Uber’s Volvo deal
purchase Uber said tens Monday of thousands that it plans of to self-driving Volvos once the technology is production-ready, giving the San Francisco company’s ridehailing network a big boost. “Everything we’re doing right now is about building autonomous vehicles at scale,” Jeff Miller, Uber’s head of automotive alliances, said about the company’s plans.
Uber plans to purchase as many as 24,000 selfdriving Volvos once the technology is production ready, putting the vehicles into its extensive ridehailing network.
“Everything we’re doing right now is about building autonomous vehicles at scale,” said Jeff Miller, Uber’s head of automotive alliances. “We don’t know exactly how an autonomous world will look. But we know that we want to be the platform that’s at the center of it, from a ride-sharing standpoint.”
The deal is an extension of an agreement that Uber made with Volvo nearly two years ago, when the San Francisco ride-hailing company started its research and development efforts in autonomous vehicles in earnest.
Uber has worked with component manufacturers to build software and hardware for driverless cars, then worked closely with Volvo to outfit the automaker’s XC90 vehicles with the technology.
But the new deal vastly increases the number of Volvo driverless cars that Uber can work with, showing the scope of its ambitions.
From automakers like Ford, Tesla and General Motors to tech companies like Google and Uber, titans of the transportation industry are racing to gain an edge in autonomous vehicles. Each company has approached the issue differently.
Automakers like GM and Ford have spent billions buying software startups to work on integrating driverless technology into their vehicles.
Tesla has long offered a hybrid version of selfdriving software in its vehicles and recently debuted an electric, nearly autonomous semitruck it expects to hit the road in the next few years.
Uber has done most of its work in research and development in-house instead of partnering with multiple manufacturers, as has been the case with Lyft, Uber’s largest U.S. rival. In particular, Uber has invested in its Advanced Technologies Group, home to hundreds of engineers in Pittsburgh, where it is doing much of its autonomous vehicle research.
“The only way we could control our own destiny was to work with this technology that had the potential to disrupt our business, and have direct involvement in the creation of it,” Miller said. “We couldn’t afford to be on the outside looking in. We have to be in the game.”
Some of Uber’s work in self-driving cars has run into hurdles. The company has been fighting a lawsuit from Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car business, over stolen trade secrets.
Miller said Uber will own and operate fleets of its own vehicles purchased from partners like Volvo, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach, so it will also allow other self-driving vehicles on its network.