Uber’s vision on driverless cars begins to blur

that it “is a big-time hardware manufacturing, software problem at scale. Lots of tech companies out there are going after this problem, but I think there are very few companies who are taking this on end-to-end atscale the way we are.”

In a statement, Uber said: “Right now the entire team is focused on safely and responsibly returning to the road in autonomous mode. That’s our No. 1 objective, and we have every confidence in the work they are doingto get us there.”

Uber first made its interest in self-driving cars public when it hired about 40 researchers and scientists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. At the time, the company’s chief executive was one of the founders of Uber, Travis Kalanick, who had decided to bet big on selfdriving vehicles. He wanted to prepare Uber for a future whenfleets of driverless cars could move passengers efficiently and safely around the clock.

But the crash in March — the first known fatality involving a pedestrian and an autonomous car — altered everything. Since then, Uber has steadily narrowed the scope of its autonomous vehicle operations.

In May, Uber announced thatit was shutting its driverless testing hub in Arizona and laying off 300 employees. A day later, preliminary findings from federal regulators investigating the crash confirmed what many self-driving car experts suspected: Uber’sself-driving car should have detected a pedestrian with enough time to stop, but it failed to do so. Uber has beguna safety review and plans to publish its assessment in thecoming months.

Mr. Khosrowshahi has started to subtly de-emphasize the company’s role in developing driverless technology.

At a conference in 2017, he said it was a “huge advantage” for Uber to have its own autonomous technology while operating a global ride-sharingnetwork.

But in May, Mr. Khosrowshahi said that while Uber needed to have access to autonomous technology, it aimed to be “neutral.” He said Uber would be open to licensing its own technology or building around alternatives from other companies — a stark contrast to the company’s previous approach of owning and operating the entire self-driving “stack” of technology and hardware.

And in July, Uber announced that it was closing its autonomous trucking business. The company instead said it would focus exclusively on building selfdriving cars.