Uber has partnered with — and in some cases made direct investments in — more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past two years, taking a global approach to building an autonomous driving ecosystem1,2.
The ride-hailing company's current AV strategy represents a sharp pivot from its earlier attempt to develop self-driving technology in-house. Uber created Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in 2014 and recruited dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics program. In 2016, Uber acquired Otto, a self-driving truck company founded by former Google self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron, Don Burnette, and Claire Delaunay. Burnette has since gone on to found Kodiak AI. That same year, Uber began testing its AVs on public streets across California, Pittsburgh, and Arizona.
Three events derailed the in-house program: Waymo's trade secrets lawsuit against Uber, the resignation of then-CEO Travis Kalanick in 2017, and a fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018 involving a self-driving Volvo XC90 that struck and killed a pedestrian. The vehicle was operating in autonomous mode, and a human safety operator behind the wheel was not paying attention at the time of the crash. Uber suspended testing and reorganized the program but, according to TechCrunch, never truly returned to its original mission.
After Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO, Uber underwent a reset. In 2020, the company walked away from its autonomous vehicle moonshots.
ANALYSIS The shift from internal AV development to a partnership-and-investment model across more than 30 companies marks a fundamentally different strategic posture: Uber is positioning its ride-hailing network as a platform layer for third-party autonomous technology rather than competing directly as an AV developer. The breadth of partnerships — spanning multiple companies and geographies — distributes technical and regulatory risk across a wide portfolio rather than concentrating it in a single in-house program. The contrast with the ATG era is stark: the earlier approach centralized R&D and exposed Uber to litigation, safety liability, and reputational damage from a single fatal incident, while the current model externalizes those risks to partner companies.
TechCrunch is tracking every one of Uber's AV partnership and investment moves in a consolidated tracker.