Toyota Investing $500 Million in Uber in Driverless-Car Pact

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

BUSINESS AUTOS & TRANSPORTATION AUTOS INDUSTRY

Toyota Investing $500 Million in Uber in Driverless-Car Pact

Auto maker and ride-hailing company will jointly work on driverless-vehicle development as part of investment

By Greg Bensinger and Chester Dawson

https://twitter.com/GregBensinger
[email protected]

https://twitter.com/decodethefirm

Updated Aug. 27, 2018 10:57 p.m. ET

Toyota Motor Corp. TM +0.24% is investing about $500 million in Uber Technologies Inc. as part of an agreement by the companies to work jointly on autonomous vehicles aimed at improving safety and lowering transportation costs.

Toyota’s investment values Uber at about $72 billion, slightly higher than where SoftBank Group Corp. valued the ride-hailing company earlier this year with its funding, according to people familiar with the matter. ... Under terms of the tie-up, Uber will integrate self-driving technology into Toyota Sienna minivans for use in Uber’s ride-hailing network, the companies said. The vehicles later could be owned and operated by third-party fleet managers, they added.

Uber has been seeking ways to lower development costs and losses in its autonomous-vehicle unit following a fatal crash involving one of its cars earlier this year in Arizona. Last year, the Uber division spent about $750 million on self-driving car development before making cuts this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent months, Uber has closed its Arizona autonomous-vehicle operations and laid off about 400 test drivers, some of whom it will rehire after undergoing new training. Uber also has taken its self-driving vehicles off the roads in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburgh and Toronto while investigators look into the circumstances of the Arizona crash.
....

Write to Greg Bensinger at [email protected] and Chester Dawson at [email protected]

Appeared in the August 28, 2018, print edition as 'Toyota To Work With Uber, Take Stake.'

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-investing-500-million-in-uber-in-driverless-car-pact-1535393774

[edhopper]

1. Uber is a money losing operation

and Driveless Cars will be "a decade away" for many, many years to come.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Sudden acceleration meets driverless no-brake events

A match made in heaven - for the laboratory

[forgotmylogin]

3. I think driverless vehicles have a place.

But they need to not interact with human-driven vehicles. They need specific lanes inaccessible to other cars and pedestrians. And consumer cars SHOULD NOT just have an autopilot option.

Driverless vehicles should have their own roads and not be accessible to human-driven cars or pedestrians. Use them as cargo transport between buildings in a large factory complex, or shuttles in a large parking lot to and from the entrance. Perhaps some smaller cities that don't have the infrastructure to build a train system might be able to swing a special road with small autonomous shuttle buses where the passengers pay a fare and swipe their card to be driven on-demand between stops which would save vehicles just circling a constant route.