Once Investor, Google Looks To Take On Uber

Is Google waging a war on Uber? Early signs say yes.

Google Ventures was once Uber’s biggest supporter, backing the ride-hailing app with $258 million in 2013. Now Uber faces a threat from that very investor who is looking to become its competitor, Bloomberg reported.

According to the report, there are “signs that the companies are more likely to be ferocious competitors than allies.” This means that Google could be prepping its own ride-hailing app as part of its driverless car project. But this information is still speculative as Bloomberg‘s report said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, who also serves on Uber’s board, told “a person close to the Uber board” about the possibility. There are now talks that the Uber board may ask to step down from its board.

In a separate but related article, TechCrunch reported yesterday (Feb. 2) that Uber is opening a robotics research facility to build self-driving cars. The article said that sources told TechCrunch that scientists from Carnegie Mellon and the National Robotics Engineering Center are being hired by Uber to work on the technology. That may be another heated competition that Uber and Google are facing off in.

Here’s what Google has said on the subject matter of driverless cars: “We’re thinking a lot about how in the long term, this might become useful in people’s lives, and there are a lot of ways we can imagine this going,” said Chris Urmson, the Google executive in charge of the project, according to TechCrunch. “One is in the direction of the shared vehicle. The technology would be such that you can call up the vehicle and tell it where to go and then have it take you there.”

So what would Google creating its own ride-hailing service mean for Uber? For one, it would lose its biggest partner (the technology giant that hosts Uber’s Google-map based routes) and second, it would leave it up to Uber to develop new technology that could be in direct competition with what Google is working on. Instead of moving forward in the space together, Google and Uber could be moving alone. This in turn could turn the once strategic partners into fierce competitors.