Uber has a pitch for autonomous vehicle manufacturers: we got it.
The ride-hailing and food delivery company has launched a new division called Uber Autonomous Solutions, designed to handle all the tasks associated with running a robot, self-driving or curbside delivery robot business, including software and support services.
The initiative, announced Monday, formalizes what Uber has been quietly working on for several years.
Uber has amassed partnerships with nearly two dozen autonomous vehicle technology companies in every use case, from robot taxis and trucks to curbside delivery robots and drones. Uber has backed many of these companies — Lucid and Nuro, Waabi and China’s WeRide — investing $100 million to build fast-charging charging stations, autonomous vehicles, and even launching Uber AV Labs, a specialized engineering team that will collect data for robotaxi partners.
Uber has made the partnerships and investments. now he wants to become indispensable.
“AV technology teams should be able to focus on what they do best: building software that can safely power an autonomous world,” said Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery, who will lead the initiative. The idea, he said, is to add “functional depth where they need it,” including demand generation, rider experience, customer support or managing day-to-day fleet operations.
The ultimate goal is to help these companies reduce cost per mile and increase speed to market. Uber said it plans to help these partners scale robotaxi deployments more than 15 cities by the end of this year.
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“What will determine the success or failure of the autonomous world is whether it can be commercialized, and Uber will be the one to make autonomy commercially viable,” said Uber president and COO Andrew MacDonald.
For Uber this means handling infrastructure such as training data and mapping, fleet financing, regulatory services and managing how robotaxis and other AVs navigate complex events and venues. The company said it uses a fleet of specially equipped Lucid vehicles to collect data that can be shared with partners so they can train their AI systems.
The new division also plans to address user experience, including customer support. Specifically, Uber wants to take over fleet management, which would include remote assistance — an issue that has recently received the attention of federal lawmakers over concerns that Waymo is using overseas workers. Fleet management would also cover the insurance and employment of the people who may need to support these AVs when they are out in the world.
Uber’s movement is existential and opportunistic. The company sold its internal AV development unit known as Uber ATG in 2020, after two years of internal struggles and pressures after one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian. (Uber sold the division in a complicated deal with Aurora.)
It tried to support its position through partnerships and investments. And there have been many. Uber and Waymo have a joint robotaxi service in Atlanta and Austin. The company has also inked partnerships with Chinese companies Baidu, Momenta and Pony.ai, robot delivery companies Cartken, Starship and Serve and UK-based self-driving technology startup Wayve, as well as robotaxi developers AVride and Motional, to name a few. It has plans to launch a robotaxi service with Volkswagen in Los Angeles by the end of 2026 — though it won’t be driverless until 2027.
Those give Uber some protection, but it doesn’t replace any revenue lost if those companies erode its own food transportation and delivery business that is currently powered by human drivers. Uber hopes this new segment will.
