Well.. Uber sold their self-driving division to Aurora (Sequoia Capital and Amazon). They've kinda committed themselves to being solely a gig-economy app with no plans or ambition.

Not exactly; they want the benefits that they think self-driving will bring, without doing the work.

> Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora. Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.

> Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/07/uber-sells-self-driving-un...

Uber is basically shifting from a heavy NIH "build, don't buy" culture to a less insulated culture. This is manifesting at all levels, from more widespread adoption of AWS/GCP internally to seeking partnership deals (in SDV w/ Aurora, but also in other areas e.g. SKTelecom, etc)

spending piles of money developing self-driving and managing a large fleet of automated cars is kind of antithetical to the way uber operates anyway

It was explicitly their goal back in the day. Paid drivers were seen as a stepping stone.

and it didn't make sense to me then either! They'd have to build out massive fleets of cars and technicians... at the moment they're really just managing contractors and do simple background checks and car inspections... much less overhead than maintaining a fleet.

I always got a filing Uber was not serious about it and used it more for evaluation pump.

Tesla is the one that should be hearing alarmbells, their evaluation is partially coming from their promises of (real) FSD, that they have been overpromising and underdelivering so far.

They are literally the only company that has autopilot in production at scale.

Waymo is doing autonomous driving though, autopilot is driver assist, they're not even remotely the same product.

Is this a joke? Their scaling has been at a snails pace.

That's how the start of an exponential growth trend works.