A Toronto company is helping Uber go driverless

Sometime in the near future, you’ll order an Uber and notice something missing when you open the car door: the driver.

Waabi, the Toronto-based autonomous vehicle company, has announced plans to roll out at least 25,000 driverless cars in partnership with Uber. The robo-taxis will operate exclusively on Uber’s platform, though the companies have not said when the roll-out will begin or which cities will get them first. They also haven’t disclosed which automaker will build the cars, but Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun says a manufacturing deal is expected to be finalized in the coming months.

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The announcement accompanied news that Waabi has raised $1.35 billion in venture capital, funding it will also use to expand its autonomous long-haul trucking business. Since 2023, the company has been delivering goods between Dallas and Houston in partnership with Uber Freight, with a human safety driver on board.

Related: Inside Uber’s self-driving car lab

Urtasun, a University of Toronto prof who ran Uber’s autonomous driving unit before it was sold in 2020, argues that Waabi’s technology could ultimately be safer than human drivers. She claims that the company’s approach sets it apart from competitors: rather than logging millions of real-world kilometres first, Waabi trains its AI using a proprietary simulation platform called Waabi World.

The software can rapidly generate endless driving scenarios—pedestrians stepping into traffic, sudden braking events—allowing systems to learn faster and at a lower cost than traditional road-testing-first strategies. Since 2022, Waabi has also been testing vehicles on public roads with safety drivers, and last fall the company completed its first fully driverless test on a closed course.

Urtasun has also suggested that robo-taxis could appeal to women travelling alone at night, eliminating the concerns about driver misconduct that have long plagued ride-hailing platforms. Meanwhile, Uber has spent the past year assembling a global network of autonomous partners to expand driverless ride-hailing on its platform. That includes Alphabet’s Waymo, which operates 2,500 self-driving cars in cities such as Austin, Los Angeles and Miami. Uber also works with China’s Baidu in parts of Asia.

Related: Artificial intelligence expert Raquel Urtasun on the complicated future of transportation

Still, even as the technology spreads, recent high-profile failures continue to fuel skepticism about safety. In 2023, a Cruise robo-taxi—part of General Motors’ autonomous driving unit—struck a pedestrian in San Francisco who had already been hit by a human driver in another vehicle. The pedestrian was pinned beneath the robo-taxi and dragged for six metres but survived her injuries. Soon afterward, Cruise suspended its US operations after regulators found that the company’s robo-taxis posed a risk to public safety.

Whether Waabi’s robo-taxis represent a genuine breakthrough remains to be seen, but the real test will soon happen on city streets, not in simulation labs.