Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners
Uber has more than 20 autonomous vehicle partners, and they all want one thing: data. So the company says it’s going to make that available through a new division called Uber AV Labs.
Despite the name, Uber is not returning to developing its own robotaxis, which it stopped doing after one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian in 2018. (Uber ultimately sold off the division in 2020 in a complex deal with Aurora.) But it will send its own cars out into cities adorned with sensors to collect data for partners like Waymo, Waabi, Lucid Motors, and others — though no contracts are signed just yet.
Broadly speaking, self-driving cars are in the middle of a shift away from rules-based operation and toward relying more on reinforcement learning. As that happens, real-world driving data has become hugely valuable for training these systems.
Uber told TechCrunch the autonomous vehicle companies that want this data the most are the ones that have already been collecting a lot of it themselves. It’s a sign that, like many of the frontier AI labs, they’ve come to realize that “solving” the most extreme edge cases is a volume game.
Image Credits:Waymo/Uber
And Uber wont be charging for it. At least not yet.
“Our goal, primarily, is to democratize this data, right? I mean, the value of this data and having partners’ AV tech advancing is far bigger than the money we can make from this,” he said.
Uber’s VP of engineering Danny Guo said the lab has to build the basic data foundation first before it figures out the product-market fit. “Because if we don’t do this, we really don’t believe anybody else can,” Guo said. “So as someone who can potentially unlock the whole industry and accelerate the whole ecosystem, we believe we have to take on this responsibility right now.”
Screws and sensors
The new AV Labs division is starting out small. So far, it just has one car (a Hyundai Ioniq 5, though Uber says it is not married to a single model), and Guo told TechCrunch that his team was still literally screwing on sensors like lidars, radars, and cameras.
“We don’t know if the sensor kit will fall off, but that’s the scrappiness we have,” he said with a laugh. “I think it will take a while for us to say, deploy 100 cars to the road to start collecting data. But the prototype is there.”
Partners won’t receive raw data. Once the Uber AV Labs fleet is up and running, Naga said the division will “have to massage and work on the data to help fit to the partners.” This “semantic understanding” layer is what the driving software at companies like Waymo will be pulling from to improve a robotaxi’s real-time path planning.
Even then, Guo said there will likely be an interstitial step taken, where Uber will essentially plug a partner’s driving software into the AV Labs cars to be run in “shadow mode.” Any time the Uber AV Labs driver does something different from what the autonomous vehicle software does in shadow mode, Uber will flag that to the partner company.
This will not only help discover shortcomings in the driving software, but also help train the models to drive more like a human and less like a robot, Guo said.
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/uber-launches-an-av-labs-division-to-gather-driving-data-for-robotaxi-partners/