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Illustration for article titled Uber Has Severed Its Ties To A Supposedly Profitable Autonomous Future — Image: Getty Images

After spending years and billions of investor dollars trying to get its autonomous robotaxi fleet off the ground, Uber has cut its losses and dumped the problem child division on a Silicon Valley startup called Aurora. As part of the deal, Uber will invest an additional $400 million in Aurora, paying the new company to distance itself fiscally and legally from the disaster that Uber’s autonomous project has become.

Uber has always been an unprofitable taxi service and has said that the path toward profitability is replacing its expensive human drivers with self-driving robot cars. That’s how the company managed to keep getting investors to funnel billions into the company — the promise that it would someday make a profit by kicking hard-working Americans out of their gig economy jobs. Without this autonomous hardware and software, Uber has admitted that it has no idea how the company will ever turn a profit.

Aurora has already announced that it will discontinue working on autonomous taxi service technology, which Uber has known for quite some time was still a very very long way off. Instead, it will focus on trying to wrench long haul truckers from one of the last middle-class income jobs you can obtain without mandatory post-secondary education. Trucking, it supposes, is much easier to automate as America’s highway infrastructure is unidirectional and comes part and parcel with fewer on-the-road surprises.

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I have always been skeptical of autonomous driving, and this revelation throws another wrench into the works. A company that has banked its entire future on autonomous tech hasn’t been able to figure it out with a several billion dollar budget, even after very publicly killing a pedestrian in Arizona, stealing intellectual property, and getting sued by Google. None of this is very reassuring.

Is an unprofitable taxi company really worth almost $100 billion?

Illustration for article titled The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Probably Going To Permanently Change The Way We Relate To Cars — Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)

When 2020 kicked off, we knew the automotive industry was changing, but no one could have predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would have as much of an impact as it’s had. As the virus has lingered in America, it’s become clear that we want something different from the way we relate to our cars.

Buying Online

Two out of three car buyers are open to a 100 percent online buying experience, a study from AutoTrader reports. Luxury automakers like Genesis are already offering options like this, where you can order a car online and have it delivered to you without ever having to step into a dealership.

It’s an attractive option for people who don’t want to go through an already arduous buying experience. From the study:

Consumers have always wanted quicker interactions during their automotive experience, and now, with more online tools available to them such as scheduled test drives, pick-up and delivery, their willingness to completing the entire vehicle purchase online is accelerating exponentially.

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While there’s certainly still value in being able to see a car in person before making a purchase, there’s a lot more accountability now than in the past. If you have a bad buying experience, you can always take to the Internet to complain and, in some way, hold that brand accountable.

People just don’t feel they can adequately socially distance in a dealership scenario, and the longer the pandemic has lasted, the more open people have become online shopping.

Driving, Not Public Transit

It makes sense that folks are growing less and less interested in public transit these days. There’s been a big push in recent years to expand things like subways, trains, and bus services in order to reduce the number of cars on the road, but we’ve seen a regression as a result of COVID-19.

At this exact moment, plenty of people have been putting off new car purchases, but that has less to do with the virus itself than its economic impact, AutoTrader notes. Millions of people are still unemployed, and the economy still isn’t exactly booming; investing in a car is probably not on most peoples’ radar right now.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not driving.

“COVID-19 has caused vehicle ownership to become more vital to consumers’ everyday lives, often replacing other transportation methods such as ride-sharing or public transit,” notes a CarGurus study of Canadian drivers.

We perceive public transportation as more dangerous than personal travel, and that’s not wrong: confined spaces, high-touch surfaces, and the inability to quickly determine which person is sick makes it a riskier option than taking the family car. And, the longer this pandemic plays out, the more firmly these perceptions of uncleanliness will settle into our brains.

It’s the same thing with air travel. While some folks have been trying to push a study saying contracting COVID-19 on airplanes is rare, the whole concept of sitting in close confines with people breathing the same recycled air is unappealing. The onset of the pandemic saw a 96 percent decrease in air travel, and while more people are flying, they aren’t doing so with the same abandon they had been pre-pandemic. Many of those people are turning to their cars to get them where they need to go.

Electric And Autonomous Options

One of the biggest surprises for me is the fact that the pandemic has people more interested in electric and autonomous options than they had been before. Nearly one-third of new vehicle shoppers are interested in EVs, and that largely comes down to the perception that it would enable drivers to avoid high-touch areas in a gas station. Charging stations will likely present a problem in and of itself, but EV owners can also opt for a home charger.

In part, this also comes down to a greater familiarity with EVs. They’re not really new anymore. We see them on the road and have likely noted the nearest charger to us.

This is also paired to our beliefs about autonomous vehicles, which we think we know but about which many folks are still a little hazy. If we’re going to be opting for driving more often in our personal cars, we’re going to be more interested in handing over the reins the way we’ve done in airplanes and public transit.