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Uber Drops Autonomous Truck Project
Ride-hailing service Uber Technologies Inc. says it will abandon development work on autonomous commercial trucks to focus on self-driving cars.
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Ride-hailing service Uber Technologies Inc. says it will abandon development work on autonomous commercial trucks to focus on self-driving cars.
Uber jumped into self-driving truck development in 2016, when it acquired startup Otto. The company says its Uber Freight, a smartphone app that links truck drivers with shippers, is not affected.
Uber agreed to pay as much as $680 million for Otto, depending on the unit’s ability to meet performance goals. But the deal quickly soured when Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski was accused of stealing technology for robotic vehicles from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo unit.
Uber fired Levandowski in May 2017, and the remaining three Otto co-founders had left the company by last April. By then the company had announced it was testing self-driving highway trucks on public highways in Arizona.
Uber envisioned fleets of trucks that would be piloted by human drivers in cities but operate automatically during long hauls on highways. Now the company says its “best path forward” is deploying all its development efforts on autonomous cars.
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