Transportation as a service (TaaS): A look ahead

SoftBank Group just invested $5 billion in China's Didi Chuxing, China's biggest ride-sharing service. Last year Uber sold their China business to Didi resolving (by giving up) all the legal and antitrust investigations it was undergoing in China. In other news, Chris Urmson, CTO of Google's self-driving car program for many years, left to start a new company. In a recent lecture at CMU, Chris Urmson (who got his PhD from and taught at CMU), co-founder and CEO of self-driving car startup Aurora and part of the DARPA Urban and Grand Challenge teams, described three major transitions involving self-driving cars and said that "It's a wonderful time to be a roboticist." Urmson's new startup, Aurora, will develop software, hardware, and data, to sell to automakers who want to build their own autonomous cars.