in a Prius without touching the wheel

Uber fired researcher Anthony Levandowski during its lengthy, high-profile legal battle with Waymo over stolen intellectual property. The engineer has little interest in getting his job at the ridesharing giant back. Instead, he founded a new company named Pronto that specializes in self-driving technology, and he claims to have taken one of its autonomous prototypes across the country with no human intervention.

Levandowski explained he started Pronto to build the best self-driving stack in the world. To achieve this ambitious goal, he enlisted some of the best minds in the business, including old colleagues and young talent fresh out of school. His approach focuses on software. “After all, the best and safest drivers don’t necessarily have the best eyes. They have the best brains and the most experience,” he wrote in a lengthy Medium post.

Recommended Videos

Making a car drive itself on a sunny day is easier than sending it out on its own in the pouring rain. Levandowski’s team aims to develop technology that can navigate even complex situations like low-light conditions, heavy rain, snow, and construction zones. And, interestingly, Pronto is tackling the challenging parts of self-driving before turning its attention to simpler, more straightforward conditions. Levandowski said this approach has already paid off.

In October 2018, Pronto fitted its technology to a Toyota Prius and sent it on a 3,099-mile trip from San Francisco to New York City without the slightest human intervention. That’s an impressive feat, and Pronto doesn’t downplay its significance, but it realistically points out the technology that powered it is a level-two system at best. It’s on par with Tesla’s Autopilot technology in terms of capacity, and it doesn’t work without a human driver permanently keeping an eye on the road ahead. Levandowski sees it as a solid foundation on which to build a true autonomous level-four system.

Until that happens, Pronto needs to make money. It has bundled some of the features it fitted to its Prius prototype into a suite of driving aids named Copilot that was developed specifically for class-eight trucks, a classification which encompasses a majority of the semi trucks meandering across America on a daily basis. Copilot is a highway safety system that reduces lane departures, collisions, and driver fatigue, according to Pronto’s website. It doesn’t replace the driver, however.

“It will be the first stand-alone real product for a real market that the self-driving industry has delivered,” Pronto promised. The company will release additional details about Copilot in early 2019.

Ronan Glon
Ronan Glon is an American automotive and tech journalist based in southern France. As a long-time contributor to Digital…
Uber to bring robotaxis to its ridesharing app via Cruise deal
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

Uber and autonomous car specialist Cruise are teaming up to offer robotaxi rides starting as early as next year.

Ridesharing giant Uber announced the multiyear partnership on Thursday, saying it will use Cruise’s modified Chevy Bolt vehicles for the service.

Read more
Waymo robotaxi attacked and set on fire in San Francisco
Waymo Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV

A Waymo self-driving car was set upon by vandals in San Francisco on Saturday evening.

According to footage and eyewitness reports of the incident, the attackers graffitied the car before smashing its windows and throwing fireworks inside. The vehicle then caught fire and burned before fire crews arrived to extinguish the blaze.

Read more
Beleaguered robotaxi startup Cruise lays off quarter of workforce
A Cruise autonomous car.

Beleaguered autonomous car startup Cruise has laid off 900 workers, equal to about a quarter of its workforce. The news comes a day after nine executives were also dismissed.

The General Motors-backed firm has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months, triggered by an accident on the streets of San Francisco in October when one of its self-driving cars came to a halt on top of a woman, pinning her to the ground just moments after she’d been hit by a human-driven car.

Read more