Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into an electric team for the self-driving industry

Uber has a long-term ambition that goes beyond chasing passengers: the company eventually wants to outfit self-driving cars with sensors to input real-time information for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and other companies that train AI models for real-world situations.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview with TechCrunch’s. StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as an additional environmental strategy that the company announced at the end of January. AV Labs.

“That’s where we want to go,” Naga said as he prepared the public transport. “But first we have to understand the sensor equipment and how it works. There are some rules – we have to make sure that every country is (clear) what sensors mean, and what sharing means.”

Currently, AV Labs relies on a fleet of small, dedicated sensor-equipped vehicles that Uber drives itself, separate from its drivers. But the desire is apparently too great. Uber said million drivers around the world, and even if only a fraction of those cars could be converted into data collection platforms, the amount Uber could offer AV companies would dwarf what any AV company could build on its own.

The insight driving the program, Naga said, is that what’s holding back AV development is no longer the underlying technology. “The limitation is data,” he said. “(Companies like Waymo) have to go around and collect data, collect different scenarios. You can say: in San Francisco, ‘At this school intersection, I need data at this moment to train my models.’ The problem for all of these companies is getting that information, because they don’t have the money to send trucks and go get all this information. “

Being a layer of all things AV is a smart play, especially considering the years Uber has abandoned its ambitions to develop self-driving cars (a move that co-founder Travis Kalanick has publicly lamented big mistake). Indeed, many industry watchers wonder whether, without its self-driving cars, Uber might one day be out of business as AVs proliferate around the world.

The company currently has partnerships with 25 AV companies – including Wayve, which operates in London – and is creating what Naga has called “the AV cloud”: a library of common data that partner companies can query and use to train their models. Partners, which Uber is planning very strongly money directlythey can also use the system to run their training models in “shadow mode” against real Uber rides, simulating how an AV would perform without putting one on the road.

“Our goal is not to monetize this information,” Naga said. “We want democracy.”

Given the obvious commercial value of what Uber is building, this space won’t last long. The company has already made it equity capital in many AV games, and its ability to provide owner information on a large scale could lead to significant profits in a sector that currently relies on Uber’s marketplace to reach customers.