Uber to Become 5th Largest Automaker in the United States?

What if autonomous vehicle technology was fused with another new and successfully invasive undertaking? Reports indicate that this project is in the works. Uber, the ride-sharing company based in San Francisco, is working on self-driving technology. The potential combination is a self-driving vehicle that picks you up, all without the use of a human driver.

Bidness ETC is reporting that “Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that Uber Technologies may very well be on the way to becoming America’s fifth top-automaker.” Part of the reasoning behind this attention-grabbing prediction is the current Uber investment in autonomous vehicle technology. The ride-sharing company has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University and the National Robotics Engineering Center to research autonomous vehicle technology. About 50 scientists from both organizations are now working on this project in a brand new robotics workshop in Pittsburgh.

Jeff Holden, Chief Product Officer at Uber, said in a statement, “We said, ‘Hey, who are the best in the world at this from an academics standpoint and bringing this kind of technology into the real world?’ And CMU is at the top of that list. So that’s what started it and why we reached out.” Carnegie Mellon has also partnered with Google back in 2006. That partnership led to Google hiring a certain Carnegie Mellon robotics specialist named Chris Urmson. Urmson has since become well known in the automotive world for his work on autonomous vehicle technology.

Adam Jonas, an auto industry analyst for Morgan Stanley, thinks that in 15-20 years Uber could “develop, manufacture and own” a fleet of self-driving cars that pick up people without any human driver. He also went on to say in an AP report that Uber’s self-driving manufacturer success could lead to, “ultimately obviating the need for the vast majority of individual vehicle ownership.” Some analysts feel that it could take as much as a generation for self-driving technology to be fully accepted and trusted. Do you think self-driving technology is going away or here to stay? Should dealers be concerned about the eventual disappearance of individual vehicle ownership?