Nine months after a crash in Arizona killed a cyclist, Uber is again testing self-driving cars on the streets of Toronto.
The ride-hailing company says it has resumed testing of its autonomous vehicles in Canada’s largest city — nearly a year after one of its driverless vehicles struck and killed a cyclist in Arizona, prompting Uber to suspend further tests.
The cars now being tested in Toronto are manually operated by a "mission specialist," accompanied by another specialist in the passenger seat who will be driving the cars on Toronto’s highways to further Uber’s research into automatic mapping, the company said in a news release issued on Thursday. Uber said that it is carrying out similar testing of its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco and Pittsburgh.
The company says its research and development team in Toronto is developing artificial intelligence technology that enables its self-driving cars to map routes on the go, where maps are unavailable, in real-time.
Uber also says that it plans to double the size of its Toronto research team in 2019 and will relocate its research and development hub to Bathurst College Centre, a four-storey building located in downtown Toronto.
In September, Uber announced that is investing more than $200 million over five years in its self-driving research and development hub in Toronto. At the time, the company announced plans to launch an engineering hub in Toronto in early 2019, which it says will create 500 jobs in the city.
