According to Uber, “There are no implications for Uber Freight with the shutting down of the self-driving truck program. They were operating separate programs before this even happened, so there really is no effect. Uber Freight will continue on as usual, and it’s one of our fastest growing businesses within Uber, so it’s not going anywhere.”
“At a high level we’ve been rethinking our self-driving efforts, we’ve made the decision to focus on cars because we don’t feel we need to immediately be developing self-driving trucks to remain competitive in the freight logistics space” a spokesperson said.
Instead, they’re currently focused on “building out the network first to ensure we have a viable place to put this technology.”
“Given that Uber Freight has been growing as rapidly as it has, we think it’s the best use of time to focus on that and then explore self-driving technology for trucks down the line. We’re continuing to explore approaches to highway driving using the cars,” exploring new business opportunities, like self-driving trucks, in the future,” Uber stated.
Uber will also be reallocating employees from the self-driving truck division to the self-driving car division: “We’ll be moving folks over from the truck program to the car program, we continue to hire relatively aggressively for the car program. It’s great that we can move folks over who already have experience. We want to make sure we have all of the best people on the project. We want to use their expertise on the car program any way we can.”