 Self-driving cars are the future of transportation, and a lot of experts say that we're not going to see them on the road for at least another 10 years. But some companies just can't wait, like Uber. Uber started playing around with the idea of self-driving cars a few years ago. Then last September, it launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh as a way to give a select group of riders their first taste of an autonomous future. Today, Uber is ready to launch its second self-driving service here in San Francisco. We spoke to Lior Ron, one of the heads of Uber's self-driving program, who explained how their partnership with Volvo is a key step towards pushing autonomous driving onto public roads. Aesthetically, we were able to actually integrate the technology much more seamlessly into the car. We have as many of the sensors embedded into the car. For example, the front radars will not show up randomly on the front, but they'll be integrated into the grid of the car. And everything we need in terms of sensors, all the antennas, the GPS, everything you've seen on the Fusion is now nicely, compactly integrated into that pod. Uber doesn't want to unnecessarily accelerate the adoption, but rather take its time focusing on particular cities and neighborhoods while building a database of driving patterns. And for a number of reasons, San Francisco seems like a great city to start the program. We can now have those cars close to the Uber engineers, to the Uber team, to the Uber self-driving engineers here. We can experience a much bigger city with a lot of different permutations, a lot of different neighborhoods, a lot of different street formations, a lot of unique or more common San Francisco sites such as bikers and heavy traffic and heavy pedestrians. Steep hills. Steep hills. Cable cars. A lot of fun dealing with cable cars. It's just a much wider basically operational area that we can iterate on the technology. Naturally, we took a test ride to see how it all works. Self-driving Uber has arrived. Ah, excellent. I didn't even have to hail it. All right. Where would you like to go? We're going to go to a pizza. Pizza? Yeah. Sounds good to me. How does it work when you're already in the car? Zero minutes away. Yeah. Makes sense. We're in the car. The drive will be self-driven as much as possible, but not all of it. This is about operating and iterating on the technology. So the drivers are there to either take control when needed or sort of manually drive in the portions of the route that is being driven. The XC90 was way more streamlined than the self-driving Ford Fusions Uber is using in Pittsburgh. There are only seven cameras down from 22 on the Ford Fusion and 3D video for a wider field of vision. Radar sensors are mounted behind the plastic bumper rather than protruding off the side of the vehicle. And the spinning LIDAR detector and camera suite on the roof is way more compact. So what about the ride? In general, it was pretty uneventful. Uber self-driving cars in San Francisco will always feature two safety engineers in the front seats to take over just in case things get complicated. And during our ride, the driver did just that, occasionally taking control when conditions got tricky. But for the most part, the car drove itself, seamlessly navigating through bad weather and distracted pedestrians with relative ease. But as convenient as self-driving could be, there will be a lot of controversy that follows. How safe will it all be once it becomes widely adopted? Can the cars be programmed to make ethical choices? And most importantly, what will happen to all those jobs? It's going to be a hybrid network regardless. It's not going to be all either or, black or white. There's always going to be room for drivers to cover maybe some difficult areas, maybe some snowy or some challenging condition, maybe peak demand or time where the self-driving cars cannot actually fulfill that request. So regardless, the future is going to be hybrid, and it's going to take us a while to get there. For now, only a limited number of people will get a taste of Uber's self-driving future. But eventually, everyone may experience the shock of hailing a ride on their smartphone only to have a car with no one inside show up. I feel if you guys can build a self-driving car that can also flick off people when they drive like assholes, then you will have achieved the type of vehicle that people will want to have and ride in the most.