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Is Google planning to use its driverless cars to compete with Uber?

By Kenny Yeo - on 3 Feb 2015, 11:19am

Is Google planning to use its driverless cars to compete with Uber?

Source: Guardian Liberty Voice.

Google has been working on driverless cars for a long time, but we never quite knew what the company's intentions behind it were. Was it going to license this technology to automakers? Or will it build and sell Google-branded cars in future? If reports are true, it is neither.

The latest reports now suggest that Google is planning to use its driverless cars to come up with a competitor to Uber. Reports also say that Google's chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, David Drummond, who also sits on Uber's board of directors, has informed Uber of this possibility.

Lending further credibility to this is Google CEO Larry Page's fascination with making cities run more efficiently. At the recent Detroit Auto Show, Chris Urmson, who is in-charge of Google's driverless car project, said, "We're thinking a lot about how in the long-term, this might become useful in people's lives, and there are a lot of ways we can imagine this going. One is in the direction of the shared vehicle. The technology would be such that you can call up the vehicle and tell it where to go and then have it take you there.”

Uber, who was recently in the lime light with regard to leaked email correspondence between its staff and drivers, is also said to be developing its own self-driving cars. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has said before that Uber costs so much because of "the other dude" in the car. He said reportedly said at a technology conference, "The Uber experience is expensive because it’s not just the car but the other dude in the car. When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost gets cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

Source: Bloomberg, The Next Web

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