Uber ATG
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Donald Trump pardons ex-Waymo, Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski
Anthony Levandowski, an engineer convicted of stealing information about self-driving car tech from Google/Waymo, has been pardoned by Donald Trump.
Uber is selling its self-driving unit to autonomous vehicle startup Aurora
As expected, Uber is selling off its self-driving unit.
Uber is reportedly in talks to sell its self-driving unit
Last year Toyota, Softbank and Denso teamed up to invest $1 billion in Uber ATG in a deal that valued the self-driving focused spinoff at $7.25 billion.
Uber's former self-driving lead pleads guilty to stealing from Google
After about three years of legal wrangling between Uber and Waymo over self-driving car tech, the engineer at the center of it has agreed to plead guilty to one count of stealing materials from Google. Anthony Levandowski was a lead engineer on the self-driving car project that's now known as Waymo, until he left to form his own company, Otto, which Uber then acquired. Reuters reports that the agreement will see all the other criminal charges go away while he admits to taking a file that tracked Google's goals for its self-driving car project. A court already ruled that Levandowski owes Google $179 million for violating his contract, and he has declared bankruptcy. Prosecutors said they will recommend a sentence of fewer than 30 months.
Uber's self-driving unit gets its own CEO and a $1 billion investment
As Uber finally closes in on its IPO, its self-driving car unit is getting a big cash infusion and some independence. The company announced tonight that Toyota, Denso and Softbank are investing a total of $1 billion in its Advanced Technologies Group (Uber ATG), in a deal that values that part of the company at $7.25 billion. This adds onto Toyota's $500 million investment last year, which the two said would lead to the creation of an autonomous fleet based on Toyota's Sienna minivan. So far, many of the big car companies are teaming up to develop autonomous tech combined with ridesharing angles as it's expected to be a huge market in the next few years. According to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, "The development of automated driving technology will transform transportation as we know it, making our streets safer and our cities more livable. Today's announcement, along with our ongoing OEM and supplier relationships, will help maintain Uber's position at the forefront of that transformation." In the statement Toyota EVP Shigeki Tomoyama said "Leveraging the strengths of Uber ATG's autonomous vehicle technology and service network and the Toyota Group's vehicle control system technology, mass-production capability, and advanced safety support systems, such as Toyota Guardian™, will enable us to commercialize safer, lower cost automated ridesharing vehicles and services." The deal won't close until Q3, which should be well after Uber's initial public offering that's on track to occur in May. It's also being announced after Arizona prosecutors announced they did not find the company criminally liable for a 2018 self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian. The deal makes Uber ATG its own corporate entity that's controlled by Uber. Reuters reports that it has ATG head Eric Meyhofer as CEO reporting to a newly-formed board of directors, with six appointed by Uber, one by Toyota and one by Softbank.
Uber files for its IPO and faces the past
Ten years after the company was founded, Uber is finally ready to go public. The company revealed its S-1 filing for an IPO this afternoon, and as such opened up more information to everyone about its finances and concerns going forward. Going through the document, a lot of those concerns involve the past, particularly in 2017 when a series of revelations about its corporate culture, treatment of drivers and passengers, and other misdeeds resulted in the exit of CEO Brian Kalanick. According to Uber, it has some 91 million monthly active users who've either taken a ride or received an Uber Eats delivery. That number came from Q4 of 2018, and is up 35 percent from the previous year, with some 3.9 million drivers, and 1.5 billion trips in the quarter. Uber also gave some insight on its self-driving car plans, saying "Along the way to a potential future autonomous vehicle world, we believe that there will be a long period of hybrid autonomy, in which autonomous vehicles will be deployed gradually against specific use cases while Drivers continue to serve most consumer demand." As usual for an S-1, the list of risks acknowledges everything that could go wrong for the company including increased regulation, drop in reputation or falling behind competitors. For Uber that includes not just the seedier aspects of its past mentioned above, but also the issue of how to try and achieve profitability while maintaining prices customers have come to expect and compensation that works for drivers. This is expected to be one of the biggest tech IPOs ever, and comes just a month after its main competitor Lyft listed its shares on the open market, revealing over 30 million riders and just under two million drivers.
