Uber strikes $1B deal with Volvo for self-driving cars

Uber has reached an agreement with Volvo to purchase a fleet of driverless cars as the ride-hailing firm seeks to deploy autonomous vehicle technology.

As part of the deal, Uber will buy as many as 24,000 XC90 Volvo SUVs between 2019 to 2021, making the agreement potentially worth more than $1 billion. 

The agreement is part of automaker’s mission “to be the supplier of choice for AD ride-sharing service providers globally,” said Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo’s president and CEO.

{mosads}Uber is already testing 200 of the automaker’s cars in San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Tempe, Ariz. Last year, the two firms agreed to invest $300 million to jointly develop self-driving cars.

“This new agreement puts us on a path towards mass produced self-driving vehicles at scale,” said Jeff Miller, Uber’s head of automotive partnerships.

Uber is currently trying to outpace autonomous car rivals such as Tesla, Lyft and the Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, which are each developing their own technologies.

Lyft and General Motors had previously launched their own partnership to eventually create an on-demand service for autonomous vehicles.

At the beginning of November, Waymo announced that it had begun testing fully autonomous cars without the help of human monitors. The Google-affiliated company was the first to reach that milestone.