Uber In Talks To Sell ATG Self-Driving Unit To Aurora 21
Uber is reportedly in talks to sell its $7.25 billion self-driving car unit, Uber Advanced Technologies Group, to competing autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation. TechCrunch reports: Aurora Innovation, the startup founded by three veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry who led programs at Google, Tesla and Uber, is in negotiations to buy Uber ATG. Terms of the deal are still unknown, but sources say the two companies have been in talks since October and it is far along in the process. The talks could falter. But if successful, they have the potential to triple Aurora's headcount and allow Uber to unload an expensive long-term play that has sustained several controversies in its short life.
Waste of money (Score:2)
$7.25 billion for immature non-working technology that has to be re-written from scratch? Are they crazy? What an enormous waste of money. For just $1 billion you can hire an array of the world's top experts and get it done.
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I think $7bn is what they value it at, not what it will sell for.
It looks like they have given up trying to do their own self driving tech and will simply buy someone else's. There was always going to be a relatively small window where they could be first to market and having missed it they can't afford to be left behind by waiting now.
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It looks like they have given up trying to do their own self driving tech and will simply buy someone else's.
Always a great selling point for an unfinished prototype, "There's no way we'd ever get it working, that's why it is worth billions; it must be complicated!"
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I expect it will be sold off cheap, with the technology added to whatever they already have. The other guy's only business is self driving so they have to keep going, Uber was always looking at it as a way to make their taxi business viable.
Or for not much more than minimum wage... (Score:2)
... you can hire a cabbie to do the job much better than any technology. I wonder how many centuries that $7B could pay the entire wage bill of Uber for?
If there's a purpose to self driving taxis I've yet to read about it. Self driving cars for the disabled who can't drive and for people too incompetant to pass a driving test, yes, I get that, but taxis? No, sorry.
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Uber reportedly arranged (or provided) 6.9 billion rides in 2019. If the average ride is 15 minutes and we assume $10/hour effective wages (within the reported typical post-expenses range for the driver's cut), $7B would cover almost 5 months of wages.
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Well, Uber earned $14B in revenue last year, on about $65B in gross bookings, for a back-of-the-envelope wage bill of ~$51B. So, about seven years, even assuming their new profit margin advantages don't allow them to undercut the rest of the market and grow their share even further.
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Don't you mean seven weeks (total of $7B vs $51B/year)? Arguably, the $51B in driver revenue should not all be imputed as wages, which extends it by perhaps a few months. But it's certainly nowhere near the centuries that the GP suggested.
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Well, sure, if you conform to society's rules about how division works. (Oops.)
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Wonder if the sale includes the several thousand documents stolen from Waymo, or the liability for the really stupid woman they killed in Phoenix.
Aurora!? (Score:2)
One of my disastrous stock market investments is in Aurora Cannabis (ACB)
Did a double take when reading the summary but thought if consumers did not have to drive, it would be helpful to their core business.
Wait what is the Uber plan again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I was under the impression Uber themselves had said they can only become profitable if they have autonomous cars instead of paying drivers. That was supposedly their long term plan. Are they giving up on it? Or are they hoping others will develop autonomous cars and then buy them from them? In which case what exactly will they themselves bringing to the table? An app?
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Sorry, I was under the impression Uber themselves had said they can only become profitable if they have autonomous cars instead of paying drivers. That was supposedly their long term plan. Are they giving up on it? Or are they hoping others will develop autonomous cars and then buy them from them? In which case what exactly will they themselves bringing to the table? An app?
If Uber can get laws passed across the U.S. similar to Prop. 22 in California, then they can become profitable by suppressing emplo ^H^H^H^H^H contractor wages and by raising and taking a bigger slice of the ride fare.
Let me translate that for y'all: (Score:2)
We finally got it through our thick skulls that this 'self driving car' thing is a gigantic disaster, huge money pit, and is never going to work well enough to get rid of pesky human drivers we actually have to pay, therefore we're selling it all off to some fool of a company that still believes in the fantasy that they can make it magically work, before they catch on to the fact and we then can't get a plug nickel for any of it.
So-called 'self driving cars' will never, ever work well enough to replace human drivers because the underlying technology is woefully inadequate and always will be woefully inadequate because the entire approach is insufficient to actually have anything resembling actual 'intelligence'.
Re: Let me translate that for y'all: (Score:1)