Report: Uber has been urged by investors to sell off its self-driving car unit, which has lost $125M-$200M per quarter over the last 18 months
(Reuters) - Investors have told Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] it would be wise to sell off its self-driving car unit after it racked up losses …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands a year after Uber moved to close or sell most of its US car-leasing division to stem unsustainable losses — another sign that pre-IPO Uber was pruning businesses whose economics didn't work. The self-driving unit is a far bigger prize: $125M-$200M burned per quarter over 18 months, with investors now telling Reuters they'd rather see it sold than carried onto a public balance sheet.
The arc that follows validates the pressure: within two months Uber was reportedly weighing minority-stake investment to share the unit's cost, and by late 2020 it was in talks to sell Advanced Technologies Group outright to Aurora Innovation. This 2018 moment is where the divestiture logic first went on the record.
First-order effects
- Uber's board faces a direct choice between funding a unit losing up to $200M per quarter or selling it ahead of an IPO that will be priced on the company's loss profile.
Second-order effects
- Rather than an outright sale, Uber's fallback reported weeks later — bringing in minority-stake investors to co-finance the unit — would dilute the risk while keeping autonomy on the roadmap.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, capital-intensive autonomy programs get carved out of ride-hailing platforms and consolidated into dedicated developers like Aurora, which is exactly where Uber's unit ended up in the 2020 sale talks.
The trend: Ride-hailing platforms are shedding capital-intensive self-driving units to specialized AV startups as investor scrutiny of quarterly burn intensifies ahead of public listings.