Uber says AV momentum has never been stronger, yet its autonomy unit has quickly lost its commercial, legal and engineering leaders. By Stewart Burnett
Uber’s autonomous vehicle (AV) talent exodus continues: Danny Guo, who led engineering for its robotaxi partnerships and fronted its AV Labs data unit, will leave the company on 16 November. He departs the company on the same day as Sarfraz Maredia, its Global Head of Autonomous Mobility and Delivery; the double exit strips Uber’s autonomous business of both its senior commercial and technical leadership at a crucial inflection point in its effort to bring robotaxis to scale globally.
Indeed, the development comes weeks before fully driverless testing of its Lucid and Nuro robotaxi is due to begin. Guo, whose formal role is Vice President of Engineering and Science, reports to Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga, and oversaw engineering across autonomy, maps, marketplace, experimentation and the Uber One membership programme.
He is taking a role outside the transportation industry, an Uber spokesperson told Bloomberg, and many of the leaders beneath him will now report directly to Naga. Nearly 12 years into his tenure, he joins a list of autonomy departures that already includes the unit’s heads of partnership business development and legal.
Guo’s exit matters because the AV Labs he led was Uber’s most direct answer to the threat of disintermediation. Launched in January, the unit was designed to supply partners with real-world driving data from rare edge scenarios that their own fleets struggle to capture. The ride hailing giant said back in June that it planned to deploy 500 sensor-laden Hyundai Ioniq 5 data-collection vehicles globally this year, gathering up to two million miles of data per month. “Because if we don’t do this, we really don’t believe anybody else can,” Guo said at the launch.
That data offer was meant to give robotaxi developers a reason to choose Uber’s platform beyond its reach and massive customer base. Waymo is the partner with the least need for outside data, and it’s already loosening its ties, planning its own app in Austin and Atlanta while winding down its presence on the app entirely. In those cities, Waymo’s vehicles are currently available only through Uber; they are no longer available via Uber in Phoenix.
Waymo’s Co-Chief Executive Tekedra Mawakana has previously described booking through Uber as “a little bit of a crapshoot”, given that riders have no way of knowing if they will receive a human-driven vehicle or a robotaxi. It is conversely the partners which remain, many of them smaller and running modest fleets, that depend most on what AV Labs was built to provide.
The leadership exodus arrives as many of Uber’s AV projects inch closer towards deployment. Perhaps the most significant of these is its robotaxi service with Lucid and Nuro in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has slipped to the first quarter of 2027. Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said recently that fully driverless testing would begin during Q3 and the service “will operate fully driverless from day one”.
He added: “Our focus on autonomous is now on commercial execution, with approximately 700 fully driverless vehicles expected on Uber by year-end and over 2,000 in 2027.” Waymo, by comparison, already runs upwards of 4,000 vehicles across the US. The Lucid-Nuro project is arguably Uber’s largest, with the order expanded to 35,000 units earlier in 2026.
Folding Guo’s teams under Naga fits the flatter and more streamlined leadership structure Uber has pursued since announcing in September that it would cut about 3,300 jobs, or 10% of its workforce. The departures extend well beyond autonomy, however, with President Jill Hazelbaker leaving for OpenAI and earlier exits by the Chief Financial Officer and Chief People Officer. For senior engineering talent, the pull of the wider AI sector now competes directly with the robotaxi business on which Uber is staking more than US$10bn.
The handover from those who designed Uber’s autonomy strategy to those who will run it is now complete on both the commercial and technical sides. That suits a business shifting from partnership-building to deployment, but the Lucid and Nuro launch in early 2027 will be the first substantial test of AV Labs’ ability to execute without the architects of the model.
Source: www.automotiveworld.com
