A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, robotaxi, robotic car or robo-car, is a car that is capable of operating with reduced or no human input. Self-driving cars are responsible for all driving activities, such as perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and controlling the vehicle, which includes navigating from origin to destination.
Uber Technologies, Inc., commonly referred to as Uber, is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 150 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It facilitates an average of 28 million trips per day and has facilitated 47 billion trips since its inception in 2010. In 2023, the company had a take rate of 28.7% for mobility services and 18.3% for food delivery.
Lyft, Inc. is an American company offering mobility as a service, ride-hailing, vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, rental cars, and food delivery in the United States and select cities in Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dynamic pricing model based on local supply and demand at the time of the booking and are quoted to the customer in advance, and receives a commission from each booking. Lyft is the second-largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber.
Jur P. van den Berg was the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of driverless trucking startup Ike, which was sold to Nuro in 2020. As of 2024, he is part of the leadership at autonomous truck developer Waabi. He has been an assistant professor at the University of Utah. He was formerly a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley and in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published more than 40 works in computational chemistry, computational geometry, computer animation, industrial engineering, robotics, and virtual reality. He has also coauthored the reciprocal velocity obstacle library for multi-agent navigation.
Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.
A ridesharing company, ride-hailing service, is a company that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire that, unlike taxis, cannot legally be hailed from the street.
A robotaxi, also known as robot taxi, robo-taxi, self-driving taxi or driverless taxi, is an autonomous car operated for a ridesharing company.
NuTonomy was an MIT spin-off technology startup company that made software to build self-driving cars and autonomous mobile robots. The company was founded in 2013. In August 2016, it launched its robo-taxi service in Singapore. In October 2017, Delphi Automotive purchased the company, which then became part of the Motional autonomous driving joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai Motor Group.
Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.
Argo AI LLC was an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was co-founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, veterans of the Google and Uber automated driving programs. Argo AI was an independent company that built software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure to power self-driving vehicles. Argo was mostly backed by Ford Motor Co. (2017) and the Volkswagen Group (2020). At its peak, the company was valued at $7 billion.
Kitty Hawk Corporation was an American aircraft manufacturer producing electric ultralight aircraft.
Travis VanderZanden is an American businessman and the founder and former CEO of Bird, a scooter sharing service. Before founding Bird, VanderZanden was Chief Operating Officer at Lyft, then VP of International Growth at Uber.
Nuro, Inc. is an American robotics company based in Mountain View, California. Founded by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro develops autonomous delivery vehicles and is the first company to receive an autonomous exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Drive.ai, a subsidiary of Apple Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California that uses artificial intelligence to make self-driving systems for cars. It has demonstrated a vehicle driving autonomously with a safety driver only in the passenger seat. To date, the company has raised approximately $77 million in funding. Drive.ai's technology can be modified to turn a vehicle autonomous.
Boeing NeXt was a division of aerospace manufacturer Boeing, exploring urban air mobility. Its portfolio includes a passenger air vehicle (PAV), a cargo air vehicle (CAV) and other urban, regional and global mobility platforms.
Zoox, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon developing autonomous vehicles that provide mobility as a service. It is headquartered in Foster City, California and has offices of operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, Washington. Zoox sits in the Amazon Devices & Services organization alongside other Amazon units like Amazon Lab126, Amazon Alexa, and Kuiper Systems.
An electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is a variety of VTOL aircraft that uses electric power to hover, take off, and land vertically. This technology came about thanks to major advances in electric propulsion and the emerging need for new aerial vehicles for urban air mobility that can enable greener and quieter flights. Electric and hybrid propulsion systems (EHPS) have also the potential of lowering the operating costs of aircraft.
The Wisk Cora, also known as Generation 4 and Generation 5, is an American autonomous personal air vehicle prototype previously developed by the Kitty Hawk Corporation, and subsequently by Wisk Aero.
Motional is an American autonomous vehicle company founded in March 2020 as a joint venture between automaker Hyundai Motor Group and auto supplier Aptiv. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Motional also maintains operations in Pittsburgh, Singapore, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Motional began testing its newest generation of vehicles in Las Vegas, Nevada, in February 2021, and also operates vehicles in Pittsburgh and Santa Monica, California.
Wisk Aero is an aerospace manufacturer based in Mountain View, California, United States. The company develops self-flying electric vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft designed to be operated as air taxis. The company was formed in 2019 as a partnership between Boeing and Google co-founder Larry Page's Kitty Hawk aircraft company.
