Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, made it clear on Wednesday: he believes the company’s decision to abandon its autonomous driving program was a mistake. Said Kalanick at 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 sold its self-driving unit in a reported fire sale to the self-driving tech developer Aurora in 2020, three years after Kalanick was forced to step down. At the time, it made sense; autonomous driving was bleeding cash, and Uber had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort. Now, Waymo’s self-driving cars are tooling around the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix and popping up in new markets.
Waymo recently partnered in Austin with Uber, and Uber is betting its platform will be critical in growing the service. But business is business, and partnerships falter. If Waymo decides it doesn’t need a middleman, Uber, once the future of transportation, could find itself stuck in reverse.