Uber is laying off another 350 workers, the company announced on Monday. Uber Eats and Uber’s self-driving car team are among the divisions hit by job losses. TechCrunch obtained a copy of an email CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent to Uber workers. It describes the layoffs as “difficult but necessary changes.”

This is Uber’s third round of layoffs for 2019. The company laid off 400 workers in its marketing department in July and 435 engineering and product workers in September. Some workers have also been asked to relocate.

Uber announced in August that it racked up record losses of $5 billion in the second quarter of 2019. It’s important to note that the bulk of that figure represents one-time charges connected to Uber’s May stock offering. Excluding those charges, Uber’s ongoing burn rate has been around $1 billion in recent quarters. Third-quarter financial results are due out next month.

An Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey that Monday’s layoffs represented about 1% of the company’s workforce. That’s far too small to eliminate Uber’s losses. But every little bit helps.

Layoffs include Uber’s self-driving car unit, which has had a difficult time over the last 18 months. The division racked up millions of test miles before March 2018, when an Uber vehicle struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March 2018. Uber shut down testing for months after that death and then resumed testing on a vastly smaller scale in December 2018.

Toyota led a $1 billion investment in Uber’s self-driving unit in August 2019, but the company hasn’t indicated when it might resume large-scale testing, to say nothing of commercial deployment.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1584805