South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Startup taking driver’s seat in Uber’s self-driving project
Uber, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a self-driving car project that executives once believed was a key to becoming profitable, is handing the autonomous vehicle effort to a Silicon Valley startup, the companies said thisweek.
Uber will also invest $400 million in the startup, calledAurora, so it is essentially paying the company to take over the autonomous car operation, which had become a financial and legal headache. Uber is likely to license whatever technology Aurora manages to create.
The deal amounts to a fire-sale end to a highprofile effort to replace Uber’s human drivers with machines that could drive on their own. It is also indicative of the challenges facing other autonomous vehicle projects, which have received billions in investments from Silicon Valley and automakers but have not produced the fleets of robotic vehicles some thought would be on the streets by now.
Aurora CEO Chris Urmson saidAurora’s first product will not be a robot taxi that could helpwithUber’s ride-hailing business. Instead, it will likely be a self-driving truck, which
Urmson believes has a better chance of success in the near term because longhaul truck driving on highways is more predictable and does not involve passengers.
Among self-driving car projects, Uber’s effort, which led to the 2018 death of a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona; a lawsuit from Waymo, theself-driving car company owned by the same parent company as Google; and a guilty plea from a former Uber executive accused of stealing intellectual property, was particularly fraught.
Uber began its work on autonomous vehicles around 2015 when it announced a partnership with CarnegieMellon University’s National Robotics Center. Uber poached 40 engineers and scientists fromCarnegieMellon later, establishing the foundation for its autonomous vehicle unit, called the Uber Advanced Technologies Group, or ATG.
In 2016, Uber acquired autonomous trucking startup Otto, led by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer. When Google first tested its selfdriving car on public roads a decade ago, Levandowski and Urmson, who played a key role in Google’s original self-driving car project before co-founding Aurora, were two of the project’s engineers. The test was a milestone that eventually led toan investment frenzy.
The acquisition, which valued Otto at $680 million, turned sour when Waymo filed a lawsuit against Uber in early 2017, claiming Levandowski had stolen trade secrets from Google. Uber fired Levandowski, and though the case went to trial, the companies eventually settled. Uber agreed to give Google a stake in the company valued at $72million.
Federal prosecutors charged Levandowski with
33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison earlier this year.
In 2018, Uber received a
$500 million investment from Toyota to help keep the self-driving unit afloat. The investment marked a shift in Uber’s strategy, signaling that the company no longer wanted to develop its own self-driving car.
A year later, Toyota partnered with Denso and the SoftBank Vision Fund to pour $1 billion into Uber’s effort. The deal valued Uber’s ATG at $7.25 billion. The infusion bought ATG some time. The unit was expensive to operate, but Uber maintained it would become profitable by 2021.