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Uber has set up a new initiative to serve a growing number of providers making the leap into autonomous vehicles in a bid to diversify revenue streams and position itself at the centre of the emerging robotaxi market.
The San Francisco-based app said on Monday that Uber Autonomous Solutions would offer customers services including insurance, roadside assistance and “AV mission control” software to help providers monitor vehicles and “tee up possible actions” when they encounter issues such as road traffic incidents.
Uber said that it would also offer a fleet financing solution that would help partners pay for the robotaxis deployed on its network.
The new offering will be overseen by Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery, though it will draw from a range of internal organisations.
Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s president and chief operating officer, said that the technical hurdles that had impaired AVs for the better part of a decade had “largely been solved”.
“What’s going to determine the success or failure of autonomy in the world is whether it can be commercialised,” he said.
“Uber is going to be the thing that makes autonomy commercially viable.”
Uber has moved aggressively in the past year to accelerate the deployment of robotaxis on its network. It has signed more than a dozen partnerships, including with Alphabet’s Waymo in the US and China’s Baidu in Asia and the Middle East. It has also invested in several self-driving start-ups, including UK-based Wayve.
The company faces intensifying competition and is even competing with partners including Waymo in key markets such as San Francisco. This has led to some investor concerns about Uber’s role in an autonomous future, with shares trading down 9 per cent in the year to date.
Uber has made a series of multibillion dollar commitments with operators and AV developers, placing orders for tens of thousands of vehicles, and plans to deploy a fleet of Lucid SUVs equipped with sensors from start-up Nuro in San Francisco later this year.
Uber has also placed an order for at least 25,000 autonomous vehicles from developer Waabi, having backed the start-up with $500mn in fresh capital last month.
In total, it plans to deploy AVs in 15 cities across the globe including in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong by the end of 2026.
Uber’s new autonomous solutions unit will also offer mapping data and data collection services to help train the AI models underpinning robotaxis. The latter service is being offered as part of work undertaken by Uber’s AV Lab — a group announced last month — that will gather data from specially equipped vehicles operating on its network.
The autonomous solutions unit follows in the footsteps of Uber’s AI solutions business, a service that the company expanded in the middle of last year, which sells data labelling services to help frontier labs and AV developers train AI models.
