Ridesharing giant Uber has reportedly shut down its self-driving car business, selling its Advanced Technologies Group division to self-driving startup Aurora.
Roadshow by CNET reports that on Monday, the self-driving startup Aurora announced that it will acquire ridesharing company Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group which has spent the past few years developing self-driving vehicle technology. The deal will bring Aurora’s valuation to around $10 billion.
Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora, stated: “With the addition of ATG, Aurora will have an incredibly strong team and technology, a clear path to several markets, and the resources to deliver. Simply put, Aurora will be the company best positioned to deliver the self-driving products necessary to make transportation and logistics safer, more accessible, and less expensive.”
Aurora complimented the research done by the Advanced Technologies Group, noting the group’s advances in hardware, software, and safety. The firm published an in-depth safety case framework two years ago to embed safety in every mile a self-driving car prototype takes. However, in the same year an Uber self-driving vehicle killed a pedestrian.
In March 2018, Breitbart News reported that one of Uber’s self-driving vehicles hit and killed a woman in Phoenix while undergoing testing of the vehicle’s road capabilities. 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was walking a bicycle outside the lines of a crosswalk when the self-driving vehicle operated by safety driver Rafaela Vasquez hit Herzberg hit and killed her. The company voluntarily suspended their tests in Arizona, California, Pittsburgh, and Toronto following the crash. Uber stated that it chose not to re-apply for a license in California “with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future.”
In September of this year, the Information published a report titled “Infighting, ‘Busywork,’ Missed Warnings: How Uber Wasted $2.5 Billion on Self-Driving Cars,” which outlined how Uber invested billions of dollars to develop self-driving cars yet is nowhere near ready to launch an autonomous vehicle that can reliably drive for any length of time.
Uber’s team began researching self-driving cars in 2015, but despite studying the area long before many other companies making progress in the sector, Uber’s self-driving car “doesn’t drive well” and “struggles with simple routines and simple maneuvers,” a manager in the unit told CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The manager reportedly said: “The talent is still here to get this job done, but the belief is waning.”
The manager reportedly raised the issue as they believe that the company “has simply failed to evolve and produce meaningful progress in so long that something has to be said before a disaster befalls us.” The report claims that managers within the group have competing philosophies with members from the aerospace and government industries focusing mainly on safety while engineers feel that progress is moving too slow.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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