Taxi firm Uber has abandoned plans to develop self driving cars and has sold its self driving car unit to Californian start-up Aurora. The taxi firm is also investing $400 million in the start-up, essentially paying Aurora to take the self-driving car unit off its hands.

Uber has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars in its self driving car efforts, but had run in to financial, legal and operational problems, including the death of a woman in Arizona in 2018, which caused the company to suspend its road tests.

The Covid-19 crisis has hit Uber hard as revenue from its taxi business fell as people have cut back on travel, both for business and personal purposes. This has led many investors to demand that the firm sell its self-driving car unit.

Japanese car firm Toyota and Japanese investor SoftBank have invested 1.5 billion dollars in Uber’s self driving efforts, with the latest investment just a year ago.

Aurora was founded by former Google self-driving lead Chris Urmson, former Tesla engineer Sterling Anderson, and former Uber self driving engineer Drew Bagnell. The company has focused on developing self driving hardware and software, rather than attempt to build a whole car from scratch. The company had formed partnerships with Volkswagen and Hyundai, but Volkswagen has ended the partnership and Hyundai, although still working with Aurora, is also working with other self driving partners.

The acquisition of Uber’s self driving efforts could hand Aurora a life-line, as it is likely that Toyota will now become a partner of Aurora. Uber as well is now likely to license technology from the start-up.

Chris Urmson recently announced that Aurora’s aim was to launch a long-haul self driving truck as its first product.

In 2016, Uber bought self driving truck start-up Otto, a company led by another former Google self-driving engineering lead, Anthony Levandowski. With a year of the acquisition, Google brought a lawsuit against Uber, charging that Levandowski had stolen technical secrets from Google. Uber fired Levandowski, and settled with Google, granting it a stake in the company.

The merger of Uber’s self driving car and long distance truck technologies with Aurora’s could result in the latter bringing its first product to market much sooner. Urmson’s calculation that self-driving long distance trucks are a safer bet than autonomous cars could also give the company a greater chance of commercial success.

As part of the deal, Uber has taken a 26 percent in Aurora. That means that if Aurora makes a success of developing self driving technology, Uber will still have access to it, without having to run a loss making unit.