Back in 2016, Uber picked up Otto, a truck-based self-driving tech company. The company would eventually deploy a fleet of autonomous vehicles back in March as part of the Uber Freight service. Much like normal Uber, the freight variant was a way for truck drivers to complete delivery orders for third parties.
Since then, Uber has come under a number of complications regarding self-driving technology. Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski was a former Waymo engineer, making him the center point in the dispute over stolen technology between Waymo and Uber.
The company would also come under heavy fire when one of their self-driving vehicles struck a woman jaywalking, killing her. Reports by the National Transportation Safety Bureau revealed that the vehicle had seen the women six seconds before impact, but safety regulations failed to activate after being manually disabled. This sparked a distrust in the company's practices, implying they cut corners to speed up development.
The result of all of this is less autonomy by Uber. Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, stated that they're going to focus more on safer projects.
“We recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh. As we look to continue that momentum, we believe having our entire team’s energy and expertise focused on this effort is the best path forward.”
