Uber acquired Otto for $625 million in 2016.
(meta data) TITLE: Uber Strikes Deal With Volvo to Bring Self-Driving Cars to Its Network - The New York Times (meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.facebook.com/mikejisaac 153 captures 20 Nov 2017 - 23 Aug 2022 About this capture The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20171121235318/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/technology/uber-deal-volvo-self-driving-cars-.html NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Please upgrade your browser. LEARN MORE » ## The New York Times ###### Technology|Uber Strikes Deal With Volvo to Bring Self-Driving Cars to Its Network ### Technology # Uber Strikes Deal With Volvo to Bring Self-Driving Cars to Its Network An Uber self-driving Volvo in Pittsburgh. Uber plans to purchase thousands of self-driving Volvos for its fleet once the technology is production-ready. Gene J.Puskar/Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — No one knows what the future of self-driving cars will look like, or how long it will take to get there. But every major player in the field is striking partnerships to be ready for the day when autonomous vehicles finally become mainstream. That includes Uber, which on Monday announced a new deal with Volvo. Under the agreement, Uber plans to purchase as many as 24,000 self-driving Volvos once the technology is production-ready, putting the vehicles into its extensive ride-hailing network. "Everything we're doing right now is about building autonomous vehicles at scale," Jeff Miller, Uber's head of automotive alliances, said in an interview. "We don't know exactly how an autonomous world will look. But we know that we want to be the platform that's at the center of it, from a ride-sharing standpoint." The deal is an extension of an agreement Uber made with Volvo nearly two years ago, when the ride-hailing company started its research and development efforts in autonomous vehicles in earnest. Uber has worked with third-party component manufacturers to build software and hardware for driverless cars, then worked closely with Volvo to outfit the automaker's XC90 vehicles with the technology. But the new deal vastly increases the number of Volvo driverless cars that Uber can work with, showing the scope of its ambitions. Volvo, which is based in Sweden and owned by Geely Automobile Holdings of China, said in a statement that Volvo and Uber were contributing $300 million to the project. From automakers like Ford, Tesla and General Motors to technology companies like Google, Uber and Lyft, titans of the transportation industry are racing to gain an edge in a future of autonomous vehicles. Each of the players has approached the issue differently. Automakers like G.M. and Ford have spent billions buying software-based start-ups to work on integrating driverless technology into their vehicles. Tesla has long offered a hybrid version of self-driving software in its vehicles, and recently debuted an electric, nearly autonomous semi truck that it expects to hit the road in the next few years. Uber has done most of its work in research and development in-house instead of teaming up with multiple manufacturers, as has been the case with Lyft, Uber's largest rival in the United States. In particular, Uber has invested in its Advanced Technologies Group, home to hundreds of engineers in Pittsburgh, where it is doing much of its autonomous vehicle research. "The only way we could control our own destiny was to work with this technology that had the potential to disrupt our business, and have direct involvement in the creation of it," Mr. Miller said. "We couldn't afford to be on the outside looking in. We have to be in the game." Some of Uber's work in self-driving cars has run into hurdles. The company has been fighting a lawsuit from Waymo, Google's onetime autonomous car business, over stolen trade secrets. Uber has expanded its partnerships over the past year, striking deals with automakers like Daimler to bring autonomous cars onto the ride-hailing company's network. Mr. Miller said that Uber would own and operate fleets of its own vehicles purchased from partners like Volvo, but that there was no one-size-fits-all approach, so it would also allow other self-driving vehicles on its network. Correction: November 20, 2017 An earlier version of this article misstated the type of vehicle Tesla recently unveiled. It was an electric semi-truck that is nearly self-driving, it is not fully autonomous. ## Related Coverage Go to Home Page » ## Site IndexThe New York Times (meta data) TITLE: Why Uber Just Ordered a Buttload of Volvos (meta data) AUTHOR: Adam Clark Estes (meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2017-11-20T12:45:00-05:00 23 captures 20 Nov 2017 - 23 Jan 2022 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Internet Archive Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. Collection: top_domains-00500 The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20171121115819/https://gizmodo.com/why-uber-just-agreed-to-buy-a-buttload-of-volvos-1820607567 # Why Uber Just Ordered a Buttload of Volvos Adam Clark EstesYesterday 12:45pmFiled to: uberFiled to: uberself-driving carsdriverless carsanthony levandowski232EditSend to EditorsPromoteToggle Conversation toolsGo to permalinkPhoto: AP Things seem to be looking up at Uber's embattled self-driving car unit. The company just made a deal with Volvo for as many as 24,000 XC90 sport utility vehicles to be delivered between 2019 and 2021. Uber then plans to add its own driverless technology and unleash a fleet of robo-taxis onto the world. It would be the first of its kind. News of the deal and Uber's continued ambitions to lead the way on driverless cars comes with a lot of caveats. A small one is that retail prices for the XC90 start at $45,750, which means this deal could cost Uber around a billion dollars. Which is a lot of money for a company that famously loses money very quickly. The bigger problem is the company's on-going lawsuit with Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google's parent company, Alphabet. Waymo has accused Uber of stealing confidential information about its self-driving technology when it acquired the self-driving truck company Otto and hired its star engineer Anthony Levandowski, who co-founded Google's self-driving car operation. The trial takes place next month, and things do not look good for Uber. A recently revealed report shows that Levandowski started meeting with Uber six months before he left Google and then destroyed five hard drives that contained proprietary Google data after Uber told him not to bring any trade secrets from his old job. Uber fired Levandowski earlier this year, claiming that the 37-year-old engineer refused to participate in an internal company investigation. Uber's CEO Travis Kalanick resigned a month later, after a string of scandals involving sexual harassment and discrimination. After all that fracas, Levandowski founded a religion called Way of the Future that focuses on "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Which is a weird thing to do. Photo: AP But the Waymo lawsuit is just the most immediate problem that Uber faces in attempting to be the first ride-hailing service with its own fleet of self-driving cars. In recent months, multiple reports catalog in-fighting and technological struggles within Uber's self-driving car unit, known as the Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Uber made a big splash a year ago when it picked Pittsburgh as the headquarters for the ATG and poached several prominent professors from Carnegie Mellon University to develop its self-driving technology. It only took the company a year to chase away several of those engineers—some of whom started competing driverless car companies—and alienate the city of Pittsburgh by failing to produce jobs and support fundraising efforts, among other things. The city's controller, Michael Lamb, called the Uber partnership "an opportunity missed" this past May. Still, Uber's engineers in Pittsburgh march on. The team is slowly confronting the very difficult problem of perfecting self-driving technology and scaling it up to work on an entire fleet. Now that the company has actually signed an agreement for a fleet, the ATG is under pressure figure it all out in a few short years, not decades. That is, of course, assuming that Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, can eventually steer the ship away from its scandalous, money-losing habits. And also assuming that the verdict in the Waymo lawsuit doesn't lead to serious setbacks for Uber in the self-driving taxi race—a competition the company must win, some say, to keep having a future. So, uh, congratulations to Uber on buying all those Volvos. If the self-driving stuff doesn't work out, at least the resale value tends to be pretty good with those Swedish safety machines. #### Recommended Stories ##### Why Uber Is Losing Money Faster Than Any Tech Company Ever ##### How My Arranged Marriage With Volvo Got Hot Again ##### Spotted: A Self-Driving Uber in Pittsburgh #### About the author Adam Clark EstesAdam Clark Estes Senior editor at Gizmodo. PGP Fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22A8 • PGP Key OTR Fingerprint: D9330D9B 6CF5E271 7FAC6194 DAA9B51B E09A99B2 ## You may also like #### Apple Received a Warrant for the Sutherland Springs Shooter's iPhone Data Yesterday 12:50pmGizmodo #### DJI Rewarded Bug Bounty Discovery With Legal Threats, Developer Claims Yesterday 12:00pmSploid #### This Mind-Bending Archer Fires Arrows That Change Direction in Mid-Air Yesterday 10:23am ## Recent from Adam Clark Estes 380106.7 #### The Best Bluetooth Speaker Now Works With Alexa and It's Amazing Adam Clark EstesYesterday 11:00am20479241.3K #### iOS 11 Is Killing Me Adam Clark EstesFriday 9:40am54974.7K #### Watch an Artist Instantly Create a Mirror With Liquid Silver Nitrate Adam Clark EstesThursday 5:50pmKinja is in read-only mode. We are working to restore service.
train48184
Uber
History.:Self-driving car research.:Cancellation of research on autonomous trucks.
After spending $925 million to develop autonomous trucks, Uber cancelled its self-driving truck program in July 2018.