Uber is much more thrilled about the self-driving than the normal public. As we all know, Uber’s business model involves drivers using their own cars to provide services to people, for Uber these drivers account for a major chunk of profit sharing. So, with the advent of Self-driving, Uber will no longer need to share its profits with drivers (if the government allows that).
The company has partnered with many to work on self-driving technologies, and recently Uber’s CEO has shown a fair amount of interest in Tesla’s self-driving cars. Although Tesla is not the only company to be working on self-driving vehicles, Google is also pretty active with its self-driving cars project, but it looks like Tesla is the first company to have bagged a major potential customer. As per the reports, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, has told Tesla’s Steve Jurvetson that he would like to purchase all the 500,000 self-driving cars that are to be produced by Tesla in the year 2020.
As per Forbes, this comment was made by Kalanick about a month ago but went unnoticed until recently. Although it was just a simple comment, and there would be a lot to sort out by both the parties involved. For Uber to make it into a reality, there has to be a lot of rules relaxation done on government’s part to match the fast-paced innovation. There are many concerns involved with the self-driving cars and there are still many pondering over safety issues and the need of a driver in case the vehicle goes out of control.
With the rapid development taking place in the segment of autonomous vehicles, we might see more companies taking a cue from Uber in backing the project. So far autonomous vehicles have achieved fair mileage with not many accidents.
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