I think the self-driving efforts by the ride-sharing companies were just there to attract massive investment rounds. Now Uber's public and investors are generally aware that the level of self-driving required for autonomous taxis is decades away. Probably a good choice to sell.
But I thought that was the whole point of Uber, to replace their workers with AI right? I'm guessing they now are just going to attempt to partner with one of the winners of the self-driven-horse-race, but I'm thinking that if you are the winner of the self-driving-horse-race you don't need uber, if you can build self driving cars/software you can probably clone Ubers functionality and do your own app.
NVIDIA and Mobileye sell to everyone.
And Waymo would launch their own taxi service instead of partnering with Uber.
So who's left? Tesla? (or in this case Aurora)
Argo is majority owned by ford and also partnered up with VW
Probably for the best. Right now Uber is NOT among the leaders in self-driving. So it would be better for them to buy or lease vehicles from those leaders than wait some additional years for their own project to be successful.
Yep, to the extent that I’m surprised Aurora is considering purchasing ATG at this point. I don’t know what they have to gain from such an acquisition - especially considering their head count (and associated cash burn) would triple after the acquisition.