Uber's Ambitious Plan to Support Self-Driving Companies
Uber, the ride-hailing giant, has a long-term ambition that goes well beyond shuttling passengers. The company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers' cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies.
A Sensor Grid of Epic Proportions
Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's chief technology officer, revealed the plan at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. He described it as a natural extension of a nascent program called AV Labs, which relies on a small, dedicated fleet of sensor-equipped cars that Uber operates itself.
The ambition is much larger, though. Uber has millions of drivers globally, and if even a fraction of those cars could be transformed into rolling data-collection platforms, the scale of what Uber could offer the AV industry would dwarf what any individual AV company could assemble on its own.
The Bottleneck is Data
Naga said that the limiting factor for AV development is no longer the underlying technology. Instead, it's access to data. AV companies like Waymo need to collect data from various scenarios, but they don't have the capital to deploy cars and collect the information.
Uber's Strategic Move
Becoming the data layer for the entire AV ecosystem is a smart play, especially considering Uber's past ambitions in self-driving cars. The company abandoned those plans years ago, but now it's focusing on providing data to AV companies.
Uber has partnerships with 25 AV companies and is building an "AV cloud": a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models. This could give Uber significant leverage over the AV sector, which currently depends on Uber's ride marketplace to reach customers.
Democratizing Data
Naga emphasized that Uber's goal is not to make money from this data but to democratize it. However, given the obvious commercial value of what Uber is building, this positioning may not last long.
The Future of Self-Driving Cars
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