Comment by zitterbewegung
1 day ago
Isn’t this a pivot I always thought Uber wanted to automate their whole fleet instead of having to pay people ?
1 day ago
Isn’t this a pivot I always thought Uber wanted to automate their whole fleet instead of having to pay people ?
Uber was working on self driving ten years ago. They had cars on the road loaded with cameras and sensors specifically to collect data. Then they negligently killed a woman crossing a street.
This isn't a pivot, this is them trying to sheepishly reenter the race they were dramatically ejected from.
The main reason Uber sold their self driving R&D unit was because they couldn't afford it. So they sold it to another company taking a 25% stake in Aurora and Uber CEO joined their board, the company is still operating automated trucking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Innovation?wprov=sfti1
They run trucks for Fedex in Texas and wants to offer an "Uber Freight network"
This exactly; self driving was a large part of their valuation iirc.
The part I don't fully understand is what leverage this gives Uber over anyone else? Uber doesn't have the fleet management, mechanics, cleaners or even storage facilities. They do have the most used taxi app, but that seems like a very small edge.
There's nothing stopping the car makers from running their own taxi service and they already have networks of mechanics and cleaner as well as some level of storage. They'd need to scale up, but they don't need to start from zero.
Ubers success is in large part build on not having to own AND MANAGE their cars. With self-driving cars that advantage disappears, unless they're gaming that "drivers" will buy the cars and lease it to them.