7 ms·

Uber is moving its self-driving cars from San Francisco to Arizona

44 points by arikr 10y ago

Tempest1981 10y ago
Good idea -- start out in a less challenging urban environment.
throatfuck 10y ago
California is going to regulate itself to death, and it's going to be hilarious all the way down. It reminds me of when Mugabe seized white-owned farmlands in Zimbabwe, economy obviously immediately tanked, begged them to come back, and it's been a disaster ever since. Between the emissions scandal, forcing hundreds of thousands of trucks that need to be entirely re-fleeted, and then immediately fucking over clean-energy endeavors like Tesla, harassing self-driving endeavors like Uber, they have no chance to survive. The US needs to disavow CA and cut them off asap.
- Zhenya 10y ago
  Yes. You are right. Traffic light and bike lane laws are regulatory overreach. Uber, Please comeback and train your ML on live traffic while t-boning cars and hitting cyclists. /s
- aetherson 10y ago
  California may or may not be regulating itself to death, but this is not an example of a crazy onerous regulation. The fee is nominal ($150), the application is simple, and the process is quick. The best guess is that Uber is fleeing a transparency requirement in the regulation.
- fullshark 10y ago
  Lol California's requirements for putting a self-driving car on the road are incredibly low given mistakes have potentially fatal consequences. Uber's unwillingness to meet even that bar is amazing imo and says more about Uber than CA's over-regulation.
- iscrewyou 10y ago
  You had a somewhat good critique going up until the last sentence. I live in California and would like not to be hit by a car that is gunning down a road where the driver may or may not be paying attention. If uber doesn't want to go the proper route to get the fleet going here, you are more than welcome to have it.
fabian2k 10y ago
Uber's almost pathological aversion to any form of regulation doesn't inspire confidence. The requirements in this case seem very reasonable, detailed accident disclosure is a reasonable thing to ask in my opinion. My impression, based on this and other cases where Uber got in conflict with local regulations is that they don't seem to care whether the regulations are reasonable or not. They try to ignore them in every case.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > They try to ignore them in every case Other than for PR, I couldn't understand why Uber started testing in San Francisco. It's a densely-populated and heavily-regulated city in a heavily-regulated state.
  - tyre 10y ago
    Because that's where they are headquartered
    - jayjay71 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of the engineers will be unhappy about constantly traveling (or worse, moving) to Arizona. Their self-driving engineers are now split among three locations: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Arizona. I think that alone is going to cause significant engineering friction. It's a lot harder to do remote work for testing live robots (especially if they can kill people).
      - tyre 10y ago
        I'm guessing it'll be worse than a centralized team, but not too bad. The Pittsburgh team is there because of Carnegie Mellon, so likely where the hardware gets made. The software engineers in SF just need data from vehicles, which doesn't require cars to be near them. The operations folks actually going out and testing the cars can be anywhere, as long as they can stream data back to the SW and HW folks.
fullshark 10y ago
> “Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads,” said Governor Ducey in a statement. “While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses.” So Uber got some sort of tax break / sweetheart deal for this? I wonder if that was their end-game.
- niftich 10y ago
  Ah, so that was Uber's leverage [1]. Make California and its laws look bad, and get a PR statement from a competing state likely offering incentives (or receiving knock-on benefits from relocation). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234265#13234809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234265#13234809
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Ok, you have to love the visual pun in this image : https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tEI5W_27WhDMteZhxakApTm3Gzk=/0x0:5327x3551/920x613/filters:focal(2238x1350:3090x2202)/cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52429987/Self_Driving_4.0.jpeg https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tEI5W_27WhDMteZhxakApTm3Gzk... its a self driving truck carrying self driving cars :-) It got me thinking about moving large fleets of self driving cars by small numbers of individuals without using a truck. And that left me with the vision of people on motorcycles herding cars along the freeway toward their winter grazing grounds in Arizona. :-)
- chinathrow 10y ago
  It is also a branded truck... PR 101. https://ot.to https://ot.to
aetherson 10y ago
So, Uber: Bloomberg says that their Q3 net revenue is 1.7B, with a loss of 800M. That makes their overall profit margin approximately -50%. To say that this is not a good sign is a significant understatement. Yearly figures would be about $5.5B in revenue, loss of about $3B, so expenditures of $8.5B. Let's say that $2B in expenditures are essentially waste or research projects with no very immediate prospect of return. That leaves it with a loss of -$1B on revenues of $5.5B. Any further expenditure cutting is going to result in loss of revenue as well -- it's super hard to see how it could conceivably get to +$1B in net profit. It's also super hard to see how it can really substantially increase its revenues without yet further cutting its margins. There are no large markets left for it to enter, so how does it entice more ridership except by cutting fares? But even if it did manage to get to $1B or $2B in profit, that's not enough. It's allegedly a $75B company! Uber stipulates that it shouldn't have to register its cars as self-driving, because they aren't advanced enough to meet the definition. It compares itself to Tesla: automated lane-keeping + adaptive cruise control. If we take Uber at its word, that is not a good sign for it to dig itself out of its terrible revenue situation via being first to market with automated vehicles. My guess: Uber's investors have realized that when the music stops, there are about half as many chairs as people. They're trying to get it to pull together some kind of IPO so they can dump at least some of their losses on public investors, and Uber is trying to desperately spin along the pixie dust stories until it can get itself into some shape to IPO. That means avoiding California's reporting requirements for driverless cars because only by claiming that they have a viable automated car program do they have some kind of story about how they might eventually make a profit. The sad thing is that there is almost certainly a very good, modestly-sized company in Uber that plugs along making $100M a year in profit on $1B in revenue as a taxi company. But they can't go back down to that company anymore.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Well the theory is that those new larger markets to enter will be in adjacent industries involving movement of nonhuman goods.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    They've really de-emphasized this story over the last two years, though. You used to hear that they were a "logistics company," but they sure haven't been banging that drum, lately. Perhaps because it was always ludicrous. Uber's underlying technology is not complicated, it's not hard to build an app that connects buyers to drivers -- they have no durable competitive advantage there. They do have large network of drivers that they could potentially tap into, but those drivers are driving smallish sedans, not delivery trucks. They aren't necessarily super keen on double parking, getting out, and doing deliveries. They are probably 1/10th as efficient as a traditional UPS or Fedex driver in terms of cost per package delivered. Now, could that excess capacity still soak up a little additional money? Sure. If Uber needed to bump up their profit margins by 1-2%, there might be a viable play in adding package delivery. But increasing their profit margins by 20-80%? Hahaha no. If Amazon ever really needs to have a distributed driver network, they'll clone the Uber app and set the whole thing up themselves, not work to prop up Uber's absurd market cap by overpaying for delivery. I know that Amazon has looked into this -- I think they've just decided that there's no money there. If there's no money in this for Amazon, why would we imagine there is money in this for anyone else?
xt00 10y ago
Companies in the US essentially can kill somebody "accidentally" and nobody from the company will go to jail in the majority of cases. There has to be some sort of obvious scheme or negligence on the part of the company leadership to result in somebody going to prison for anything more than a trivial amount of time. So people can complain about regulations, but they are essentially the primary method we have to prevent companies from killing or hurting people accidentally. Yes there are plenty of regulations that are actually not related to human safety that are put there by other companies for the purpose of trying to close the door behind them after they get into a strong position, but for things like cars that are essentially interacting with intersections, crosswalks, bikelanes, rail crossings, stopped cars, etc, having some burden on the company who wants to put machines into these situations run by algorithms being held accountable by way of forcing transparency, that seems pretty damned reasonable to me and many other people. So Uber is being pretty lame in this situation.
- mbel 10y ago
  > Companies in the US essentially can kill somebody "accidentally" and nobody from the company will go to jail in the majority of cases It certainly doesn't make things better, but really US doesn't seem to be unique in this case. It's like that in most if not all places on this planet (I will be delighted to be proven wrong).
stale2002 10y ago
HAHAHA! This is perfect! If California doesn't want those self driver car jobs, and tech investment thats ok! There are many other places out there that will happily accept the money, jobs, innovation, and safety advancements that these technologies will create.
- kabes 10y ago
  Does this equal to jobs and investments? Except for the few people behind the wheel of these cars, I don't think Uber is now suddenly going to move its offices and make big investments in Arizona.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Doing things remote is hard. Uber already creates a large office in Pittsburgh, and I presume they will do the same in Arizona.
- jlmorton 10y ago
  > There are many other places out there that will happily accept the money, jobs, innovation, and safety advancements that these technologies will create. Ironic comment given that the cars are designed in Pennsylvania and California, and the intention is literally to permanently destroy tremendous numbers of jobs. Of course, that's just first-order effects, productivity improvements benefit us all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ciconia 10y ago
  Funny how Americans have such a pavlovian knee jerk reaction to regulation. As a European I think a lot of your problems actually derive from not having enough regulation: inequality, violence, lack of universal healthcare, lack of solidarity. Too bad so many Americans are willing to sacrifice all that for so-called "freedom".
  - stale2002 10y ago
codecamper 10y ago
It could be a while before taxi drivers stop stepping in front of self driving uber cars with drill in hand (slash tires, run).
- r00fus 10y ago
  Wouldn't a camera mount and copious video (combined with a wealthy corporate HQ) essentially derail these attempts. Nothing beats appearing the victim of assault for public sympathy.
pw 10y ago
I wonder how they'll get to Arizona.
kabes 10y ago
Good the DMV didn't give in. There will always be a lesser economy bragging with lesser regulations. If you step into that race, things will turn out ugly fast. Except if those regulations are outrageous, which they really weren't in this case.
rblatz 10y ago
I saw a self driving Uber SUV in Scottsdale yesterday on my way in to work. Had two people in it. For the minute or so I was next to it I saw it drastically slow down for a crosswalk[0] that crosses in the middle of a street. Normally no one slows down there unless the pedestrian sign is lit up. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4871087,-111.9428112,3a,75y,4.78h,69.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slibIGTs-ft0j9SFBCpPRiw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4871087,-111.9428112,3a,75y,...
eric_h 10y ago
Is the $150 permit fee a typo? Given that it's likely that in the event of an accident, Uber would already create a detailed incident review internally - why on earth wouldn't they spend $150 and agree to submitting accident reports? They most certainly caved to NYC's demands that regular Ubers be registered with a registered cab dispatcher, and I'm quite certain they can afford $150 with their current war chest.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Accident reports mean a tally of the number of accidents in the public record. If there's a lot that would stop people taking a self-driving Uber, which would ruin the company in the long term.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Okay, but aren't car accidents already generally a matter of public record? You're technically required to report accidents to the police when they happen, are you not? Edit: It just occurred to me that the requirements could mean that Uber would have to report on any accidents that have occurred to date, though I'm not sure that conflicts with my original point. I must be mistaken in my original assumption.
    - florean 10y ago
      > You're technically required to report accidents to the police when they happen, are you not? No, you are not. Unless there is an injury or death, you just exchange information and pay the other party or let insurance figure it out. "You must call the police or the CHP if the accident caused a death or injury." http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/AutoAccident.aspx#1 http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/AutoAccident.aspx#... In WA, you also have to report if there was over $1k in damage. But it is obviously easy to estimate it is under that while at the scene of the accident. http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.52.030 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.52.030 Most states are the same. If there wasn't an injury and it isn't impeding traffic, the police don't care.
jaypaulynice 10y ago
I can't say I agree with him when it comes to the regulations, but Travis Kalanick gave an excellent TED talk about why there was no Uber before Uber when there was a chance: http://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_more_people_into_fewer_cars http://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_...
hanman9 10y ago
Totally unrelated to this; sorry for the hijack. Recently, I requested Uber for me and my friend from SF airport to San Jose; the rate was around $52 for two. Taken aback by high price, I opened Lyft and it quoted me $36 for two. My friend who uses Uber quite frequently switched to Lyft almost exclusively because of this pricing difference. Even though I commend Uber's disruption in the Taxi space, it's actually scary once Uber attains absolute monopoly.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  I ALWAYS compare both apps. Like most ride-sharing app users, I'm highly price sensitive and not loyal to any particular brand.
wrs 10y ago
If ever there was a time where I want some government regulation backing up my right not to be killed by a buggy computer, it's when I'm sharing space with a car that's driving itself. I don't see why Uber would want to fend for itself in a litigation free-for-all when its prototype car kills somebody, either. Everyone would be better off operating in a known regulatory framework.

44 points by arikr 10y ago

Tempest1981 10y ago

Good idea -- start out in a less challenging urban environment.

California is going to regulate itself to death, and it's going to be hilarious all the way down. It reminds me of when Mugabe seized white-owned farmlands in Zimbabwe, economy obviously immediately tanked, begged them to come back, and it's been a disaster ever since. Between the emissions scandal, forcing hundreds of thousands of trucks that need to be entirely re-fleeted, and then immediately fucking over clean-energy endeavors like Tesla, harassing self-driving endeavors like Uber, they have no chance to survive. The US needs to disavow CA and cut them off asap.

Zhenya 10y ago
Yes. You are right. Traffic light and bike lane laws are regulatory overreach. Uber, Please comeback and train your ML on live traffic while t-boning cars and hitting cyclists. /s
aetherson 10y ago
California may or may not be regulating itself to death, but this is not an example of a crazy onerous regulation. The fee is nominal ($150), the application is simple, and the process is quick. The best guess is that Uber is fleeing a transparency requirement in the regulation.
fullshark 10y ago
Lol California's requirements for putting a self-driving car on the road are incredibly low given mistakes have potentially fatal consequences. Uber's unwillingness to meet even that bar is amazing imo and says more about Uber than CA's over-regulation.
iscrewyou 10y ago
You had a somewhat good critique going up until the last sentence. I live in California and would like not to be hit by a car that is gunning down a road where the driver may or may not be paying attention. If uber doesn't want to go the proper route to get the fleet going here, you are more than welcome to have it.

fabian2k 10y ago

Uber's almost pathological aversion to any form of regulation doesn't inspire confidence. The requirements in this case seem very reasonable, detailed accident disclosure is a reasonable thing to ask in my opinion. My impression, based on this and other cases where Uber got in conflict with local regulations is that they don't seem to care whether the regulations are reasonable or not. They try to ignore them in every case.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> They try to ignore them in every case Other than for PR, I couldn't understand why Uber started testing in San Francisco. It's a densely-populated and heavily-regulated city in a heavily-regulated state.
- tyre 10y ago
  Because that's where they are headquartered
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of the engineers will be unhappy about constantly traveling (or worse, moving) to Arizona. Their self-driving engineers are now split among three locations: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Arizona. I think that alone is going to cause significant engineering friction. It's a lot harder to do remote work for testing live robots (especially if they can kill people).
    - tyre 10y ago
      I'm guessing it'll be worse than a centralized team, but not too bad. The Pittsburgh team is there because of Carnegie Mellon, so likely where the hardware gets made. The software engineers in SF just need data from vehicles, which doesn't require cars to be near them. The operations folks actually going out and testing the cars can be anywhere, as long as they can stream data back to the SW and HW folks.

fullshark 10y ago

> “Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads,” said Governor Ducey in a statement. “While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses.” So Uber got some sort of tax break / sweetheart deal for this? I wonder if that was their end-game.

niftich 10y ago
Ah, so that was Uber's leverage [1]. Make California and its laws look bad, and get a PR statement from a competing state likely offering incentives (or receiving knock-on benefits from relocation). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234265#13234809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234265#13234809

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Ok, you have to love the visual pun in this image : https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tEI5W_27WhDMteZhxakApTm3Gzk=/0x0:5327x3551/920x613/filters:focal(2238x1350:3090x2202)/cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52429987/Self_Driving_4.0.jpeg https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tEI5W_27WhDMteZhxakApTm3Gzk... its a self driving truck carrying self driving cars :-) It got me thinking about moving large fleets of self driving cars by small numbers of individuals without using a truck. And that left me with the vision of people on motorcycles herding cars along the freeway toward their winter grazing grounds in Arizona. :-)

chinathrow 10y ago
It is also a branded truck... PR 101. https://ot.to https://ot.to

aetherson 10y ago

So, Uber: Bloomberg says that their Q3 net revenue is 1.7B, with a loss of 800M. That makes their overall profit margin approximately -50%. To say that this is not a good sign is a significant understatement. Yearly figures would be about $5.5B in revenue, loss of about $3B, so expenditures of $8.5B. Let's say that $2B in expenditures are essentially waste or research projects with no very immediate prospect of return. That leaves it with a loss of -$1B on revenues of $5.5B. Any further expenditure cutting is going to result in loss of revenue as well -- it's super hard to see how it could conceivably get to +$1B in net profit. It's also super hard to see how it can really substantially increase its revenues without yet further cutting its margins. There are no large markets left for it to enter, so how does it entice more ridership except by cutting fares? But even if it did manage to get to $1B or $2B in profit, that's not enough. It's allegedly a $75B company! Uber stipulates that it shouldn't have to register its cars as self-driving, because they aren't advanced enough to meet the definition. It compares itself to Tesla: automated lane-keeping + adaptive cruise control. If we take Uber at its word, that is not a good sign for it to dig itself out of its terrible revenue situation via being first to market with automated vehicles. My guess: Uber's investors have realized that when the music stops, there are about half as many chairs as people. They're trying to get it to pull together some kind of IPO so they can dump at least some of their losses on public investors, and Uber is trying to desperately spin along the pixie dust stories until it can get itself into some shape to IPO. That means avoiding California's reporting requirements for driverless cars because only by claiming that they have a viable automated car program do they have some kind of story about how they might eventually make a profit. The sad thing is that there is almost certainly a very good, modestly-sized company in Uber that plugs along making $100M a year in profit on $1B in revenue as a taxi company. But they can't go back down to that company anymore.

hkmurakami 10y ago
Well the theory is that those new larger markets to enter will be in adjacent industries involving movement of nonhuman goods.
- aetherson 10y ago
  They've really de-emphasized this story over the last two years, though. You used to hear that they were a "logistics company," but they sure haven't been banging that drum, lately. Perhaps because it was always ludicrous. Uber's underlying technology is not complicated, it's not hard to build an app that connects buyers to drivers -- they have no durable competitive advantage there. They do have large network of drivers that they could potentially tap into, but those drivers are driving smallish sedans, not delivery trucks. They aren't necessarily super keen on double parking, getting out, and doing deliveries. They are probably 1/10th as efficient as a traditional UPS or Fedex driver in terms of cost per package delivered. Now, could that excess capacity still soak up a little additional money? Sure. If Uber needed to bump up their profit margins by 1-2%, there might be a viable play in adding package delivery. But increasing their profit margins by 20-80%? Hahaha no. If Amazon ever really needs to have a distributed driver network, they'll clone the Uber app and set the whole thing up themselves, not work to prop up Uber's absurd market cap by overpaying for delivery. I know that Amazon has looked into this -- I think they've just decided that there's no money there. If there's no money in this for Amazon, why would we imagine there is money in this for anyone else?

xt00 10y ago

Companies in the US essentially can kill somebody "accidentally" and nobody from the company will go to jail in the majority of cases. There has to be some sort of obvious scheme or negligence on the part of the company leadership to result in somebody going to prison for anything more than a trivial amount of time. So people can complain about regulations, but they are essentially the primary method we have to prevent companies from killing or hurting people accidentally. Yes there are plenty of regulations that are actually not related to human safety that are put there by other companies for the purpose of trying to close the door behind them after they get into a strong position, but for things like cars that are essentially interacting with intersections, crosswalks, bikelanes, rail crossings, stopped cars, etc, having some burden on the company who wants to put machines into these situations run by algorithms being held accountable by way of forcing transparency, that seems pretty damned reasonable to me and many other people. So Uber is being pretty lame in this situation.

mbel 10y ago
> Companies in the US essentially can kill somebody "accidentally" and nobody from the company will go to jail in the majority of cases It certainly doesn't make things better, but really US doesn't seem to be unique in this case. It's like that in most if not all places on this planet (I will be delighted to be proven wrong).

stale2002 10y ago

HAHAHA! This is perfect! If California doesn't want those self driver car jobs, and tech investment thats ok! There are many other places out there that will happily accept the money, jobs, innovation, and safety advancements that these technologies will create.

kabes 10y ago
Does this equal to jobs and investments? Except for the few people behind the wheel of these cars, I don't think Uber is now suddenly going to move its offices and make big investments in Arizona.
- stale2002 10y ago
  Doing things remote is hard. Uber already creates a large office in Pittsburgh, and I presume they will do the same in Arizona.
jlmorton 10y ago
> There are many other places out there that will happily accept the money, jobs, innovation, and safety advancements that these technologies will create. Ironic comment given that the cars are designed in Pennsylvania and California, and the intention is literally to permanently destroy tremendous numbers of jobs. Of course, that's just first-order effects, productivity improvements benefit us all.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ciconia 10y ago
Funny how Americans have such a pavlovian knee jerk reaction to regulation. As a European I think a lot of your problems actually derive from not having enough regulation: inequality, violence, lack of universal healthcare, lack of solidarity. Too bad so many Americans are willing to sacrifice all that for so-called "freedom".
- stale2002 10y ago

codecamper 10y ago

It could be a while before taxi drivers stop stepping in front of self driving uber cars with drill in hand (slash tires, run).

r00fus 10y ago
Wouldn't a camera mount and copious video (combined with a wealthy corporate HQ) essentially derail these attempts. Nothing beats appearing the victim of assault for public sympathy.

pw 10y ago

I wonder how they'll get to Arizona.

kabes 10y ago

Good the DMV didn't give in. There will always be a lesser economy bragging with lesser regulations. If you step into that race, things will turn out ugly fast. Except if those regulations are outrageous, which they really weren't in this case.

rblatz 10y ago

I saw a self driving Uber SUV in Scottsdale yesterday on my way in to work. Had two people in it. For the minute or so I was next to it I saw it drastically slow down for a crosswalk[0] that crosses in the middle of a street. Normally no one slows down there unless the pedestrian sign is lit up. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4871087,-111.9428112,3a,75y,4.78h,69.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slibIGTs-ft0j9SFBCpPRiw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4871087,-111.9428112,3a,75y,...

eric_h 10y ago

Is the $150 permit fee a typo? Given that it's likely that in the event of an accident, Uber would already create a detailed incident review internally - why on earth wouldn't they spend $150 and agree to submitting accident reports? They most certainly caved to NYC's demands that regular Ubers be registered with a registered cab dispatcher, and I'm quite certain they can afford $150 with their current war chest.

onion2k 10y ago
Accident reports mean a tally of the number of accidents in the public record. If there's a lot that would stop people taking a self-driving Uber, which would ruin the company in the long term.
- eric_h 10y ago
  Okay, but aren't car accidents already generally a matter of public record? You're technically required to report accidents to the police when they happen, are you not? Edit: It just occurred to me that the requirements could mean that Uber would have to report on any accidents that have occurred to date, though I'm not sure that conflicts with my original point. I must be mistaken in my original assumption.
  - florean 10y ago
    > You're technically required to report accidents to the police when they happen, are you not? No, you are not. Unless there is an injury or death, you just exchange information and pay the other party or let insurance figure it out. "You must call the police or the CHP if the accident caused a death or injury." http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/AutoAccident.aspx#1 http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/AutoAccident.aspx#... In WA, you also have to report if there was over $1k in damage. But it is obviously easy to estimate it is under that while at the scene of the accident. http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.52.030 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.52.030 Most states are the same. If there wasn't an injury and it isn't impeding traffic, the police don't care.

jaypaulynice 10y ago

I can't say I agree with him when it comes to the regulations, but Travis Kalanick gave an excellent TED talk about why there was no Uber before Uber when there was a chance: http://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_more_people_into_fewer_cars http://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_...

hanman9 10y ago

Totally unrelated to this; sorry for the hijack. Recently, I requested Uber for me and my friend from SF airport to San Jose; the rate was around $52 for two. Taken aback by high price, I opened Lyft and it quoted me $36 for two. My friend who uses Uber quite frequently switched to Lyft almost exclusively because of this pricing difference. Even though I commend Uber's disruption in the Taxi space, it's actually scary once Uber attains absolute monopoly.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
I ALWAYS compare both apps. Like most ride-sharing app users, I'm highly price sensitive and not loyal to any particular brand.

wrs 10y ago

If ever there was a time where I want some government regulation backing up my right not to be killed by a buggy computer, it's when I'm sharing space with a car that's driving itself. I don't see why Uber would want to fend for itself in a litigation free-for-all when its prototype car kills somebody, either. Everyone would be better off operating in a known regulatory framework.