With its CEO out, the most exciting tech Uber's engineers are working on could be thrown into more turmoil
Uber's self driving car program is a believed to be "a disaster, far behind the rival from Google, Waymo. Uber's new CEO may have to rethink it.
f self driving cars don't come out in next 10 years, can Uber continue to burn billions of dollars until then? You’ve got to be working towards taking the cost out," he said.
The con case
Even if it continued its own self-driving car program, Uber likely wouldn't build the actual cars, but would likely have to buy them from another manufacturer before installing its autonomous driving software and related sensors on them. If it would have to buy cars anyway, it could just buy ones that are already come with autonomous driving capabilities.
Uber's self-driving car program has already been costly for the startup. It
The new leadership will have to decide if the " big expense" is "going to be worth it,"
far behind. Waymo is far ahead."
ber has had dubious success with rides around Pittsburgh and Waymo laughed at that. They’ve been doing test rides for years at a higher level of fidelity."
And that leads to another issue: hiring talent and keeping them from being poached.
here’s a huge talent scrum in the area of self-driving cars. Uber has already lost multiple people to Ford, and I think, currently, its program is certainly a ripe target for other companies to poach talent,"
The talent problem is not likely to improve at Uber anytime soon in part because
"There's a shortage of people that know how to do this. It is very difficult to get people and to recruit the right people under them. They are losing all this brainpower," says Sullivan.
They have to explore what it's going to take to do it themselves. What else are they going to do? They've got to look forward. Self-driving is the future,"
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