Travis Kalanick thinks Uber screwed up: “Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product”

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6:28 PM PDT · March 12, 2025

Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, made it clear on Wednesday that he believes the company’s decision to abandon its autonomous driving program was a mistake. Said Kalanick at the Abundance Summit in L.A., “Look, [new management] killed the autonomous car project we had going on. At the time, we were really only behind Waymo but probably catching up, and we were going to pass them in short order … I wasn’t running the company when that happened, but you know, you could say, ‘Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product right now. That would be great.’”

Uber sold its self-driving unit in a reported fire sale to the self-driving tech developer Aurora in 2020, three years after Kalanick was forced to step down. At the time, it made sense; autonomous driving was bleeding cash, and Uber had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort. Now Waymo’s self-driving cars are tooling around the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix and are popping up in new markets.

Waymo recently partnered in Austin with Uber, and Uber is betting its platform will be critical in growing the service. But business is business, and partnerships falter. If Waymo decides it doesn’t need a middleman, Uber, once the future of transportation, could find itself stuck in reverse.

Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.

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