Robocab

I can’t tell if Uber’s decision to offer retirement planning to people who use its app to find people who wish to be driven somewhere for a fee its drivers in several cities is a sign it’s about to admit it is in fact a taxi service, or an attempt to improve its public image.

Uber is now offering drivers in select cities free financial planning through a partnership with a robo-advisor called Betterment. This announcement is coming on the heels of two huge headlines in Uber-land: the imminent rollout of the ride-hail startup’s first self-driving car, and a federal judge’s rejection of a proposed $100 million settlement with drivers in California in a worker misclassification lawsuit.

Uber mentions neither in its announcement about teaming up with Betterment. The fee-free services will be first available to drivers in Seattle, Boston, Chicago, and New Jersey, with the option to expand the offering to drivers in other cities later this year. Drivers can use the Uber app to open a Betterment IRA or Roth IRA for free for the first year, with no minimum account balance and a team of advisors to walk them through the steps of setting up a retirement account.

More on Betterment.

Uber is touting the new services as part of its ongoing effort to help its drivers save money and plan for the future. Meanwhile in the background, the company is waging a costly fight to keep drivers classified as independent contractors, arguing that it is a technology platform that connects drivers to riders, not an employer in the traditional sense. The class action lawsuit challenging that classification appeared headed toward a $100 million settlement, until last week when a judge rejected it as unfair and inadequate.

Not that it will matter once Uber replaces its ride sharing human drivers with K.I.T.T. and the libertarians who think Uber is the greatest thing since the U.S. Constitution because they don’t think that well will claim this wouldn’t have happened if the drivers hadn’t stood up for their rights.

But the day when Uber goes to court to argue that its unmanned vehicles are fully independent and so the company isn’t liable because a car took a short cut through a maternity ward and a river is ways off.

Uber announced last week that it will bring a fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs to Pittsburgh starting at the end of this month. This is part of a $300 million partnership, with the end goal being a replacement of Uber’s one million human drivers with robot ones. While the fleet is being lauded as “self-driving,” the cars aren’t fully there yet.

…Uber’s Pittsburgh experiment will be using Level 3 autonomy. The cars will not be “self-driving” yet, like the Google Car.

Self-driving and autonomous are not synonymous with “driverless.” This is an important distinction to make, especially if you’re going to start comparing what Uber’s doing with what Google has been doing.

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It’s quite fantastic that Uber is working to achieve Level 4 autonomy. Even though this is not a totally driverless car (yet) that some are making it out to be, it’s still an extremely important vision to autonomous cars and the next stage of ride sharing.

I’m going to say that cars with Level 4 autonomy will represent the end of ride sharing, unless the idea is that passengers going to different places will share the cars. Perhaps the cars could drive on a set route, and have certain locations where the car will stop and people can get on. And then they could notify the car when they want to get off at one of these preset locations by ringing some sort of bell? That might work.