San Francisco – Uber has announced the launch of AV Labs, a new internal team dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles by solving one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: access to large-scale, real-world driving data that captures rare and complex scenarios.
For more than a decade, Uber has focused on making transportation more accessible, reliable, and safe worldwide. With AV Labs, the company is positioning autonomous technology not as a winner-take-all product, but as a scalable ecosystem that can deliver the benefits of autonomy to more people, faster.
Unlocking the Data Bottleneck in Autonomy
As machine learning advances, autonomy has increasingly become a data and modeling race. While simulation and closed-course testing remain valuable, Uber notes that real progress now depends on learning from “long-tail” driving scenarios—rare, unpredictable, and often messy situations that occur only in real-world conditions.
These edge cases are expensive and difficult to capture, yet they are essential for deploying safe and reliable autonomous systems at scale. According to Uber, this data gap remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in the autonomy sector.
Uber’s Scale as a Competitive Advantage
Uber believes it has a unique advantage in addressing this challenge. Every hour, millions of Uber trips take place across diverse environments—dense city centers, suburbs, airports, restaurants, and complex pickup and drop-off locations—under all weather conditions and times of day.
These real rider and delivery trips generate operational coverage and contextual data that few companies can match in scale or cost efficiency. Uber plans to transform this real-world complexity into high-quality datasets that can help autonomous systems learn faster and perform better.
A High-Velocity, Multidisciplinary Team
AV Labs brings together specialists in data science, machine learning, computer vision, systems engineering, and infrastructure. The team will focus on building core autonomy capabilities, including data mining, simulation, validation, and system-level improvements across perception, prediction, and planning.
Rather than developing a standalone autonomous vehicle, AV Labs is designed to support Uber’s autonomous vehicle partners and accelerate progress across the broader autonomy ecosystem.
Supporting the Future of Transportation
By leveraging its global platform and operational scale, Uber aims to make autonomy more accessible and sustainable, while improving safety and reliability. The company views AV Labs as a foundational step in shaping the next chapter of autonomous mobility.
Uber also confirmed that AV Labs is actively hiring engineers and researchers, particularly those interested in working close to the learning core of autonomous systems and contributing to the future of transportation.
