Uber just purchased the self-driving truck startup created by former Googlers ' here's a look inside (Goog)

As Uber ramps up its driverless car operations in Pittsburgh, it will have some help from several ex-Googlers who have already mastered the technology.According to a report from Max Chafkin at Bloomberg, Uber has purchased Otto, the self-driving truck startup founded by AnthonyLevandowski and Lior Ron, both former high-level Google employees. Levandowski will now take over Uber's entire self-driving car operations and Uber plans toopen two more R&D offices: one in Palo Alto and another in Otto's offices in San Francisco, Bloomberg reports.Otto is only a 6-month-old startup, but it already has four trucks on the road 24/7 andis sprinting toward what Ron described to Business Insider as the not-so-distant future of self-driving semis, where existing trucks can install one of Otto's $30,000 kits to produce autonomous driving capabilities."There's more and more demand for truck drivers to drive more with less time," Ron says. "We're living in an on-demand era where we all want to press a button and have something arrive as fast as possible. Well, there's a truck behind all of those products."Business Insider recently got a lookinside Otto's cavernous headquarters to see where the innovation is cracking. Check it out:SEE ALSO:16 incredibly useful Amazon products and services you didn't know existedOtto's San Francisco headquarters look like a standard garage from the outside.The space actually used to be a truck depot, but the most recent tenant before Otto used it to store massive amounts of furniture.(We'll see a bit more of that later, once we're deeper inside the building. Apparently, the former tenants didn't do a very thorough job moving out.)See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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