Travis Kalanick, the previous CEO of Uber, made it clear on Wednesday: he believes the corporate’s choice to desert its autonomous driving program was a mistake. Said Kalanick on the Abundance Summit in L.A., “Look, [new management] killed the autonomous car project we had going on. At the time, we were really only behind Waymo but probably catching up, and we were going to pass them in short order . . . I wasn’t running the company when that happened, but you know, you could say, ‘Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product right now. That would be great.’”
Uber offered its self-driving unit in a reported fireplace sale to the self-driving tech developer Aurora in 2020, three years after Kalanick was pressured to step down. At the time, it made sense; autonomous driving was bleeding money, and Uber had already spent a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on the trouble. Now, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles are tooling across the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix and popping up in new markets.
Waymo not too long ago partnered in Austin with Uber, and Uber is betting its platform will probably be important in rising the service. But enterprise is enterprise, and partnerships falter. If Waymo decides it doesn’t want a intermediary, Uber, as soon as the way forward for transportation, might discover itself caught in reverse.