It’s been a pretty rough year for Uber. Sexual assault complaints against female co-workers, a lawsuit by Waymo against Uber for IP-theft, and then investigations by authorities about illegal business practices and espionage. Besides Uber-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick several managers and supervisory board members had to leave the company.
A company with such signs of disintegration needs from time to time some good news. And they arrived before Christmas in the form of an announcement that Uber has reached the milestone of two million autonomously driven miles.
The first million miles took 2.5 years, but the next million only 100 days With the current rate of 84,000 miles (134,400 kilometers) per week the next million should be reached in another 100 days.
Uber has increased its Uber Advanced Technology Group to 1,500 employees located in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Toronto. A total of 200 test vehicles is operating in those cities. The focus expanded from developing a self-driving car to making a great user experience for passengers.
Google-subsidiary Waymo announced recently having reached the four million mile mark (7.2 million kilometers) of autonomous driving. Google has been testing its fleet of several hundred cars in Mountain View, Chandler, Kirkland, and Austin. A few weeks ago their cars started driving in Chandler without a safety driver on the driver’s seat.
This article has also been published in German.
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