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Uber’s robotaxi strategy has hit a rough patch. According to the Los Angeles Times, the ride-hailing company’s split from Waymo — once its marquee partner in the race to put driverless cars on American streets — has left Uber leaning more heavily on its own, unproven autonomous vehicle technology. Bloomberg, meanwhile, reports that Uber’s stock has been languishing, prompting investors to take a harder look at just how realistic the company’s self-driving timeline really is.

The two accounts, taken together, describe a company whose driverless ambitions now rest on considerably shakier ground than they did even a year ago. Uber built its early robotaxi credibility largely by association: it didn’t need to build the technology itself when it could offer rides through Waymo’s vehicles in cities where Alphabet’s subsidiary was already operating. That arrangement gave Uber a foothold in the autonomous vehicle business without the enormous capital and engineering burden of developing the cars itself.

Now that the partnership has frayed, Uber is in the position of having to prove it can go it alone — a much harder sell to investors who have watched Waymo spend more than a decade and billions of dollars refining its sensors, software and safety record before scaling up. Uber’s in-house efforts, by contrast, remain largely untested at commercial scale, and the Los Angeles Times notes that this leaves the company’s robotaxi push looking considerably more speculative than it did when Waymo cars were doing the driving.

Why this matters extends beyond Uber’s balance sheet. The company has spent years positioning itself as the inevitable distribution layer for autonomous vehicles — the app that would sit atop whichever self-driving technology won out, collecting a toll on every ride regardless of who built the car. That thesis depended on Uber not needing to pick a technological horse. A break with Waymo forces a different, riskier bet: that Uber’s own systems, or those of newer partners, can catch up to the industry leader on safety and reliability fast enough to matter.

For the broader robotics and autonomous vehicle industry, the episode is a reminder of how fragile even the most prominent partnerships in this space can be, and how much of the sector’s progress still depends on alliances between companies with different core competencies — software and fleet operations on one side, ride-hailing networks and urban logistics on the other. Investors, per Bloomberg, are now recalibrating what Uber’s timeline for profitable, at-scale robotaxi service actually looks like. For riders in cities watching driverless cars arrive gradually, the practical effect may be more caution and slower rollout than the industry’s marketing has suggested — a reminder that the last mile of automation is often the hardest one to drive.