Washington, Sept. 14 – Ride-sharing service Uber started offering customers rides in self-driving cars Wednesday in Pittsburgh, in the first pilot test of this technology in the U.S.

 For now, just four self-driving Ford Fusions will be used to provide service in the western Pennsylvania city, marking the company’s first real test of the groundbreaking technology.

Rides will be free during the pilot phase and limited to downtown Pittsburgh.

“We’re inviting our most loyal Pittsburgh customers to experience the future first. If a Self-Driving Uber is available, we’ll send it along with a safety driver up front to make sure the ride goes smoothly.” Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement.

The self-driving Uber test is an important step in developing future transportation options, Kalanick said.

“Real-world testing is critical to the success of this technology. And creating a viable alternative to individual car ownership is important to the future of cities,” Kalanick said.

Uber plans to start offering rides to the airport in a few months and to cover the entire Pittsburgh metropolitan area, home to about 300,000 people, within a year.

“Of course, we can’t predict exactly what the future will hold. But we know that self-driving Ubers have enormous potential to further our mission and improve society: reducing the number of traffic accidents, which today kill 1.3 million people a year; freeing up the 20 percent of space in cities currently used to park the world’s billion plus cars; and cutting congestion, which wastes trillions of hours every year,” Uber said.

The San Francisco-based company has set the ambitious goal of replacing its more than 1.5 million drivers with self-driving automobiles in the future.

The most important task that computers will perform in the next 10 years will be to drive vehicles, said Uber vice president for self-driving technology, Anthony Levandowski.

The company selected Pittsburgh a year and a half ago as the home for its Advanced Technologies Center, or ATC, whose mission is to make self-driving cars a reality.

The Steel City is also the home of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top research centers for driverless technology.

Pittsburgh is an ideal place to test self-driving vehicles because of its geography, which features numerous hills, many bridges, and bad winter weather. EFE