Uber's stock has done exceptionally well this year. At the time of writing this post, it's up over 60% year-to-date. But at the same time, it remains unclear to me what the relationship will be between Uber and this brave new world of autonomous vehicles.

I mean, right now, if you're in Phoenix, I'm told you can order a Waymo car through Uber's app. But if you're in San Francisco, Waymo customers must use the Waymo app. It's all bit mirky right now, but Uber is just trying to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible."

There's also an argument that, for the foreseeable future, ride-hailing networks are going to need some mixture of both human and robot drivers. I get this argument. But beyond the short term, I think there will be strong incentives to completely eliminate human drivers.

Last month, the New York Times announced that Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder who got pushed out 8 years ago, to help him buy autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai.

It's a bit of an interesting story. Pony is a Chinese company, but because the US doesn't want Chinese tech to become too deeply embedded in the American economy — and has become increasingly hostile to such companies — it has been readying a clean US subsidiary of the business for sale.

This is what Travis allegedly wants to buy with the help of Uber. And it's particularly noteworthy because it could be an indication that Uber is worried about Waymo and wants to have its own AV unit (which it had previously, but then sold off in an effort to quickly reach profitability).

My sense is that Uber needs to do something along these lines. The risk of not having autonomous vehicle capabilities is simply too great.

Cover photo by Viktor Avdeev on Unsplash