Daimler and Uber made an announcement today that explains a few rumors that were going around in the auto industry last year. The two companies announced a partnership that will result in the German automaker building and operating a fleet of self-driving cars on Uber’s ride-sharing network.
Expand
Expanding
Close
As we reported yesterday, Tesla is suing its former Director of Autopilot programs, Sterling Anderson. The company claims that he allegedly poached Tesla employees and stole confidential information in order to start a competing company with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving program.
Anderson denies the allegations, but regardless of what happened, Tesla made a bold claim about the motive behind launching his new company and in the process, they took a solid swipe at GM and Uber.
Expand
Expanding
Close
The city of Madrid in Spain already has one of the biggest fleet of all-electric taxis in the world. Earlier this year, we reported on a local taxi company adding 110 Nissan LEAFs to its fleet as the local government was taking measures to improve the increasingly poor air quality in the city.
Uber has had problems operating in Madrid in the past with its unlicensed drivers, but now the company has decided not only to use licensed drivers, but also to have them drive all-electric Tesla Model S sedans.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Uber’s short-lived self-driving ride program is officially coming to an end. The ride-hailing service began giving self-driving rides exactly one week ago in San Francisco, but that same day California regulators told the company it must stop the pilot program because it had not gone through the proper permit process.
After the request, the company insisted that it could run the program anyway, but in a statement to TechCrunch today, Uber confirmed that it is ending its self-driving pilot in San Francisco.
Earlier today, we reported on Uber launching its autonomous ride-sharing pilot program in San Francisco and how it was justifying not needing a permit to operate self-driving cars, unlike the 20 other companies developing similar systems in California.
Just hours later, a video (embedded below) showing one of Uber’s self-driving cars running a red light in a pedestrian path in San Francisco was released, and later California regulators told the company that it needed to stop its self-driving car service in the state until it goes through the process of getting a permit.
Update: Uber has since released a statement blaming the driver of the car. See video and statement below
Expand
Expanding
Close
US President-elect and environmental foil Donald Trump set up a Strategic and Policy Team on December 2nd made up of business leaders and chaired by Stephen Schwarzman Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone Financial Services. Most of the people on the original board were folks from traditional American “Blue Chip” companies including Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors.
Today, Along with Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, untraditional transportation leaders were added to the list: Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick, CEO and Co-Founder of Uber were announced via press release.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Uber is reportedly planning to bring to San Francisco an autonomous ride-sharing program similar to its pilot program launched in Pittsburgh earlier this year where customers using Uber’s app can be picked up by an “autonomous vehicle” with a company engineer behind the wheel. The company wrote in a press release:
Starting today, riders who request an uberX in San Francisco will be matched with a Self-Driving Uber if one is available. Expanding our self-driving pilot allows us to continue to improve our technology through real-world operations. With its challenging roads and often varied weather, Pittsburgh provided a wide array of experiences. San Francisco comes with its own nuances including more bikes on the road, high traffic density and narrow lanes.
The problem is that Uber doesn’t have a permit to operate autonomous vehicles in California and it justifies its right to operate anyway through some sketchy semantics.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by early team members of Google’s autonomous car program and recently acquired by Uber, announced today that it “completed the world’s first shipment by self-driving cars”.
There are some nuances to the ‘autonomous level’ of the drive, but it’s nonetheless an impressive accomplishment.
Expand
Expanding
Close
The WSJ reports that China has opened an antitrust investigation into the acquisition of Uber China by local rival Didi Chuxing. The deal went ahead a few months after Apple invested $1B in Didi Chuxing.
Uber and Nissan announced today that they launched what they are referring to as “a new, major electric vehicle (EV) project”. The project starts with the trial of an all-electric fleet of 20 Nissan LEAFs in London starting in September.
The project will be studied by the Energy Savings Trust (EST) in order to “look into the feasibility of running large numbers of electric private hire vehicles in the UK.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
Only 3 months after its test fleet started hitting the streets of Pittsburgh, Uber announced today that it is rolling out a fleet of human-supervised self-driving cars available to customers by the end of the month. The company unveiled its modified Volvo XC90 SUV equipped with cameras, lidar, radar and GPS (pictured above).
A few will be in operation by the end of the month and a fleet of 100 by the end of the year.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Tesla’s user interface is quite unique in the auto industry. Most of the controls are activated through the 17-in touchscreen, which as often been compared to an iPad, so it wasn’t too surprising when Tesla hired a senior designer from Apple to lead its user interface design.
Brennan Boblett was working on the design team of the iTunes Store when he joined Tesla back in 2010 to “create the most visually stunning and exciting large screen interface the automotive world has ever seen”, as he described at the time.
He worked under Tesla’s Chief Designer, Franz von Holzhausen, but as the company grew, he was quickly promoted and ended up managing both the UI and UX teams in 2012. Boblett stayed with Tesla for over 5 years and led the user experience development of the Model S, Model X and even the early work of the Model 3.
Expand
Expanding
Close
What is a growth team you ask? A growth team within a company is generally a small data driven group tasked with figuring out how to scale the business. Most often, the day-to-day work will consist of planning growth models and running them in simulations in order to develop the best possible way to expand.
Facebook had an important growth team that significantly contributed to the company reaching one of the biggest user base in the history of any product ever – same thing for Uber, but on a much smaller scale.
Now that Tesla plans to expand significantly in the next few years through the introduction of the Model 3 and Tesla Energy products, Electrek has learned that the automaker has started building a growth team “from scratch”. It started by hiring from Facebook and Uber; two of the best examples of optimizing growth through growth teams.
Expand
Expanding
Close
According to a report today from The Wall Street Journal, GM and Lyft are partnering to test a fleet of self-driving electric taxis sometime within the next year in an undisclosed city. The pilot will reportedly take advantage of GM’s Chevrolet Bolt, a speedy compact crossover all-electric that we took for a test drive earlier this year…
Google joins Uber, Ford, Volvo and Lyft in forming a Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to promote self driving car regulations on a federal level versus state by state level. Google has been battling the California DMV who have proposed to ban Google’s Koala car that does not have a steering wheel or pedals and would not require a licensed driver.
Last year, famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tesla investor Steve Juvertson recalled a conversation he had with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:
Travis recently told me that in 2020, if Telsas are autonomous, he’d want to buy all of them. He said all 500,000 of estimated 2020 production, I’d want them all, but he couldn’t get a return call from Elon.
Well apparently Kalanick couldn’t wait any longer and reportedly already placed an order for 100,000 autonomous Mercedes S-Class sedans, according to sources inside Daimler and Uber talking to German magazine Manager Magazin.
Expand
Expanding
Close
It’s no secret that Uber wants to develop its own self-driving car technology, but much like Google, it isn’t clear if the company only wants to develop the technology to be implemented in existing vehicles or go all the way and develop its own car. The ride-sharing company’s latest hire suggest it could be the latter.
We learned that earlier this month, Uber hired veteran automotive designer Richard Donnelly for the role of “Senior Designer” at the company’s Advanced Technology Center.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Adam Jonas, a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley covering Tesla Motors and the automotive industry, is nothing if not persistent. During Tesla’s recent conference call to discuss third quarter financial results, the analyst again asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the possibility for the company to join the likes of Uber and Lyft in the ride-sharing industry.
Jonas first brought up the idea at Tesla’s last quarterly conference call after comments made by Tesla board member Steve Juvertson about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick potentially wanting to buy 500,000 autonomous Teslas by the end of the decade. First time around earlier this year, Jonas got a firm “no comment” from Musk, but nonetheless the CEO called his question “insightful” at the time. The second time around during this week’s call, Jonas pushed the question again and although Musk’s first reaction was not to comment, which is rare for the CEO, he implied that an announcement could be coming.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Adam Jonas, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, published a note yesterday to update the firm’s price target on Tesla’s stock to $465 from $280. The updated price target includes a whole new business segment called “Tesla Mobility” which Jonas expects Tesla to announce within the next 12 to 18 months.
Expand
Expanding
Close
During yesterday’s conference call about Tesla’s second quarter financial results, Elon Musk refused to answer a question from a financial analyst about Travis Kalanick’s, Uber’s CEO, recent comments that his company would buy 500,000 Teslas in 2020 if they are equipped with Tesla’s self-driving technology by the end of the decade.
The short conversation was very revealing. Here it is in full:
Expand
Expanding
Close