FOR UBER CEO, IT’S SELF-DRIVING OR BUST
If Travis Kalanick has his way, digital assistants will dominate within a decade — and no IPO until 2030
For Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, investing heavily in self-driving car technology isn’t a futuristic luxury. It’s a business imperative.
“If we don’t get the (autonomous car) software thing nailed, we’re not going to be around much longer,” the captain of the ride-hailing juggernaut tells USA TODAY. In his mind, self-driving cars are a societal inevitability that will reduce deaths, traffic and pollution.
“Will it all take time and storytelling (to reassure consumers)? Yes,” he says. “But that’s where it ultimately ends up.”
Kalanick, 40, spoke at Uber’s sprawling headquarters here just hours after the company, privately valued at $66 billion, announced two major strategic moves last week aimed at better positioning itself for an autonomous vehicle future.
Uber is rolling out the first of 100 Volvo SUVs equipped with self-driving features in Pittsburgh this month, part of a $300 million partnership. Volvo has targeted 2021 for a self-driving car. And Uber is buying Otto, a 100-person start-up focused on bringing au- tonomous features to tractor trailers. Kalanick insisted that neither deal — nor Uber’s recent sale of its UberChina operations to rival Didi Chuxing — was designed to make the company more attractive to investors for a possible initial public offering.
“My statements on this have been well-documented, but you gotta ask, I get it,” Kalanick says. “If there was a way to get mass liquidity without going public, (which is) that bureaucracy piece, then I’m super excited about that. Is there a way? I don’t know. If I could push (an IPO) to 2030, I would.”
Then he jokes, “I’d really prefer not to see my employees refreshing on finance.google.com every five minutes. Do they deserve liquidity for their efforts? Of course. But it’s about the when and the how.”
By keeping a tight rein on Uber, Kalanick so far has managed to navigate past potholes that include battles with taxi unions, compensation lawsuits from drivers and accusations of corporate sexism. Uber dwarfs its nearest competitor, $5.5 billion Lyft.
That said, Uber must stay on the road to profitability in an increasingly dynamic market that in the past few months has seen a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, ranging from General Motors’ $500 million investment in Lyft in January, to Ford Motor Co.’s announcement it would produce a fully autonomous car for ride-sharing purposes by 2021.
Flipping open his laptop, Kalanick pulls up a slide presenta-
“Way out, if everything’s autonomous, you’ll need tens of thousands of people to maintain a fleet of a million cars. So the jobs are there.” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
tion he has just shared with key employees. One slide, “2016,” featured a giant square labeled “atoms,” inside which was a smaller square labeled “bits.” The next slide reversed the two proportions for 2026, implying that in a decade the world would be dominated by artificially intelligent assistants serving their human masters. Uber wants to be a part of that radical shift, Kalanick said.
“I eat using (delivery service) UberEats, I push a button, the food is made, the driver delivers it to me,” he said. “But when it’s all autonomous, how does the food actually get to my door? There’s a tech stack that can get the car through the physical world to my doorstep, but then what? Does some robot get out of my car and deliver my food? That’s hard. I don’t know if that’s two decades out, but the point is the physical world is getting wired up fast.”
Kalanick’s technology network now includes hundreds of scientists at its research and development facility in Pittsburgh; tech counterparts at Volvo’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden; engineers in San Francisco working on laser radar systems; and Otto’s Bay Area teams pushing forward with their trucking project.
Questions about Otto get the CEO animated. Trucking is a $700 billion annual business according to the American Trucking Association, and Kalanick is convinced tech can improve revenues and reduce accident rates.
“That business is driven by owner-operators trying to make a living with their asset, which is a truck that they drive,” he says. “They’re human, so they have to sleep, mainly in the truck. But what if you can give them a lot more productivity out of their asset, when that thing can drive 24 hours a day, even while they’re sleeping?”
Kalanick has a message for Uber drivers who might be wondering if they’ll be needed once autonomy takes hold.
“This isn’t an overnight thing; it’ll take a really long time,” he said. “But let’s take a city like San Francisco. Let’s say over a decade or two we go from 30,000 cars on the (Uber) system to a million. Well, there will still be routes then that software can’t do; it’ll be too hard. So you’ll need drivers in those software-equipped cars to help out. And way out, if everything ’s autonomous, you’ll need tens of thousands of people to maintain a fleet of a million cars. So the jobs are there.”
As for Kalanick’s first ride in an Volvo-Uber powered self-driving car, that experience took him back to sixth grade. “That’s about when I started coding games and reading sci-fi books and just dreaming, really,” he said. “A lot of those things you thought about then were just part of the way-off future. But now we’re just at the beginning of all that really happening. And it’s just friggin’ awesome to wake up in the morning and go, ‘Wow, I’m a part of that.’ ”