Uber & the Onion drive jobs & laughs in the self-driving car race

UBERhireToday there is some hilarious self-driving car news and obvious self-driving car plans. We saw a competing connected car publication report that The Onion’s latest spoof was real about the hit-and-run self-driving Toyota. Uber, on the other hand, is showing signs of entering into the self-driving field. In February, Uber announced a self-driving car partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Uber Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, near the CMU campus.

Many learned of Apple’s foray into electric cars by its help wanted postings and new hires. Uber has listed new jobs at its Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh that suggest they will be developing autonomous driving.

Uber is looking for engineers with experience in robotics, machine learning, communications, traffic simulation, vehicle testing, and software and hardware development.

Nineteen open jobs were advertised online at the Uber website on Monday.

Manufacturing engineers with prior experience in “vendor interactions and supplier management,” are requested.

The real clincher for self-driving development is

“UATC is seeking Systems Engineers with prior experience:

  • Autonomous systems development.
  • Safety testing and certification (all stages of development).
  • Automotive, mapping, or sensor applications.
  • Communications and networking architectures.
  • Big data system design.”

Future developers of autonomous cars working for Uber will get the perk of being “showered with Uber credits each month.”

Uber recently bought deCarta, a mapping platform that offers search, nearby points of interest, turn-by-turn directions and location APIs.

In case you’ve lost track, the current companies in the race for self-driving cars are NVIDIA, MobileEye, Audi, Honda , Delphi, Tesla,  Mercedes-Benz, Valeo’s Volkswagen, Renault-Nissan, Volvo, Hyundai and, Google.

Toyota is working on self-driving cars at the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center (MTC), along with  Bosch, Econolite, Ford, General Motors and Xerox.

Toyota is not working an a self-driving car with the “the capacity to immediately flee the scene of an accident to avoid legal repercussions without any human intervention,” as reported by The Onion.

The Onion is not the only humor source satirizing self-driving cars, Jimmy Fallon did a skit on the pros and cons of self-driving cars, noting “Pro: Hooking up in back seat. Con: Getting a speeding ticket after the car thinks it’s being told to go “Faster! Faster!”

In general however, self-driving cars do not go “Faster! Faster!,” they stay within the speed limit.

Contrary to some reports, there is not a Honda HR-V SLF “Selfie Edtion” with ten different selfie cameras. There is in development a platform for editing video footage from all the cameras in car and posting it to social media from Vonsor.