- Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said making driverless cars common in ride-hailing would take a while.
- He pointed to several issues, including safety and parking.
- Uber has been working with Waymo in some cities to offer driverless cars.
Self-driving cars have a long way to go before they become common on Uber, the ride-hailing service’s CEO said Wednesday.
Developers of self-driving cars, such as Tesla and Waymo, are making the technology more common for riders in a few US cities, Dara Khosrowshahi said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
But he said that scaling that technology to assemble large fleets of driverless cars to ferry Uber passengers around was more challenging.
“We think that the commercialization of the technology is going to take way, way longer,” Khosrowshahi said.
The company already uses some self-driving cars in Phoenix through a partnership with Waymo. Uber and Waymo are set to expand their venture to Atlanta and Austin this year.
In a letter to investors on Wednesday, Khosrowshahi said that “several pieces of the go-to-market puzzle still need to come together” before Uber can use autonomous vehicles widely.
One aspect he pointed to was safety.
Waymo has said its driverless cars are safer than vehicles driven by humans, but as new providers enter the market, autonomous vehicles as a category “will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers in order to earn the trust of the public,” he said.
Khosrowshahi said that large fleets of driverless cars would also require parking spaces when not in use, as well as cleaning and maintenance.
“It is important to note that an average-utilized AV can run as much as 100K miles a year, compared to a typical consumer vehicle at 10-15K miles a year,” Khosrowshahi wrote, using an abbreviation for autonomous vehicle. “This means that AVs need to be charged multiple times a day and serviced monthly.”
Uber’s drivers, who are independent contractors, are responsible for most of those tasks.
Khosrowshahi also pointed to regulations, which can vary by state, as another hurdle for rolling out AVs. The Trump administration has indicated it might develop a federal approach for autonomous vehicles.
The CEO also said the prices of self-driving vehicles, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, would need to come down before companies could buy lots of them.
Anyone with a large network of AVs would also have to match the fleet to demand — something Uber already does with its drivers, Khosrowshahi said.
In January, Khosrowshahi said he didn’t expect autonomous vehicles to replace Uber’s millions of drivers within the next five years.
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