Uber is once again deploying its own autonomous vehicles, because apparently the company has decided that the best way to avoid a repeat of its deadly 2018 Tempe incident is to just not let the cars drive themselves. The cars, part of Uber's new AV Lab project, will be fitted with all the sensors typical of self-driving cars - cameras, lidar, radar - but will be manually driven by humans. They won't operate as robotaxis, just gather data for Uber's dozens of robotaxi partners.
This is an important distinction, especially if you recall that Uber sold off its AV division in 2020 after one of its self-driving cars killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Since then, the company has formed partnerships with dozens of AV startups, preferring to be the go-to platform for the technology rather than a developer. But those startups are hungry for data, so Uber is hitting the road.
The fleet will generate revenue and complete regular Uber trips, Balaji Krishnamurthy, the company's chief financial officer, said on X. More importantly, they'll be "getting exposure to the variety of 'edge' cases our network handles countless times each day, as we fulfill 40M trips daily." Krishnamurthy theorized that AV operators need at least 10 million miles of data to reach their first public driverless launch. To that end, Uber's new AV Lab fleet will generate at least 2 million miles each month by the end of this year, "and will scale further from there in 2027."
The project is starting small with just one Hyundai Ioniq 5, though Uber executives tell TechCrunch they're not wedded to that model. The driving data will be provided for free to any of Uber's partners, which include companies like Wayve, WeRide, Nuro, Waabi, and others. It's an acknowledgement that many AV developers aren't as cash rich as Waymo, Tesla, and other leading AV developers, and could use some help defraying many of the costs associated with launching a commercial service.
Earlier this year, the company announced a new project called Uber Autonomous Solutions to provide a variety of services to its robotaxi partners, including training data from the company's fleet of thousands of test vehicles that are out driving in dozens of cities. Uber said this data can help its partners improve their own autonomous vehicles as they seek to scale their robotaxi business more quickly.