The Autonomous Driving Business Increased 6 Times, Uber Insisted On Doing Robotaxi

On March 19, 2018, a traffic accident occurred in an Uber's autonomous car in Arizona, USA, causing a pedestrian to die. This is also the world's first autonomous vehicle to cause death.As a result, Uber gradually slowed down and tested in the field of autonomous driving, and sold relevant departments in 2020.But this does not mean UberThe abandonment of the self -driving track was changed.

In October 2023, Uber announced that it cooperated with Waymo and Jaguar to realize Robotaxi charging operations in San Francisco and Phoenix, and opened the platform+technology+vehicle's Golden Triangle cooperation model.

Since this year,Uber's layout in the field of autonomous driving has accelerated, and it has successively announced cooperation with BYD and Cruise.At the end of August, Uber announced that investing in the British autonomous driving system provider Wayve, the two parties aims to promote themselvesThe development and application of driving technology brings more possibilities to future travel methods.

Uber CEO Dala Cosroassey, although Uber's CEO of Dala Cosrossi, said that he would not expect autonomous driving to become the main source of profit in the next 5 to 10 years.But it does not affect the investment of self -driving companies such as Uber.After all, to a large extent, this is for strategic defense.

As a travel platform,The main way of survival in Uber is to provide users with more convenient, convenient and cheap taxi services through the Internet.And once there is a lower cost of travel, then Uber may no longer exist.This is why Coscasi has argued with Musk in the near future, and it is why Uber insisted not to give up Robotaxi.

01 The number of rides increases, and Uber pays more attention to autonomous driving

Uber increased by 6 times from the same period last year in the second quarter.

On August 6, Uber specially emphasized that the autonomous driving business made good progress in the second quarter of 2024.Although the specific figures were not disclosed, Coscassis mentioned at the financial report conference calling that this is mainly due to the cooperation with ten partners such as Waymo, including but not just Robotaxi.Last October, Uber and Waymo joined hands to launch a autonomous taxi service in Phoenix, which officially sounded Uber's commercialization in the field of autonomous driving.

Uber and Waymo cooperated in September of the same year. Uber also cooperated with the autonomous truck transportation company Waabi to conduct commercial trial operation between drivers driving between Dallas and Houston.In June this year, Uber and another familyAutonomous truckTransport companyAurora signed a many years of agreement, and the latter's autonomous driving technology will provide services on Uber Freight (a freight platform launched by Uber in 2017) until 2030.Existing cooperation continues to advance.At the financial report, Cosloosi also said that more cooperation details of its autonomous driving plan will be announced in the next few months.

Since the third quarter，Uber is accelerating in the field of autonomous driving obviously。At the end of July, Uber and BYD jointly stated that they would establish a multi -year strategic partnership. One of the important cooperation is that the two companies will cooperate to develop a BYD -based autonomous vehicle and deploy it on the Uber platform.

In mid -August, Uber announced that it has established a strategic partnership with Cruise for many years. The two parties plan to introduce a certain number of Chevrolet Bolt autonomous cars into the Uber platform in 2025.At the end of August, Uber announced that it established a strategic cooperative relationship with Wayve, a driverless car company, and conducted strategic investment in the latter as the continuation of $ 1 billion in Series C financing announced in May this year.

The protocol indicates, inWith the addition of Uber's additional funds and support, Wayve intends to accelerate cooperation with global car companies on the one hand to create L2, or even L3 -level autonomous driving cars; on the other hand, it is committed to developing global scalable L4 autonomous vehicles, so as to use it to use it to use it to useFor future deployment on Uber.

From the perspective of Cosloosi,Robotaxi and even autonomous vehicles are not the market for winners, but industries that require technological innovation and extensive cooperation to promote together.He also revealed that the utilization rate of autonomous driving players on the Uber platform is significantly higher than that of self -employed channels.Uber's market technology can increase the utilization rate of fixed assets. It is expected that the incremental benefits of autonomous driving will exceed the average of Uber's average drawing rate.

Uber will continue to maintain market liquidity, combined with human driver and autonomous driving technology.For example, he said that McDonald's, Starbucks and other companies themselves have channels that are directly facing consumers, but they will still choose to via UberCome to bring more demand to the store.At least from expressions and recent actions,Uber's determination is firm.

02 Consecration with Tesla, it is better to become a teammate as an opponent

Behind the frequent layout of Uber, the first thing that has an opinion is not a friend of the travelers, but the Tesla CEO Musk.Under the news of Uber and BYD in terms of autonomous driving, Musk commented that BYD needs to quickly change the direction, otherwise they will have trouble.

Musk commentUber cooperated with BYD as early as 2016, Musk added Robotaxi to Tesla's plan.In 2019, Musk said that it will soon realize the driverless driving function of driving. By 2020 Tesla will have 1 million unmanned taxis; in 2022, Musk once again said that Robotaxi will be quantified in 2024 to produce production in 2024EssenceThe latest news, Tesla's development of a self -driving taxi Robotaxi will be released in October this year.According to Musk's statement at the Tesla Autonomous Driving Day in 2019, the first stage of Robotaxi will be similar to the business model of online car -related and shared cars. Tesla will establish its own full -autonomous Robotaxi team.The cost of taxi will be lower than the current buses.In the future, Tesla not only operates his own team, but also allows Tesla's owner's car to join the shared fleet. Such car owners can profit $ 30,000 a year.In response, Coscossey recently started from Robotaxi's business logic and publicly expressed questioning the above models.

Tesla demonstrationFrom the perspective of FSD technology, there are three major problems in Musk's imagination.The first is how to solve the problem of overlapping demand time.He introduced that when you want to use Tesla Robotaxi, it is likely that the owner itself needs to use a car.Secondly, how to overcome the psychological obstacles of the owner.He believes that some Tesla owners may not be willing to let strangers take their own cars, and there is the possibility of loss of items.The third is how to build a system that satisfies both passengers and drivers.

In addition to the obstacles at the policy level, Tesla wants to build a set of ROBOTAXI service infrastructure with its own volume.Coscast said that for this, Uber spent 15 years and invested tens of billions of dollars.In his opinion, Tesla's current focus of car,AI and other businesses are completely different from travel services itself.Create a hardware worth $ 50,000 (such as cars), compared with more than 30 million transactions per day, is a very different business.Coscosi said.Therefore, he suggested: Tesla reached cooperation with Uber.

Ruqi TravelIn fact, the Robotaxi team is not only Tesla, but many car companies at home and abroad are layout of Robotaxi.For example, Geely's Cao Cao travels, SAIC's enlightenment, and GAC Ruqi's travel, while laid out the travel, conduct Robotaxi research and development.After all, travel has huge market value.

according toData from Qianji Investment Bank, in 2023, the global online ride -hailing market size reached US $ 272.71 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.75%, which is very considerable.At the same time, this market has already experienced head effects, and Hengren Hengqiang.Previously, Didi Chuxing had been silent for a while due to various factors, but the market share still occupied an absolute advantage.To re -divide and get cakes, new technologies and new methods are needed to subvert the inherent pattern.

Besides,Robotaxi is still a huge blue ocean.The McKinsey Consultation Report and CICC study data prediction that in 2030, the global market space of driverless taxis Robotaxi's global market space will exceed $ 2 trillion.This is an important factor for some self -driving companies, car companies and other layouts of Robotaxi, and it is also an important reason why Uber attaches importance to Robotaxi.If there is a lower cost and a more convenient way to travel in the future, then the Uber may no longer exist.This is why Uber has always attached great importance to Robotaxi.

03 From self -research to cooperation, Uber's autonomous driving layout changes

Su'an is in danger,Uber smelled the industrial subversion that Robotaxi may bring.As early as 2015, it began the related layout, which was the earliest group of companies focusing on Robotaxi.At that time, it first came from CarnegieMellon University dug an appointment40 employees; the second year, the Monk -driving truck startup OTTO was acquired, and the company's founder Anthony Ledan Dopsky had participated in the establishment of Google's autonomous vehicle project.

soon,In December 2016, Uber launched the autonomous vehicle service for the first time in Pittsburgh, the United States. When passengers make an appointment, they may take the Uber's autonomous car.However, the good times didn't last long, and Uber quickly faced a series of crises.First, it was charged with Google to stole its autonomous driving patent.In March 2017, Google applied to the court for a ban order, asking Uber to immediately stop using stealing technology to develop autonomous vehicles.

In the end, the two sides reached one year laterCalling, but the price was fired at the cost, and Uber promised not to use Waymo's autonomous driving technology and pay about 0.34%of the equity of Google.Later, we welcomed a heavy blow again.In March 2018, an accident occurred during a road trial in Arizona in a road trial in Arizona, causing a pedestrian to die, and Uber had to announce the suspension of driverless cars.However, at that time, Uber did not choose to give up at the first time, but first established an artificial intelligence team in Toronto, and then added 150 million to establishing a research center.

Uber ATG chief scientist Lakar Eteson In April 2019, Uber split the autonomous driving department and established Uber ATG, which received a financing of about 1 billion US dollars from companies such as Toyota, SoftBank. After this round of financing, UberATG's valuation reached $ 7.25 billion, and began to test unmanned cars in many cities such as Toronto, Pittsburgh, Washington, San Francisco.

In the endIn 2020, Uber still chose to sell Uber ATG to Aurora, an autonomous driving company.For a long time, it has not been reported by Uber related autonomous driving.Until the end of last year, it started to make a dense sound.Uber is a company that is good at software development. Studying hardware is not only difficult to double, but the cost is not consumedAt the beginning, when the company encountered difficulties, it was wise to keep the main business and decisively cut off the branch business.Recently, Coscossey explained in an interview that Uber's reasons for giving up the autonomous driving team at the time.

At the same time, he emphasized again that although there is no autonomous driving team, the experience of many years of accumulation allows them to quickly cooperate with the autonomous driving company to obtain instant demand from the existing markets and achieve a win -win cooperation.This will not be a market for winners.Coscossen continued.Initially, I think this is why Uber wants to develop this technology.

Robotaxi's Golden Triangle cooperation model is still going to deploy autonomous driving today, but he uses the business model of lighter assets.

From the perspective of Cosloosi,Uber's dynamic scheduling model is an important advantage, which can optimize the connection point and route of autonomous vehicles to ensure that they run on suitable tasks.If some connection points are too complicated or special cases, we can choose to send artificial drivers to perform these tasks.This flexibility allows autonomous driving companies to focus on their best areas, thereby further improving efficiency.

From the perspective of the overall data, the early results were very encouragingEssenceCoscossen believes that with the development of the market, human drivers and autonomous driving companies will participate together, which will make Uber maintain the most liquidity and market share in this market.He believes that with the advancement of technology and the clear regulatory environment, this cooperation model will bring significant economic benefits.