Cooperation between Toyota und Uber

Author: Thomas Wandler
Date: 29.08.2018

Cooperation for the development of autonomous driving

Toyota is now also cooperating with Uber in the development of autonomous driving. Therefore the Japanese carmaker invested 500 million US dollar, equivalent to 430 million euros. It was announced by both companies.

As part of the collaboration, Uber has developed a safety system for assisted driving that will be implemented in Toyota vehicles. These will then be used by the Uber service. Nevertheless, a driver is still needed despite the system.

The companies have already joined together in other areas. In terms of autonomous driving, both are stragglers. After a self-driving SUV from Uber had a fatal accident, the car service has completely withdrawn from this area.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber’s collaboration with Toyota aims to save development costs in the robot division, which is currently recording losses. Uber declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal on the cooperation and Toyota was initially unreachable for comment.

Currently, many carmakers are working on the development of autonomous driving. Ford recently announced that they would spend around $ 4 billion on their established division by 2023. The technology group Softbank from Japan also plans to invest more than two billion dollars for a similar department at General Motors. In addition, Softbank is also involved in Uber.