Number of the Day
Uber Is Losing the Driverless Car Race, by the Numbers
The ride-hailing giant is falling behind Tesla and Waymo at developing self-driving technology
$2.5 billion: That’s how much Uber has spent on its self-driving car technology over the last five years, according to The Information. Despite this investment, a manager working on the project reportedly described the car as still “struggl[ing] with simple routes and simple maneuvers” in an email to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Uber’s attempt to build autonomous driving technology has been plagued with problems since its early days. In 2017, the head of the project, Anthony Levandowski, was fired amid accusations (to which he pleaded guilty) that he stole proprietary data from Google’s self-driving car project. In 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving car prototypes struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, during a test drive. Uber raised $1 billion in financing for the project last year from a Japanese consortium led by Toyota, but that money could soon run out, leaving Khosrowshahi with the hard choice of whether to cut Uber’s losses and move on or keep pumping money into what may be a doomed project.
It appears that some of Uber’s competitors have made better progress. Waymo, Alphabet’s…
