Uber is open to outside investment into self-driving car unit

Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said it was “possible” the ride-hailing giant would look for outside investors for its self-driving car unit, but isn’t currently searching for backers.

The company’s pouring large, undisclosed sums of money into its Advanced Technologies Group, which includes the company’s self-driving car research as well as plans to build VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles at scale and speed, with a goal of them becoming a mass-market technology.

Khosrowshahi was speaking to Bloomberg News’s Brad Stone at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.

Uber is competing with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, Tesla Inc., and the world’s traditional auto manufacturers and startups, in the race to develop self-driving vehicles. Waymo launched the first autonomous ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. But the service is only available to a test group of about 400 people in a limited geographic area, and a human safety driver is still needed behind the wheel in case the cars encounter situations their artificial intelligence systems can’t handle.

Despite heavy investment, companies working on self-driving technology have been pushing back forecasts for when fully-autonomous cars without safety drivers are likely to be widely available, as they discover training a computerized system to handle the complexity of road and weather conditions is a far harder task than initially envisioned.