Uber has a new plan to get 25,000 robotaxis on the road — and it will come with the aid of some Uber alums and an autonomous trucking company.
On Wednesday, the ride-hailing giant announced a partnership with Waabi, a Canadian self-driving trucking startup founded by Raquel Urtasun. The partnership will include a $250 million investment from Uber, dependent on a set of milestones Waabi will have to achieve. The companies did not disclose what those were.
There are a few familiar faces here. Urtasun was the chief scientist at Uber’s self-driving car division, Advanced Technologies Group. That division was sold in 2020 to Aurora Innovation, another autonomous trucking company and Waabi’s competitor.
Waabi’s chief operating officer, Lior Ron, is also an Uber alum who founded and led the ride-hailing company’s trucking business, Uber Freight.
“Uber has always been great in building marketplaces, in matching supply and demand, and in pricing,” Ron told Business Insider. “That’s what created Uber, that what’s created Uber Eats, and that’s what I created with Uber Freight.”
Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox are already on the ground providing unsupervised rides. Even in its core business, that is, autonomous trucking, Waabi has yet to deploy a fully driverless truck without safety drivers on commercial routes.
The startup didn’t disclose a timeline or announce a partnership with an automaker that can deliver that many cars.
However, Ron dismissed the first-mover advantage narrative.
“I think it’s really about: Can the system scale? Can the system be mass-deployed?” he said. “It’s not about getting the first driver out of the car or truck. It’s not about the first lane. It’s not about the first neighborhood.”
How will an autonomous trucking startup cater to robotaxis?
Trucking and ride-hailing are two different beasts. One has set routes and long stretches of highway driving; the other sees dense neighborhoods and unpredictable pedestrians.
Ron told Business Insider that Waabi has been building a generalizable AI “brain” that can be transferred to different vehicle platforms since “day one.”
“Nothing needs to be rebuilt,” Ron said.
In addition, Ron said Waabi has built a sophisticated simulator that allows the AI driver to learn from an infinite number of scenarios that can’t easily be replicated in the real world.
The simulation allows for “mixed reality testing”: An AI driver steering a truck or car is deployed on a closed course but responds to simulated events like a traffic jam or a lane-changing car that isn’t really there.
Video from Waabi shows how a truck driving on a closed-course environment can slow down, reacting to a virtual traffic jam.
“Now we can test anything you can imagine — every permutation of traffic jam under the sun, every millions of different scenarios of construction zone,” Ron said. “A motorbike cutting you off — you can never do that because you’ll be endangering the tester.”
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