He was also on Google’s self-driving auto team.
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The Otto acquisition, whose financial terms were not disclosed, comes in the midst of Uber’s $300 million collaboration with Sweden’s Volvo Car Group to develop driverless cars.
For the time being, Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet of cars will be supervised by a human in the driver’s seat. The timing is noteworthy as just yesterday, a U.S. District Court judge in California rejected the company’s proposal to settle a class-action lawsuit by current and former Uber drivers who claimed they should be classified as employees rather than independent contractors.
However, the difference between Uber and the rest of the companies working towards fleets of self-driving cars is that Uber has no plans to manufacture its own cars.
Like Otto, Uber promotes its technology as a way to improve efficiency and safety on the road.
The exact vehicle to be used in the Volvo-Uber partnership hasn’t been confirmed, but it would most likely start with the XC90 three-row SUV because of its role as the guinea pig for Volvo to craft and test its self-driving system at the moment.
Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski has been put in charge of all autonomous driving efforts at the combined firms and will report to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. These are tragedies that self-driving technology can help solve, but we can’t do this alone.
Passengers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will be the first to experience the pilot project – home to Uber’s self-driving research and autonomous technology lab.
Self-driving vehicles have made headlines recently for malfunctioning.
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“There has been no adequate demonstration that Uber’s robot cars are safe”, Simpson told us today. Uber’s move into autonomous trucks with its purchase of Otto shows it is “doubling down on its bet on robot technology, but we’re simply not there yet”, he added. However, many other advocates of autonomous vehicles disagree. However, Kalanick wasn’t joking about building self-driving cars.
