At a 2015 event, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pondered aloud the future of his ride-hail company in a world of self-driving cars. There were still a ways off, he acknowledged—five or 10 or 15 years. But to him, Uber’s role was clear. “Are we going to be part of the future?” he said. “Or are we going to resist the future, like that taxi industry before us? For us, we’re a tech company, so we’ve said, let’s be part of that.”
Kalanick isn’t at the head of Uber anymore, but the specter of disruption remains. Ten years later, self-driving vehicle companies that mostly didn’t exist in