The Autonomous Vehicle Rollout: Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber) and Alex Kendall (Wayve) at CVAI London

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Wayve CEO Alex Kendall took a ride to the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in a self-driving Wayve weeks after announcing a partnership to develop and launch public-road autonomous vehicle trials in the UK. The plan is to one day have passengers call a Wayve via the Uber app, just as Waymo’s integrated into Uber in Austin, Texas. In his on-stage comments, Khosrowshahi underscored that Uber’s role in the rise of AVs is to act as the platform that connects the vehicles with drivers, rather than a developer of the technology. But its autonomous vehicle strategy is ambitious. Uber is partnered with Waymo to offer self driving vehicles on the app in Austin and Atlanta. It’s invested in Wayve, a London-based self-driving car startup. “The UK government has said look, we want to make this possible and we want to accelerate regulation by a bit over a year and make this possible next year,” said Kendall. And just a day after the conference, the New York Times broke that the company was in talks with Travis Kalanick to help fund his acquisition of chinese AV company Pony AI. It was a sign that the jilted former CEO is willing to mend fences with the company as everyone tries to get a piece of the action. Khosrowshahi says despite Uber’s all-time high stock price, its getting “zero credit” at for being a major player in self-driving cars. He compared its current valuation $195 billion with Tesla at over a trillion, despite the fact that Uber is already offering autonomous rides on its app via Waymo, while Tesla is only now testing its robotaxi service in Austin. “When you're developing new technologies as a company, you have to be willing to invest aggressively for many, many years before the market understands or necessarily gives credit for what you're doing,” Khosrowshahi said. “I think $190 [billion] will just be a step stone for us,” he added. Under Kalanick, Uber had invested heavily in AV technology but pulled out after a car struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. “Ultimately we decided the partnership model was the right model going forward,” Khosrowshahi said. “Basically based on all of the leading players, sans Tesla, everyone else is open to working with us, I think it was the right decision to make at the time.” Khosrowshahi argued that self-driving technology itself is likely to become a standard feature within cars in the next ten years. That would empower nearly any newer car within the Uber fleet to act to some degree as a self-driving car. “I think if ten years from now, if it doesn't have this package available it’s not going to sell.”