Uber Open to Outside Investment for Self-Driving Unit

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said it was "possible" the company would look for outside investors for its self-driving car unit, but isn’t currently searching for backers, according to Bloomberg.

The company’s pouring large, undisclosed sums of money into its Advanced Technologies Group, which includes the company’s self-driving car research as well as plans to build vertical takeoff and landing vehicles at scale and speed, with a goal of them becoming a mass-market technology. Uber is competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, Tesla, and the world’s traditional auto manufacturers and startups, in the race to develop self-driving vehicles.

Despite heavy investment, companies working on self-driving technology have been pushing back forecasts for when fully-autonomous cars without safety drivers are likely to be widely available, as they discover training a computerized system to handle the complexity of road and weather conditions is a far harder task than initially envisioned. Uber restarted testing of its self-driving cars on public roads in December, following a nine-month hiatus as a result of one of its prototypes killed a pedestrian.