Google going after Uber by turning self-driving cars division into its own business

By Maya Kosoff

NEW YORK: Google is turning its selfdriving cars unit into a standalone business under Alphabet next year, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Google's autonomous cars will offer “rides for hire“. That's still pretty vague, but it doesn't sound much different from the service Uber provides -especially since one of Uber's goals, CEO Travis Kalanick has said, is to get into the driverless car business. “Look, Google is doing the driverless thing, Tesla is doing the driverless thing, Apple is doing the driverless s doing the driverless thing,“ Kalanick said in an interview with “Late Show“ host Ste phen Colbert in Sep tember. Since Febru ary, reports have surfaced that Google has been working on an Uber rival, a service that will likely feature its autonomous vehicles.

There's been a bit of an exodus from Google to Uber in recent months. Manik Gupta, who anno-unced his move on LinkedIn after working on Google Maps for seven years (most recently as the director of product management), just joined Uber as the director of its Maps product. Brian McClendon, who ran Google Maps for many years joined Uber in July. Tom Fallows, an ex-founder of Google Express is now an Uber exec. And Rachel Whetstone, Google's communications & policy SVP, started working with the same title at Uber in May.