Dawn Of Self-Driving Taxi Wars: Uber And Its Investor Google Both Zoom Ahead

Rumors of tech giant Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG) working on a ride-sharing app are doing the rounds, which comes as a surprise as the company is a prominent investor in arguably the biggest ride-sharing company, Uber. However, instead of fretting over that, Uber has upped the ante by hiring scientists to work on a project that is very close to Google’s heart: self-driving vehicles.

Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine Dan Costa was on CNBC Monday to provide his opinion on the self-driving taxi war revving between the two companies.

Related Link: Mercedes-Benz Wants To Lead The Way To Driverless Cars

Is Self-Driving Vehicle Research A Smart Endeavour For Uber?

"Yeah, actually this has been telegraphed for a while. Travis Kalanick, their CEO, said a year ago that he wanted to staff his fleet with driverless cars and that actually makes sense from a business perspective," Costa replied.

"They have got a fleet of thousands of vehicles and one of the biggest cost centers is paying drivers and if driverless cars can work, it just makes a lot of sense."

Self-Driving Taxis

When considering Google turning self-driving cars into self-driving taxis, Costa said, "I mean, it makes a lot of sense from when you think about self-driving cars. People may own them, but they really lend themselves to being lent and to be shared." Costa said.

"And if Google’s going to build the cars themselves, they need to build a platform that lets consumers order them and all of a sudden they have got a service that looks very similar to Uber. So, it makes a lot of sense for them as well."

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What's The Time Frame?

"Well, they are on the road right now in California and Nevada," Costa replied.

"You can actually see these test drives, these prototypes being out there…it’s going to be a lot of players in this market. It will be a couple of years before they are ready to do urban driving. But for highway driving, we are really looking in that age right now."