Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by intrasight on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @08:24PM (#11819452)

They hired away almost half of CMUs robotics department. That's gotta be expensive. They are building (in the city no less) an autonomous driving test track/facility. That's also gotta be expensive. Human drivers are just a brief stepping-stone.

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Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by assface on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @09:41PM (#11819769)

I can't go into details, but it wasn't that much. The public number for "buying" CMU's NREC is $5.5 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/uber-would-like-t...

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Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by jayjay71 on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @09:55PM (#11819831)

That $5.5 million was a gift to Carnegie Mellon, I believe mostly for public relations. It does not include salaries, bonuses, or operating costs for Uber's Advanced Technology Center. The real cost was/is much higher than that.

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Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by aetherson on Thursday June 02, 2016 @12:25AM (#11820356)

Just to be clear:

If you spend $1B on actual physical vehicles or whatever (let's say... 500 $2M vehicles), then if you have 200 employees with an average pay of say $500k per year, then you could pay them all for a decade with another $1B, meaning that you'd have spent less than 1/6th of the funding they've taken to date, or still have $1.5B left of the Saudi Royal Family's hard earned money.

More briefly: no, obviously they are not spending their money on an autonomous driving program.

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