Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous ride-hailing to Austin and Atlanta

It sure feels like, barring some major regulatory setback&#x2F;surprise, that within 5 years it will be funny to remember getting into an uber or cab driven by a real person when in any major city.<p>The biggest challenge overall is going to be overcoming the issues with autonomous driving in inclement weather. But I’m sure it’s doable eventually.

The most interesting bit is that Uber is responsible for operations.<p>&gt; <i>Through this expanded partnership, Uber will provide fleet management services including vehicle cleaning, repair, and other general depot operations. Waymo will continue to be responsible for the testing and operation of the Waymo Driver, including roadside assistance and certain rider support functions.</i>

Can anyone explain how this makes any business sense? Doesn&#x27;t Uber have a self-driving business that competes directly with Waymo? Wasn&#x27;t one of Uber&#x27;s early engineering motivations for running on-prem infrastructure (instead of cloud) to avoid being cut off from GCP should Google decide to start competing? And now Uber is directly partnering with Google to offer a Google service through their platform?

So bynext year Waymo’s rollout will look like this:<p>* Los Angeles - Waymo One<p>* San Francisco- Waymo One<p>* Phoenix - Waymo One, Uber<p>* Austin - Uber<p>* Atlanta - Uber<p>It’s still early days for AVs, so I’m guessing Waymo is still experimenting with which model they want to go with. I wonder if we will see Waymo or Cruise launch on Lyft as well.

This is going to be the real test for Waymo. From anecdotal experience, Austin has more inclement weather, and its road infrastructure is lacking in some parts of town.

“Waymo’s fully autonomous, all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles”<p>Wonder if air quality improves in cities that get a large adoption of autonomous electric vehicles.