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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the that-is-a-lot-bigger-than-a-car dept.

From MotorAuthority.com:

Ride-sharing giant Uber sees a future where it not only has a fleet of self-driving cars offering rides to the public, but also self-driving trucks transporting goods on the highway.

Uber on Thursday announced the acquisition of Otto, an American startup with around 90 staff working on developing self-driving trucks. The announcement was made on the same day Uber announced a deal with Volvo to source additional test cars for its growing fleet of self-driving cars.

Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski has been put in charge of all autonomous driving efforts at the combined firms and will report to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Early last decade Levandowski developed the Ghostrider, a self-driving motorcycle that now sits in the Smithsonian. He was also on Google's self-driving car team.

Otto was only founded in January but much of its staff comes from more established firms including Apple, Google, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] and Cruise Automation. Otto's goal isn't to start selling self-driving trucks but rather to develop technology that can be licensed to truck manufacturers or turned into kits that can be retrofitted to existing trucks to make them autonomous.

Also at theverge.com


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:16AM (#390959)

    Babylon 5 had a minor plot arc about retrofitting self-flying spaceships with alien tech. Plundering dead civilizations for their technology was a recurring theme. It's such a fucking shame that in real life wealthy American morons have to employ foreign slave labor to invent shit for them instead of just outright stealing.