Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a network of sensors for autonomous driving companies

Uber has a long-term ambition that goes far beyond transporting passengers: The company eventually wants to equip its human drivers’ cars with sensors to absorb real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies and, potentially, other companies that train AI models in physical-world scenarios.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview on TechCrunch. Strictly VC Event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a fledgling program the company announced in late January called Audiovisual laboratories.

“That’s the direction we want to go eventually,” Naga said of equipping vehicles for human drivers. “But first we need to understand the sensor kits and how they work. There are some regulations – we have to make sure each state has (clarity) what the sensors mean and what it means to share them.”

For now, AV Labs relies on a small, dedicated fleet of sensor-equipped cars that Uber operates itself, separate from its network of drivers. But the ambition is clearly much greater. Uber has millions of drivers globally, and if even a fraction of those cars could be transformed into data collection dollies, the scale of what Uber could offer the audiovisual industry would dwarf what any individual audiovisual company could put together on its own.

The idea driving the program, Naga said, is that the limiting factor for audiovisual development is no longer the underlying technology. “The bottleneck is data,” he said. “(Companies like Waymo) need to go around and collect data, collect different scenarios. You might be able to say, in San Francisco, ‘At this school intersection, I want some data at this time of day so I can train my models.’ The problem for all of these companies is access to that data, because they don’t have the capital to deploy the cars and collect all this information.”

Becoming the data layer for the entire audiovisual ecosystem is a pretty smart move, especially considering that Uber abandoned its own ambitions to build self-driving cars years ago (a move that co-founder Travis Kalanick has publicly lamented as a big mistake). In fact, many industry observers have wondered whether, without its own autonomous vehicles, Uber could one day become irrelevant as autonomous vehicles increasingly emerge around the world.

The company currently has partnerships with 25 audiovisual companies (including Wayve, which operates in London) and is building what Naga described as an “AV cloud”: a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models. Partners, which Uber plans more aggressively invest directlyThey can also use the system to run their trained models in “shadow mode” against real Uber trips, simulating how an AV would have performed without actually putting one on the road.

“Our goal is not to make money from this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”

Given the obvious commercial value of what Uber is building, that positioning may not last long. The company has already done capital investments across numerous AV players, and its ability to deliver proprietary training data at scale could give it significant leverage over an industry that currently relies on Uber’s rides market to reach customers.