Uber expands beyond rides and food with hotels, travel, and autonomous-vehicle data play

Uber's expansion into travel and autonomous-vehicle data reflects a strategic pivot beyond its core ride-hailing and delivery businesses, but the company is being selective about which services it builds directly versus partners on. Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal notes that Uber users take 1.5 billion trips annually outside their home cities, making travel a natural extension—and the company has used its membership program (Uber One, with 51 million members) to drive cross-selling between ride, delivery, and now travel products. The strategy appears to be working: members break even on delivery in two to three orders, and the company reports cross-usage is rising, with people who previously used only one service adopting others.

The AV Labs initiative is the more complex move. By deploying its own fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles and collecting driving data at scale, Uber claims to offer autonomous-vehicle partners access to edge-case scenarios and operational know-how—how to handle pickups, drop-offs, and lost items in a real-world ride-hailing context. However, this also positions Uber as a data layer and optionality player in a sector where it competes directly with Waymo and other partners in which it holds equity. The company wound down its Waymo pilot in Phoenix (which had about a dozen cars) while scaling Waymo deployments in Austin and Atlanta (hundreds of cars), signaling that Uber views autonomous vehicles as one input to managing demand and supply in a hybrid network with human drivers—not as a path to becoming an autonomous-vehicle operator itself.