“For them, ultimate success doesn’t matter.” Sam Abuelsamid, who wrote about the self-driving car industry and is vice president of marketing at Michigan research firm Telemetry. “If you have an effective car that can drive safely, you are welcome to Uber and offer a ride.”
Still, it’s too early to say whether Kleenex Gambit will work.
LAINTY has changed since 2015. Kalanick is no longer at Uber and was removed from the hostile board in 2017. The company marked a grim milestone in 2018 when one of its own self-driving vehicles hit and killed a woman. Federal investigators later discovered the incident, and later discovered part of the ride-hailing giant, resulting in the suspension and reorganization of Uber’s automated development efforts.
In 2020, Uber sold its self-driving car units to competitors. But, in some ways, the existence of such assets (Uber is the middleman of drivers and riders, without its own (Robo) car), which seems to be working for the company. The company has finally recorded its first profit last year under the guidance of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
One potential problem with Uber is that its special role in the autonomous vehicle industry will not be super useful for some time. Uber is powerful because it has been among the calls of about 160 million active monthly users around the world. The company specializes in matching cars to millions of people who want rides. But there may not be millions of robots for a while.
Waymo, the U.S. robotics leader, has about 1,500 vehicles operating in five cities. Baidu said its next city, Dubai, will have 100 robots by the end of this year. “This is a market that will be subject to supply restrictions, not restricted,” said Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School. Self-driving car developers want access to Uber’s network — but since there aren’t too many self-driving cars, the company’s use is less useful in the near future.
This leads to another potential problem: Uber may have less power to get a lot of fares in the Robotaxi world. The company has spent billions of dollars to measure how much they need to pay individual drivers to cover the fare. Robotaxi tech developers who spend their own billions of dollars building self-dive software may want to get a larger portion of each fare. After all, companies including Tesla and Waymo operate their own ride-hailing apps. Do they really need Uber? “I promise they will push for a tougher deal,” Sherman said. (A spokesperson for Uber did not provide financial details of its existing partnership.)
Chinese Uber rival Didi, which acquired Uber’s Chinese business in 2016, appears to be following the old Uber self-driving script. It has its own subsidiary of self-driving car technology, which is building self-driving car software. It said last year that it will work with EV company GAC Aion to start producing robots this year.
It may be that Uber has not completely closed the door to own some of its own Robotaxi technology. Earlier this summer, The New York Times reported that Kalanick was back and received the U.S. division of China’s AV Company Pony.ai in negotiations and provided financial assistance from Uber. A Pony’s spokesman declined to comment on the report. Uber told the Times that it plans to work with many AV players around the world. In other words, Kleinex strategy.
Of course, one company is clearly missing one company in Uber’s independent partner press release. In a February interview, Uber CEO Khosrowshahi seemed to show that it wasn’t because of a lack of attempts. Tesla seems to want to own its entire self-driving car operation: technology, cars, maintenance and applications that power it — but Uber can still be a great robotics partner, Khosrowshahi said. “Ultimately, we hope that my charm and economic arguments will enable Tesla to work with us, too,” he said.
