“For them, it doesn’t really matter who finally succeeds,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-managing vehicle industry and the Vice President of Marketing at Telemetry, a research firm in Michigan. “If you have a car that can work and drive safely, you are welcome to come to Uber and offer rides.”
Yet it is too early to say whether the Kleenex Gambit will work.
Many have changed since 2015. Kalanick is no longer with Uber, which was sold by a hostile board in 2017. The company marked a grim milestone in 2018 when one of its own self -driving vehicles beat and killed a woman. The incident, for which the federal investigators later found the ride giant partially responsible, led to a suspension and then reorganization of Uber’s self-managed development effort.
In 2020, Uber sold its autonomous forecen to a participant. In some ways, this existence of existence-where Uber serves as the middleman for drivers and riders, without owning his own (Robo) car-who worked for the business. Under the leadership of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company finally recorded its first profit last year.
A potential problem for Uber is that its particular role in the autonomous vehicle industry will be very useful for a while. Uber is powerful because it is already on the phones of approximately 160 million active monthly users around the world. The company is good at fitting people who drive cars with the millions of people who want rides. But there will probably not be millions of robotics for a while.
Waymo, the US leader in robotics, has about 1,500 vehicles working in five cities. Baidu says the next city, Dubai, will have 100 robotaxis by the end of this year. “It’s a marketplace that will be limited for some time, and not limits the question,” said Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School who wrote about Uber. Self-managed car developers want access to Uber’s network-but because there are simply not as many self-managing cars, the company is less useful in the short term.
This leads to another possible problem: Uber may have less power to get a large part of every tariff in the robotaxi world. The company spent billions to determine how much they needed to pay individual managers to take rates. Robotaxi Tech developers who have spent their own billions of building self-diving software are likely to take a larger part of each rate. After all, businesses, including Tesla and Waymo, have their own ride-hael apps. Do they really need Uber? “I guarantee that they will manage a harder bargain,” says Sherman. (A spokesman for Uber did not provide financial details about his existing partnerships.)
The Chinese Uber co-rating Didi who acquired Uber’s China Business in 2016-apparently that the old Uber self-managed playbook follows. It has its own subsidiary for autonomous vehicle technology, which builds autonomous vehicle software. It is said last year that it will work with EV firm Gac Aion from this year to start robotaxis.
It may be that Uber has not completely closed the door to own some of its own robotaxic technology. The New York Times reported earlier this summer that Kalanick was back, and in talks to obtain the American arm of the Chinese AV Company Pony.AI – with a financial help from Uber. A spokesman for Pony.AI declined to comment on the report. Uber told The Times that he intended to work with many AV players worldwide. The Kleenex strategy, in other words.
One company is strikingly lacking in the high stack of Uber’s Autonomy Partnership Press Explesases, of course. In a February interview, Uber CEO Khosrowshahi seemed to indicate that it was not a lack of trying. It seems that Tesla wants to own its entire self-managing car industry: the technology, the cars, the interview and the app that attracts it-but Uber can still be a wonderful robotaxi partner, Khosrowshahi said. “In the end, we hope that my charm and the economic argument Tesla can also work with us,” he said.