Uber ends the development of self-driving trucks for the moment | News and opinions

Uber has not abandoned the development of autonomous cars. But on Monday, the company announced that it had curbed autonomous commercial trucks.

" We decided to stop the development of our autonomous truck program and to go ahead exclusively with cars," said Eric Meyhofer. Head of Uber's Advanced Technology Group in a statement Monday.

The change, announced for the first time by TechCrunch, does not mark the definitive end of the research on Uber trucks. But the company was forced to rethink its self-driving efforts after a fatal accident in March that implied that an autonomous Uber SU was running into a 49-year-old woman.

Uber is now trying to revive his research on autonomous vehicles. Last week, the company's test cars began returning to the streets in Pittsburgh, following a four-month suspension imposed by the company.

For now, Pittsburg vehicles are driven in manual mode, but Meyhofer of Uber still calls it a "momentum". As a result, the company has decided to reallocate its autonomous driving efforts to focus solely on mainstream vehicles. "We believe that the energy and expertise of our entire team focused on this effort is the best way forward," Meyhofer said in his release.

Uber started in 2016 with the purchase of Otto, a start-up that was co-founded by a former Google employee named Anthony Levandowski. The technology was advanced enough to drive a truck for 120 miles on a highway to deliver a shipment of Budweiser beer.

However, the acquisition of Otto by Uber was later mired in the controversy. Waymo, a spin-off of Google's auto research, has decided to sue Uber in 2017. She claimed that Levandowski had stolen trade secrets from Google and provided them to his new employer, Uber

. Levandowski and later reached a $ 245 million settlement with Waymo to stop the lawsuit.

In the field of commercial trucks, Uber still has its freight program, which is trucking suppliers with suppliers. As a result, Uber believes that it is not necessary to immediately develop autonomous trucks to remain competitive in the logistics space, said a spokeswoman for the company.