Uber is increasingly grappling with competition from self-driving taxi services like Waymo. Now the ride-hailing giant is taking more action to deal with that threat.
Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the ride-hailing company’s co-founder who was ousted in a boardroom coup eight years ago this month, to help fund his acquisition of the U.S. arm of a Chinese autonomous vehicles company, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The company, Pony.ai, was founded in Silicon Valley in 2016 but has its main presence in China, and has permits to operate robot taxis and trucks in the United States and China.
The talks are preliminary, said the people, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential conversations. Mr. Kalanick would run Pony if the deal is completed, they said. It is unclear what role, if any, Uber would take in Pony as an investor.
Financial details of the potential transaction could not be determined. Pony went public last year in the United States, raising $260 million in a share sale. Its market capitalization stands at around $4.5 billion.
If the deal goes through, Mr. Kalanick, 48, would remain in his day job running CloudKitchens, a virtual restaurant start-up that he founded after leaving Uber in 2017. He would also work more closely with Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as Uber’s chief executive after Mr. Kalanick’s ouster.
The discussions are the starkest sign yet that Uber is under pressure from Waymo, the driverless car unit spun out of Google, and other autonomous car services. This month, Tesla also unveiled a limited robot taxi service in Austin, Texas. Over time, these autonomous vehicle services may replace or eat into rides from human drivers. In cities like San Francisco where robot taxi services are available, the vehicles have become ubiquitous and are popular.
An Uber spokesman declined to comment on deal talks and said, “Uber has a platform strategy, and we intend to work with multiple players in the U.S. and around the world who can safely bring autonomous technology to the world.”
A representative for Mr. Kalanick did not immediately have a comment.
When Mr. Kalanick was Uber’s chief executive, the company tried developing autonomous vehicle technology. It then purchased Otto, a self-driving trucking start-up run by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer. Google later sued Mr. Levandowski for theft of trade secrets and sued Uber to bar it from using its self-driving technology.
Under Mr. Khosrowshahi, Uber has taken a different tack to self-driving cars. The company has struck roughly 18 partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies like Wayve, May Mobility and WeRide, to bring pilot programs for driverless car services into Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The goal, Mr. Khosrowshahi has said in podcast interviews, has been to put “as many cars on Uber’s network as possible.” Mr. Khosrowshahi has maintained that while autonomous vehicles are growing steadily, ride-hailing networks will host both human and robot drivers for years.
Mr. Kalanick has grown interested in robotics over the past year, according to two people who have spoken with him. He has brought robots into some of his CloudKitchens to prepare food for customers and has experimented with automated kitchens building food bowls for delivery. He has also become enamored with robots that traverse streets to deliver food to people.
Pony.ai has been in a precarious situation. In 2019, President Trump’s first administration passed an executive order aimed at eliminating reliance on Chinese technologies in American services, citing national security concerns.
This year, the Commerce Department passed a rule that forbids autonomous vehicle software used in the United States to be operated or maintained by any Chinese entity. The department set a deadline for March 2026.
Pony has prepared its U.S. arm of the business for a sale or spinoff. Its engineers have “forked” the source code of its technology in 2022, and the software running on autonomous cars has for the past few years been developed in the United States and not in China, two people familiar with the matter said.
Apart from Uber, Mr. Kalanick is working with other investors to finance a possible transaction of Pony.
Mr. Kalanick’s early years at Uber were marked by clashes with regulators and other Silicon Valley executives, led by his pugnacious streak. Despite his reputation — or perhaps because of it — Mr. Kalanick brute forced Uber’s way into a dominant position in the ride-hailing market and toppled traditional taxi services in the process.
Since his acrimonious exit from Uber in 2017, Mr. Kalanick has kept a low profile, working on CloudKitchens and quietly investing in other start-ups. Only more recently has he begun reappearing in the public eye, making a guest appearance at the All-In podcast’s conference event in Los Angeles last September and at President Trump’s inauguration parties in Washington in January.
Over the past year, Mr. Kalanick and Mr. Khosrowshahi began speaking more frequently, two people said. They discussed robotics, food delivery and the growth of UberEats and CloudKitchens, along with the rise of self-driving cars. Those talks, along with the passage of time, has led to a thawing of the once icy relationship between the two men, the people said.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley.
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