Drive that Uber will become Robotaxis’ Kleenex
“For them, it really doesn’t matter who will ultimately succeed,” says Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a research firm in Michigan. “If you have a car that you can work and drive safely, you are welcome to come to Uber and provide vehicles.”
Still, it’s too early to say whether Kleenex Gambit will work.
There have been a lot of changes since 2015. Karanick is no longer with Uber. Descend by hostile committee 2017. The company marked a tough milestone in one of its tests on self-driving cars in 2018. He attacked and killed a woman. A federal investigator later found a giant on board Partially responsibleled the suspension and reorganized Uber’s autonomous driving development efforts.
2020, Uber Autonomous vehicle unit sold to a competitor. However, in some respects, this asset is a light entity. Here, Uber acts as a driver and rider intermediary, not owning its own (robo) vehicle. Under the guidance of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company ultimately recorded its first profit last year.
One potential problem with Uber is that certain roles in the autonomous vehicle industry have not been very useful for some time. Uber is powerful as it is already featured on the phones of around 160 million active monthly users worldwide. The company is good at matching people driving and millions of people who want to ride. But for a while, there will not be millions of Robotaxis.
WaymoUS leader of Robotaxis, There are approximately 1,500 vehicles It operates in five cities. Baidu It says it has its next city, Dubai 100 Robotaxis by the end of this year. “This is a market where supply is constrained and demand is not constrained for quite some time,” says Len Sherman, a professor at the Columbia Business School who wrote about Uber. Autonomous car developers want access to Uber’s network, but the company isn’t very useful in the short term, as there aren’t many self-driving cars.
This leads to another potential problem. Uber may have little power to get big chunks of each fare in the Robotaxi world. The company spent billions thinking about how much they would have to pay individual drivers to take on the fare. Robotaxi tech developers who spent billions of people building self-diving software will likely make up a large portion of each fare. After all, companies like Tesla and Waymo run their own ride apps. Do they really need ubers? “We guarantee they will drive more difficult bargains,” Sherman says. (The Uber spokesman did not provide financial details of the existing partnership.)
China’s Uber competitor Diddy– Acquired Uber’s China Business in 2016 – can follow the old Uber autonomous playbook. There’s something unique Autonomous Vehicle Technology subsidiary. We are building autonomous vehicle software. that I said it last year Starting this year, we will be working with the EV Firm Gac Aion to mass-produce Robotaxis.
It may be that Uber hasn’t completely closed the door by owning some of its own Robotaxi technology. Early this summer, the New York Times It has been reported Kalanick has received financial support from Uber in consultations to acquire the US division of Chinese AV company Pony.ai. A spokesman for Pony.AI declined to comment on the report. Uber told The Times it plans to work with many AV players around the world. In other words, the Kleenex strategy.
Of course, one company is notably lacking from the tall stack of Uber’s Autonomous Partnership press releases. In an interview in February, Uber CEO Khosrowshahi appears to indicate that it is not because there are no attempts. Tesla You want to own the entire operation of a self-driving vehicle. Technology, cars, maintenance, the app that drives it, but Uber could still be a great Robotaxi partner, Khosrowshahi said. “In the end, we hope that my appeal and economic debate will work with us too,” he said.