RIDEGURU
Uber is in discussion with Waymo, Google's autonomous vehicles, to be included into their network.
Look at what Dara said here. Totally different tune about being horizontal and playing nice with all third-parties. This is NOT how they played the game before. Remember they destroyed the taxi industry? They could have done so much with the taxi fleets everywhere but instead they destroyed them.
When Recode’s Kara Swisher asked how Uber would make the case to Waymo to make its cars available via the Uber app, Khosrowshahi’s answer was simple: “Economics.” He characterized Uber’s ride-sharing network as the biggest on the planet, so it would make sense for Waymo to want to be on it. However, at the end of the day, “It’s up to them,” Khosrowshahi says.
That discussion came in the context of a larger conversation about Uber’s current attitude toward’s autonomous vehicles. Khosrowshahi thinks that self driving tech’s future is to become a “horizontal technology that should be available to everybody,” and so he would be open to licensing Uber’s tech to other companies. “Ultimately, I think that we’re not going to look to own the tech ourselves,” he says. “We’ll license to third parties.”
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“Ultimately, I think that we’re not going to look to own the tech ourselves,"
This is what Lyft used to say for reasons they are not building AVs on their own. I thought Uber did want to own all these technologies themselves. They are building autonomous cars, airplanes and airports, etc.
There may be some fake news here. This article positions it like Uber is in desperate mode to be snatched up by Waymo and how they are practically begging for Waymo to call them back.
Uber's network is quite expansive and there's something Google could leverage. Two US tech giants pair up to attack the global market?