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To keep dreaming its self-driving dream, Uber is entering into a new relationship with an old adversary.

Uber and Waymo, the autonomous driving division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced on Tuesday they’ve struck up a partnership. Waymo’s self-driving taxis will now be available through Uber’s regular ride-hailing app over a 180 square-mile area covering Phoenix, Arizona.

Uber and Waymo have not always enjoyed a friendly relationship. In 2017 the two companies legally locked horns when Waymo accused former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, whose self-driving startup Otto had been bought up by Uber, of stealing its trade secrets. The two companies reached a settlement in 2018, and Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison two years later — although he received a presidential pardon in 2021. A pretty rocky start to any relationship.

But hard times make strange bedfellows, and although Uber originally planned to develop its own self-driving technology, a fatal crash in 2017 stalled its progress, and in 2020 the company sold off the division. It never totally abandoned autonomous driving as a sector though, and in 2020 it struck a deal with Waymo to integrate its truck brokerage platform into Waymo’s autonomous trucking business.

Uber tying the knot with Waymo on robotaxis reflects a burgeoning strategy for commercializing autonomous driving:

As well as no driver, there may well be no passengers in the cars. Waymo’s vehicles will also be on Uber’s delivery platform Uber Eats. There are still plenty of people who would be anxiously climbing into a car with no driver — but would they trust it with their Friday night tacos?

New Nemesis: While Waymo and Uber have put the past behind them, Google’s generative AI rivalry with Microsoft continues to rev up. Google’s search engine still has the advantage over Bing, but Microsoft has another point of consumer entry — Windows. No, Bill Gates isn’t going to clamber through your window to make you try ChatGPT. The Windows 11 operating system is getting a new AI assistant called “Copilot.” We predict ChromeOS will be getting a similar generative-AI second-officer very soon.

– Isobel Asher Hamilton

Come in and stay a while. A long while.

America’s two biggest hotel chains — Marriott and Hilton — are fighting over a newly-prioritized corner in the hospitality space: extended-stay hotels that cater to guests seeking weeks-long visits. The lodging class, highlighted in a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, is among the hottest in the post-pandemic, work-from-anywhere world.

Both chains are in the midst of launching new, as-yet unnamed extended-stay brands due for sometime next year, according to the WSJ. Consider them something of a counter to the more homely amenities found in AirBnB’s and Vrbo’s, with the extended stay hotel rooms typically featuring larger floor plans, full-sized refrigerators, cooktop stoves, and in-unit dishwashers — at the expense of regular housekeeping and robust room service menus. That means fewer full-time employees, reducing overhead costs.

“You have all the things you need to work, sleep, eat,” Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta told the WSJ. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a new world where work trips and leisure trips can go hand-in-hand, extended-stay properties have exploded in popularity. And, crucially for brands like Hilton and Marriott, the economics are irresistible:

Nassetta said the brand would likely be “one of the—if not the—most profitable brands on a pure margin basis that we have.”

Hyatt, too, is beefing up its extended-stay offerings via its new “Hyatt Studios” brand, though that will likely be marketed as a premium chain with a higher price point than the Marriott and Hilton lines.

On the Road Again: Extended stay hotels are likely to be recession-resilient, Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics firm CoStar, told the WSJ, due to the constant demand for extended stays from demographics like construction crews, travel nurses, business consultants, and other dislocations and relocations. As long as there’s some work and some play, we don’t foresee any issues.

– Brian Boyle

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(Photo Credit: Andreas Felske/Unsplash)

By 2050, experts say the world will have to remove the equivalent of 10 gigatons — or roughly 22 trillion pounds — of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year if we want to stave off the devastating effects of climate change. Jamie Dimon thinks he can help… a little.

JPMorgan announced Tuesday that it will pump more than $200 million into carbon removal technologies. But does it amount to a substantial investment in the fight against climate change, or is it just another feel-good ESG venture to make a big company look like it cares?

Carbon removal technology is essentially a gigantic vacuum that sucks surplus CO2 out of the atmosphere and safely stores it or processes it into other products like alcohol, fuel, and even synthetic meat.

However, the carbon removal industry is still in its infancy and in need of robust financing, so the most popular practice is selling removed carbon to petroleum companies for enhanced oil recovery. That’s right: An industry that wants to make the planet greener is attached to the hip with one actively polluting it. We suppose Emerson had it right when he called consistency the hobgoblin of little minds:

Best Frenemies: Climeworks has managed to avoid alliances with oil companies until just recently. According to The Verge, Climeworks said it will never use its stored carbon for EOR, but it is planning to partner with the California Resources Corporation for carbon storage purposes. “That’s what oil and gas can do really well,” Climeworks’ Christoph Beuttler told The Verge. “They know the underground, they know the geologic subsurface and therefore they are a great storage partner.”

– Griffin Kelly