• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 18, 2016

Uber has reportedly paid $680 million to acquire Otto, a 90-plus person technology startup whose mission is to rethink transportation, starting with self-driving trucks. The move widens its lead on autonomous transportation with tech leaders such as Google and Tesla Motors. 

Anthony Levandowski, Otto’s co-founder, will now lead the combined self-driving efforts at Uber, reporting directly to Travis Kalanick, CEO and Uber co-founder.

"When it comes to this advanced technology stack, Otto plus Uber is a dream team," Kalanick wrote in a post.

Kalanick called Levandowski one of the world's "leading autonomous engineers," noting that his first invention, a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider, is now in the Smithsonian.

Levandowski, Otto’s co-founder, worked between April 2007 and January 2016 as a software engineer at Google. He left Google, along with others, earlier this year to work on self-driving trucks.

Otto began turning commercial trucks into self-driving vehicles with the help of retrofitted kits, and initially began testing the technology with Volvo on the VNL 780, according to one report.

Self-driving trucks with Volvo are not the only autonomous vehicles Uber is working on. Later in August, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon a self-driving car — about 100 modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles — from their phones, an achievement that Google and Tesla Motors, among others, have yet to reach.

Uber and Volvo forged an agreement earlier this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021. The Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles have dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers.

The company has been on a quest to change the car services industry for years. Uber also acquired assets from Microsoft Bing back in June 2015, including 100 employees focused on the product image collection, as well as intellectual property licenses, software, and physical goods such as cameras.

Uber's Otto acquisition, bringing on Levandowski, acquiring the mapping assets from Microsoft Bing, and the partnerships with Volvo are extremely critical to the company's future.

The steps announced Thursday are crucial to the company's self-driving strategy because Uber has no experience making cars, according to Kalanick. "By combining Uber’s self-driving technology with Volvo’s state-of-the art vehicles and safety technology, we’ll get to the future faster than going it alone," he said.