Uber bought Otto [1] and is doing live trials of trucks on highways right now.

Otto was granted permission and began driving on actual highways in Ohio last week:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/self-driving-truck-h...

1 - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-volvo-otto-idUSK...

> Uber [...] they're head of the pack today

Head of the pack of dreams maybe. What does Uber have, in a tangible manner, right now? At least both Tesla and Google have real systems that are on the verge of full autonomy.

This is a fair point. Uber has yet to ship any hardware, and really any software aside from an app that is a couple steps above "Uber for X" that are whipped out in a weekend.

I know they gobbled up a bunch of researchers, but moonshot engineering feats like autonomous driving is not (yet) in their DNA. And their current business model is not profitable and will die the moment they go up against an autonomous service.

They don't need to be last to market to lose, they need to be first in order to survive.

>yet to ship any hardware

Except for the fleet of Ford Fusions and XC90's covered in very nicely implemented custom sensor rafts http://theincline.com/2016/12/12/three-months-of-self-drivin...

I don't particularly care for Uber, but they do have prototype self driving cars on the street in Pittsburgh. So it's not quite fair to say they're failing at this.

I see autonomous Uber cars out all the time near downtown Pittsburgh. In fact it's getting rarer that I don't see one.

I saw an uber car covered in a crazy amount of sensors a couple of days ago on Van Ness avenue... There was a human driver, so I assumed it was mapping the environment, but it might have been a test vehicle; it looked similar to the pictures of the autonomous cars in Pittsburg.