From Sherwood News, August 23:
Uber chooses partners in self-driving race
Starting next year, some Uber users will be able to choose a Cruise robotaxi to ride with on their app, part of a multiyear partnership between Cruise and UberUBER $74.46 (1.36%).
General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise suspended all robotaxi services last year after a major incident in San Francisco where a vehicle ran over a pedestrian, and hasn’t restarted the service yet. But a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Uber partnership will follow Cruise’s own relaunch.
This could be an indication of how ride-hailing companies plan to position themselves in the self-driving race. Instead of developing its own technologies, Uber is choosing to be a “demand aggregator,” Bank of America analysts wrote in a report. By leveraging riders’ demand for Uber, robotaxi operators also make sure that their cars get used more efficiently.
Last year, Uber started to partner with Waymo, and riders in Phoenix are already hailing Waymo robotaxis through Uber. It also plans to deploy autonomous BYD vehicles in international markets....
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We have a few hundred posts on Uber, here's one from 2017:
Sure you do:"We're at the very beginning stages of becoming a robotics company," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Vanity Fair Summit in San Francisco in October. "As we move toward the future, autonomy is a pretty critical thing for us. It's existential."I think he chose his words carefully, an existential threat literally threatens the existence of a firm and he has known since at least 2014 that without major breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles Uber could never be worth what they had convinced investors to pay:
-via c|net, Dec. 2016
"When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, May 28, 2014