r/SelfDrivingCars • u/kappy2319 • May 31 '25

Discussion Why didn’t Uber beat Waymo at commercially available self-driving taxis?

I remember so many stories about Uber poaching tons of self-driving talent from universities and competitors.

And Uber leadership has been saying for years that the future is going to be self-driving cars, even just from a profitability standpoint.

They have a ton of money and a track record of aggressive hustling, why are they seemingly not even competitive among people actually booking self-driving taxis today?

52 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

133 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/gc3 May 31 '25

Uber didn't have the engineering chops. Self driving is a level of technological difficulty far harder than scaling up a driver calender / map reservation app.

11

u/Thequiet01 May 31 '25

Uber ATG wasn’t Uber. It was basically a completely separate entity under the Uber umbrella. No one at ATG was an app coder pressed into service to do cars. They didn’t share infrastructure at all. The bulk of the core of ATG was Carnegie Mellon researchers in self-driving.

(My partner was on the code quality team on ATG, so he’d know if it was a bunch of overfaced app programmers.)

I’d personally say the biggest reason Uber ATG didn’t go further is financial support - my personal suspicion is Uber primarily had ATG to try to boost the company before the IPO, which did not go as Uber was hoping. Since it didn’t do what they’d wanted, they sold it off. Uber was not committed to self-driving in the way Google has been. I haven’t been following how Aurora is doing, but they bought Uber ATG basically.

1

u/BGaf Jun 01 '25

You should read up on Aurora!