Uber wants to be a Swiss Army Knife for robotaxis

Uber has a pitch for autonomous vehicle makers: we got this.

The ride-hailing and food delivery company has launched a new division called Uber Autonomous Solutions designed to take on all the tasks associated with operating a robotaxi, self-driving truck, or sidewalk delivery robot business, including software and support services.

The initiative, announced Monday, formalizes what Uber has been not so quietly working on for several years now.

Uber has amassed partnerships with nearly two dozen autonomous vehicle technology companies across every use case, from robotaxis and trucking to sidewalk delivery robots and drones. Uber has backed many of these companies — Lucid and Nuro, Waabi, and China’s WeRide — invested $100 million to build fast-charging, autonomous-vehicle charging stations, and even launched Uber AV Labs, a specialized engineering team that will gather data for robotaxi partners.

Uber has made the partnerships and investments; now it wants to make itself indispensable.

“AV tech teams should be able to focus on what they do best: building software that can safely power an autonomous world,” said Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery, who will be leading the initiative. The idea, he said, is to add “operational depth wherever they need it,” including demand generation, rider experience, customer support, or managing the day-to-day fleet operations.

The end goal is to help these companies reduce their costs per mile and increase the speed to market. Uber said it plans to help these partners scale robotaxi deployments to more than 15 cities by the end of this year. 

“What’s going to determine the success or failure of autonomous in the world is whether it can be commercialized, and Uber is going to be the thing that makes autonomy commercially viable,” Uber President and COO Andrew MacDonald said.

For Uber that means handling infrastructure like training data and mapping, fleet financing, regulatory services, and managing how robotaxis and other AVs navigate complex events and venues. The company said it is using a fleet of specially equipped Lucid vehicles to collect data that can be shared with partners so they can train their AI systems.

The new division also plans to tackle user experience, including customer support. Notably, Uber wants to take over fleet management, which would include remote assistance — an issue that recently received attention from federal lawmakers over concerns Waymo uses workers overseas. Fleet management would also cover insurance and employing the humans who might need to support these AVs when they’re out in the world.

Uber’s move is both existential and opportunistic. The company sold its in-house AV development unit known as Uber ATG in 2020, following two years of internal struggles and pressure after one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian. (Uber sold off the division in a complex deal with Aurora.) 

It has tried to shore up its position through partnerships and investments. And there have been plenty. Uber and Waymo have a shared robotaxi service in Atlanta and Austin. The company has also locked up partnerships with Chinese firms Baidu, Momenta, and Pony.ai, sidewalk delivery bot companies Cartken, Starship, and Serve, and the U.K.-based automated driving tech startup Wayve, as well as robotaxi developers AVride and Motional, to name a few. It has plans to launch a robotaxi service with Volkswagen in Los Angeles by the end of 2026 — although it won’t be driverless until 2027.

These do provide Uber with some protection, but it doesn’t provide a replacement to any revenue lost if these companies erode its own ride-hailing and food delivery business that is today powered by human drivers. Uber is hoping this new division will.