Self-driving vehicle technology company Aurora will acquire the employees and technology behind Uber's Advanced Technologies Group in a stock transaction, the companies said Monday. Uber will also invest $400 million into Aurora, and Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will join Aurora's board of directors. The company's efforts around self-driving technology was marred in March 2018 when one of its automated test vehicles hit and killed a woman, the first death involving the technology. While at Google, Urmson also worked on the self-driving car technology with another top engineer, Anthony Levandowski, who defected to Uber in 2016 oversee its early efforts to build robotic vehicles. Before the settlement, Uber's former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick revealed he believed Google's self-driving car technology posed an existential threat to Uber during his dramatic appearance on the witness stand.

Source: New Zealand Herald December 08, 2020 00:11 UTC