Uber Wants to Be the Data Layer for Every Self-Driving Car

Uber’s CTO let something slip at StrictlyVC last week. The plan is to outfit millions of human drivers’ cars with sensors and turn them into a global, always-on data collection grid for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies. They already have partnerships with 25 AV players and call the resulting library an AV cloud, a labelled sensor dataset for training AV models. The framing was generous: “Our goal is not to make money out of this data. We want to democratise it.” Right. Because if there’s one company famous for unprofitable acts of generosity, it’s Uber. ...

May 5, 2026 · 2 min · 320 words · bjr