25 ms·

Uber Freight

192 points by hharnisch 10y ago

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I wonder if truckers will actually sign up for this, especially when it's 100% obvious that this will evolve into autonomous trucking shop. Maybe the people who sign up will be similar to the type of people who sign up as Uber drivers--not your typical truck drivers..
- shostack 10y ago
  That hasn't stopped people from signing up to drive for Uber. Unfortunately if you need to get new business, and all the customers are switching to using the new broker (Uber in this case) what choice do you have? They will be used until Uber can discard them and then their industry will quickly fade.
  - jsemrau 10y ago
    There is one major difference. Private people usually don't know (and don't care) about the TCO of their vehicle. So they see the money earned from doing part-time uber as pure income. Truck operators on the other hand usually do (and care)
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      most truckers don't own their truck. They are just paid per mile or gig.
      - falcolas 10y ago
        I would think that Uber would be targeting the owner/operators with this venture, not those already employed for someone who provides a truck.
        brianwawok 10y ago
        So they move from dispatcher A to dispatcher Uber. Why? Higher pay subsidized by VC money?
- wcummings 10y ago
  You need a CDL to drive a truck, so the barrier is higher than driving for Uber.
  - rafamvc 10y ago
    Technically you can go rent a uhaul without CDL. There is a hole in the regulation that could allow people to drive smaller trucks without CDL. You are mostly restricted from towing a certain gross amount weight, which may make the mathematics not work.
- tomphoolery 10y ago
  I hope not, my packages aren't really into the soft rock station...
- burger_moon 10y ago
  Most people I've talked to in person an online that do hot shotting use a few different load boards already. however they all stay away from sites like uship and stay with places that have a higher barrier to entry.
nodesocket 10y ago
I'd be curious to hear some use cases for Uber Freight. I am guessing it is not targeted for individuals wanting alternatives for UPS or FedEx.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  I have a friend who owns a restaurant equipment import business. He employs a driver to deliver ovens, refrigerators, display cases, etc. to restaurants and grocery stores around the country. He could fire his driver and hire an Uber truck on demand instead, and if he got a blast of orders, he could hire a few trucks instead of having to wait on one driver. I have another friend who is a truck dispatcher. Her entire job is telling truckers where to go and when to be there. Trucking companies don't need to employ dispatchers any more, Uber's algorithms handle her entire job. My uncle drove trucks delivering dairy to grocery stores. Since he was a member of the dairy trucker's union, that was the only thing he was allowed to deliver. If there was no dairy to deliver but lots of bread, sorry, that's for the members of the bread trucker's union. The whole trucking industry is carved into these niche unions which are really frustrating to deal with. When I was a student, I worked for a construction company that had a decrepit old truck they used to deliver some of their prefab pieces, like sets of windows and doors. It broke down a lot and only one guy in the shop had the license and knew how to drive it. Now they can get rid of the truck and just hire Uber whenever they need some bigger stuff delivered.
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    Awesome. All makes total sense. I think the dispatcher example is spot on and very common with haulers. Unfortunately for her, her job could indeed be eaten by technology.
- aqme28 10y ago
  I work for a company that ships a lot of stuff. If uber freight is cheaper and more reliable than the shippers we use today, then why wouldn't we use it? I don't see anything new here though. It's just a matter of them making the same-old-thing more convenient (which is basically all the Uber car service is).
cylinder 10y ago
Haha they really are trying to sell every story possible to their investors. I'm going to enjoy this company blowing up.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  I'm guessing that your opinion comes from your personal distaste of their practices and aren't based on any business facts or insights. I'd love to hear why you think they are going to "blow up".
  - brians 10y ago
    They're burning investor money and have no plausible plan to reach profitability. Their best plan appears to literally be that the singularity might come early in the area of personal urban transit. They could get the benefit of the doubt... but then you see stunts like the recent self-driving fiasco.
    - nodesocket 10y ago
      I actually don't think the self-driving announcement and implementation was a fiasco. Message got out there, media ate it up, and any potential "controversy" only further strengthened their positioning efforts against Google, Tesla and Apple in the self-diving market.
    - xapata 10y ago
      > plausible I find it plausible that they can turn a profit on ride hails, despite it being a competitive market. FedEx, DHL, and UPS are all profitable.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        > FedEx, DHL, and UPS are all profitable. All of whom own or lease almost all of their transportation infrastructure (Note Amazon leased their own Prime planes).
Scoundreller 10y ago
503 Service Unavailable
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Fine for me from California.
  - Scoundreller 10y ago
    And back up and running here. Hrmmm...
- mtarnovan 10y ago
  Why was parent downvoted? I'm seeing the same (503)...
jayjay71 10y ago
While I'm not sure how well this fits into Uber's business model (I feel like freight and taxi services are very different industries), the idea of automating trucking is great. It's a far easier technical problem, the logistics are simpler, and it's a $700 billion industry just in the United States. After acquiring Otto this year it's good to see them pursuing this aggressively. Although I'm not a big fan of Uber as a whole, there is a huge amount of money to be made in automated trucking and Uber has a good chance of taking the lead there. I feel like this is where we'll see the real competition for automated driving in the coming years.
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  Where did you find the $700bn number? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it seems high, at ~3% of US GDP.
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    It's $650 billion from 2013 and growing (see link), so I extrapolated and rounded. Over 1% of people in the United States work as truck drivers. http://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-industry-infographic-2013-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-industry-infographic...
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  How is it a far easier technical problem with simpler logistics?
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    Driving on highways is far easier than driving in cities because it's a more controlled environment. There aren't supposed to be pedestrians, bikers, traffic lights, and it's generally a more constrained problem. Logistically, you can just have truckers drive in cities, get out at certain waypoints, and then have truckers take over again at waypoints (mostly located just outside cities). I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it's a much easier problem. You also don't have to be as concerned with public perception, as you aren't asking a consumer to get inside of it.
ylhert 10y ago
RIP all the "Uber for freight" and "Uber for trucking" startups
- hayd 10y ago
  except Otto which Uber acquired and presumably will be rolled into this at some point... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company)
shade23 10y ago
I do not live in the US. So would love some help understanding what could possibly happen here: -Do people own trucks or is it corporations/shipping-companies. - What happens to all the various forms of taxes (are there any?) which come into picture during long distance transporation - Is there a concept of toll tax on the roads. Who would be providing those? - How do you ensure legality of contents and prevent illegal transportation of goods here? - The USP of Uber is the being able to get the required service in a couple of minutes.Will this be applicable here? - Uber has always been in grey areas when it comes to personal vehicles being used commercially to drive single passengers. Transporting goods would cause the same issues on a larger scale right? On the website: It kind of sucks that you need to give an email id to get even basic information on what this is about[1]. https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver
- jbob2000 10y ago
  I don't think Uber will try to solve those problems right away. What Uber is good at is routing and handling payments, both of which are kind of annoying as a driver and dispatcher. It will be a boon to businesses who do a lot of ad-hoc local shipping rather than scheduled or specialized deliveries.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  I worked in the trucking industry for about seven years, so I can answer some of these. Most trucks in the US are owned by individuals are very small companies. I'm not aware of any taxes specific to interstate trucking. If you have a licensed and insured truck in one state you're good to go anywhere in the US. There are some slightly different regulations on trailer length and such, but there is a consistent baseline across the US. There are toll roads but they're uncommon, especially in the middle of the country where most of the freight is moving. Those that do exist are fairly inexpensive and would be trivially easy to price in. Carriers are generally not responsible for the contents of their cargo. If they accept a big 'ole pallet marked "cocaine" they're gonna be in trouble, but they're not required to ensure that the cargo matches the manifest. LTL (less-than-truckload) cargo is generally delivered to your doorstep on a given day, not at a given hour. Trucks are commercial vehicles, so insurance is going to be much less of an issue there.
parthdesai 10y ago
can somebody tell me the need to use react in such a simple website? I'm not being snarky, just curious.
- jaredlunde 10y ago
  It's doubtfully about need. Why did they use it? Probably because they have a solid workflow already based on a React tool chain - so why not? In that case you could similarly ask, why go out of their way to create a static page if they use React for everything else and it's how their programmers are used to thinking? You can use whatever you want as long as it gets the job done. It's about comfort zones and preference.
  - ndirish1842 10y ago
    > Probably because they have a solid workflow already based on a React tool chain - so why not? Can confirm, lot of Uber's web infrastructure is modeled around React
rckrd 10y ago
Most likely related to their acquisition of Otto. Establish a trucking service so that they are ready for autonomous trucking.
Animats 10y ago
Well, at least they got their US Federal Motor Carrier broker registration and insurance: Date: 09/14/2016 USDOT Number: 2926893 Legal Name: UBER FREIGHT LLC They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt. Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service. Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber. The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small. Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.
- elif 10y ago
  1,000,000 / 1,200 = 833.3
  - tsomctl 10y ago
    1,000,000 / 12,000 = 83.3
- neximo64 10y ago
  The stunts are to get press headlines. Fortunately trucking and freight are a bit too boring for the ordinary consumer to relate to. Their customers, corporations guarding themselves against risk want every checkbox checked and rechecked twice. That's why its no surprise they're not pulling off stunts here.
  - jonwachob91 10y ago
    Too boring for the ordinary consumer, yes. Too boring for an investment banker weighing what price to purchase the stock at in an IPO, no. Depending on how they do the accounting for this it could be huge gains to the top line, something much needed to validate a $60bn valuation in the public markets.
hardwaresofton 10y ago
So I know of only one competitor in this space (I don't know very much about startups that do freight hauling) -- UShip. Wonder if this has even registered on their radar
paulgrimes1 10y ago
Interesting. How will they regulate shipping illegal goods? Moving people and food is fine, but this adds a layer of grey to the already blurry line uber are skirting.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  This generally isn't an issue as a carrier unless it can be shown that the carrier was aware (or should have been aware) of the cargo. FWIW, I've dealt with firearms being accidentally shipped to Canada. They were on a freight dock in Toronto before anyone realized. We (the carrier) were levied a fine and we shipped them back to the US without further incident. Being that it was self-reported, they didn't even send someone out.
blaincate 10y ago
There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license. for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber. who will work for uber freight?
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  By the numbers, the vast majority of trucks in the US are owned by small companies.
- ssclafani 10y ago
  > The way most shipping works for most companies today is by going through a brokerage firm, which makes calls to trucking companies and arranges the best deals for its customers. The broker takes a commission of between 15 and 20%. To start, the Uber Freight marketplace will eliminate that middleman and offer shippers real-time pricing of what it will cost to move their goods based on supply and demand. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-to-launch-uberfreight-for-long-haul-trucking-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-to-launch-uberfreight-fo...
  - aqme28 10y ago
    By "eliminate that middleman" do they mean "become that middleman"?
    - ssclafani 10y ago
      Yes. Uber Freight is basically a freight brokerage that's being operated at break-even levels: > UberFreight, which would not control the trucks it relies upon to move customers' freight, is building in only a 5-percent average margin for its net revenue per transaction, according to another person familiar with the matter. On average, net revenue, defined as the revenue a broker generates after its cost of purchased transportation, is around three times that for established brokers. UberFreight's other costs would then be subtracted from its net revenue threshold, leaving the brokerage business either to operate at break-even levels or be a loss leader for the San Francisco-based parent. Source: http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20161212--uberfreight-steps-up-efforts-to-expand-into-brokerage-sector/ http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20161212--uberfreight-ste...
smagch 10y ago
Amazon is also building an 'Uber for trucking' app according to http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-trucking-app-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-truc...
KaiserPro 10y ago
I look forward to the breathless praise from tech news, with lots of fluff about automation and driver-less lorries. I suspect that as they have to deal with real companies, with lawyers that do due diligence things won't be so smooth. Delivery is business critical to most companies, so Uber are going to have to make a pretty strong pitch to get business. I'm not sure who they are pitching at, companies that do lots of hauling will have decent relationships with haulage broker/companies directly. They'll do credit and guarantees. The other thing is that I'm strongly suspicious of Uber business practice, as they appear they'll do anything to make a quick buck. (drop drivers, jack up prices, lie, cheat and generally break the law) That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost"
- phil21 10y ago
  There are a number of small businesses who occasionally need LTL freight, a few times a year perhaps. I do believe that market is poorly served and is ripe for disruption. The number of "logistics 2.0" tech-focused startups lately seems to confirm that others share my belief. For those companies if your vendor doesn't have an existing relationship with a freight broker familiar with things you're in for a huge waste of time and a confusing mess where you feel you're likely being ripped off. If you could instead spend 5 minutes typing some stuff into Uber and clicking go it wins that market segment every time. We were this company until we got a bit larger and now have a relationship with a broker. But even now it's a little antiquated. > That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." This already happens, as anyone shipping throughout the year will attest to. Rates are a lesser form of airline pricing. > or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost" Trivial non-problem that again already exists in the market. This has happened, and it's just as rare as you'd expect it to be. > They'll do credit and guarantees Why wouldn't Uber? Considering their performance here in the consumer space I would expect them to be easier to work with here than current brokers who rely on that $200 to feed their kids that week.
codecamper 10y ago
Autonomous driving seems like a good OpenAI project. Letting one company control the autonomous driving market seems pretty bad for competition.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  There's a lot of competition in the autonomous driving space: Uber, Delphi, Cruise, Waymo, Ford, Volvo, Zoox, Varden Labs, Auro Robotics, Navya, Nuro.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Faraday Future, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Yutong, and there are others (including some in stealth mode that would rather not be mentioned). Udacity also has a course just for making a self-driving car, and you get to use a real car. https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nanodegree--nd013 https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nan...
polskibus 10y ago
Freight auctions connecting truck owners&drivers with shippers are quite common in Europe. Surely USA has had this kind of thing before right? Who's the incumbent?
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
  There's not really one incumbent in that market. There's a million small transportation brokerage firms which intermediate between shippers and trucking companies. Generally, the shippers will get better rates going through a brokerage even accounting for the fee the brokerage tacks on, unless they're big enough to have effectively their own brokerage in house.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Thousands of small players.
tiatia 10y ago
Old idea. I used www.uship.com many years ago (5?). Worked well. I was able to ship two pallets from the west coast to the east coast, door to door. Costs: close to nothing. I think it was something in the range 250 to 380 US dollar.
- sumedh 10y ago
  Search engine was an old idea too until Google came along. If Uber can provide a better service, customers would switch.
deleted 10y ago
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edpichler 10y ago
I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. They are extremelly competent on creating good services in difficult business areas. They are hungry for new markets and keeps innovating.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V8B5XO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V8B5XO/
drewvolpe 10y ago
In China, "Uber for trucking" services have off over the last year or two. The largest player, Huochebang, has registered more than 2 million drivers and is doing ~100,000 orders per day. They don't charge anything for using the platform and make money by selling other services to drivers.
- Inthenameofmine 10y ago
  Might I ask what some of these services are? This sounds intriguing.
  - nols 10y ago
    "Unlike Uber, which takes a cut from every ride, Huochebang makes money primarily from selling toll cards, taking a cut from the card top-ups, and helping truckers with financing." From this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/china-s-uber-for-trucks-huochebang-fetches-1-billion-valuation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/china-s-u...
pinaceae 10y ago
kind of related question: why are trains, especially freight, not being automated? seems like a far simpler problem than autonomous cars, no?
- nradov 10y ago
  Trains are already highly automated. The largest trains have only a few workers on board so eliminating them won't cut costs much. But the new positive train control systems do lay the foundation for some level of further automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
  - pinaceae 10y ago
    seems like a lot of costly accidents all point to human error of the "driver". falling asleep, speeding, etc. just seems very odd that no one from the big ones - Siemens, Bombardier, etc would go after that. Not even in Japan or China, both train heaven.
markwaldron 10y ago
Interested to see how Transfix will stand up to this: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix
CodeSheikh 10y ago
Why not just go and acquire an Austin based startup called uShip? https://www.uship.com/ https://www.uship.com/ Uber has a boatload of cash. Why reinvent a wheel? uShip has a funding of $44.71M in several rounds according to crunchbase. Uber sure has a vast collection fine-tuned maps, but freight routes are different from inner city routes.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Uber's in the negative. Have they ever turned a profit?
- patch_collector 10y ago
  Side note -- uShip is an excellent service. I needed to get a trailer from Southern California to the bay area, and uShip was half the price of the manufacturer's shipping.
ThomPete 10y ago
This to me have always been their endgame after they realized the value was in the logistics data rather than the actual drives.
treyfitty 10y ago
This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but after going through all the comments, and reflecting back on the general ethos of 2016, it's worth saying anyway: I received the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for Christmas, and there is a lot of "disruption leads to winner take all" talk in the book. I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb, but it's amazing that our lives are dominated by only a handful of companies (I'm willing to bet 90% of our daily time will be attributed to using a product made by either Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook). Now, the aforementioned companies generally do require scale, so my assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but in Uber's case... does freight really NEED scale? I've never needed to order freight, so I can't speak from experience here, but it seems like the social cost to having Uber win all may be far greater than the benefits in efficiency. I can imagine a future where we arrive at a new Era of Barons and legislation is passed to break them up (ala Rockefeller, Vanderbilt...etc.). Last but not least, we seem to be push for "Universal Income" as a means to assuage the pain caused by the Winner Take All economy, but I don't think that's fair to a lot of America. I think we should solve the problem in it's root before we talk about Universal Income- I don't mean to sound negative, but it just seems like a convenient cop out to the problems at hand.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Truck companies do need scale. People don't buy truck trips, they buy goods transportation. That means your company must at a minimum send stuff everywhere. Also, scale permits all kinds of cost-cutting that are the difference between failure and success on a low margin market like trucking. About universal income, I'm curious how do you think people could solve the winner take all problem at its root.
- hx87 10y ago
  IMHO, the solution to the "Winner Take All" economy isn't to prevent the winner from taking it all, but to make the "all" smaller so lots of people and companies can be winners of their own nonfungible markets. In effect, Winner Take All (of a niche) instead of Winner Take All (of everything).
  - neon_electro 10y ago
kingmanaz 10y ago
A stepping stone to the unemployment of half the families in my small town. Yet, so long as narcissist STEM technocrats have money for their coffee shops the world will continue blindly "progressing".
soulashell 10y ago
I think they're doing factoring too, since the driver application says that the payment to the driver is made right after delivery.

192 points by hharnisch 10y ago

I wonder if truckers will actually sign up for this, especially when it's 100% obvious that this will evolve into autonomous trucking shop. Maybe the people who sign up will be similar to the type of people who sign up as Uber drivers--not your typical truck drivers..

shostack 10y ago
That hasn't stopped people from signing up to drive for Uber. Unfortunately if you need to get new business, and all the customers are switching to using the new broker (Uber in this case) what choice do you have? They will be used until Uber can discard them and then their industry will quickly fade.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  There is one major difference. Private people usually don't know (and don't care) about the TCO of their vehicle. So they see the money earned from doing part-time uber as pure income. Truck operators on the other hand usually do (and care)
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    most truckers don't own their truck. They are just paid per mile or gig.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      I would think that Uber would be targeting the owner/operators with this venture, not those already employed for someone who provides a truck.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        So they move from dispatcher A to dispatcher Uber. Why? Higher pay subsidized by VC money?
wcummings 10y ago
You need a CDL to drive a truck, so the barrier is higher than driving for Uber.
- rafamvc 10y ago
  Technically you can go rent a uhaul without CDL. There is a hole in the regulation that could allow people to drive smaller trucks without CDL. You are mostly restricted from towing a certain gross amount weight, which may make the mathematics not work.
tomphoolery 10y ago
I hope not, my packages aren't really into the soft rock station...
burger_moon 10y ago
Most people I've talked to in person an online that do hot shotting use a few different load boards already. however they all stay away from sites like uship and stay with places that have a higher barrier to entry.

nodesocket 10y ago

I'd be curious to hear some use cases for Uber Freight. I am guessing it is not targeted for individuals wanting alternatives for UPS or FedEx.

jbob2000 10y ago
I have a friend who owns a restaurant equipment import business. He employs a driver to deliver ovens, refrigerators, display cases, etc. to restaurants and grocery stores around the country. He could fire his driver and hire an Uber truck on demand instead, and if he got a blast of orders, he could hire a few trucks instead of having to wait on one driver. I have another friend who is a truck dispatcher. Her entire job is telling truckers where to go and when to be there. Trucking companies don't need to employ dispatchers any more, Uber's algorithms handle her entire job. My uncle drove trucks delivering dairy to grocery stores. Since he was a member of the dairy trucker's union, that was the only thing he was allowed to deliver. If there was no dairy to deliver but lots of bread, sorry, that's for the members of the bread trucker's union. The whole trucking industry is carved into these niche unions which are really frustrating to deal with. When I was a student, I worked for a construction company that had a decrepit old truck they used to deliver some of their prefab pieces, like sets of windows and doors. It broke down a lot and only one guy in the shop had the license and knew how to drive it. Now they can get rid of the truck and just hire Uber whenever they need some bigger stuff delivered.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Awesome. All makes total sense. I think the dispatcher example is spot on and very common with haulers. Unfortunately for her, her job could indeed be eaten by technology.
aqme28 10y ago
I work for a company that ships a lot of stuff. If uber freight is cheaper and more reliable than the shippers we use today, then why wouldn't we use it? I don't see anything new here though. It's just a matter of them making the same-old-thing more convenient (which is basically all the Uber car service is).

cylinder 10y ago

Haha they really are trying to sell every story possible to their investors. I'm going to enjoy this company blowing up.

nodesocket 10y ago
I'm guessing that your opinion comes from your personal distaste of their practices and aren't based on any business facts or insights. I'd love to hear why you think they are going to "blow up".
- brians 10y ago
  They're burning investor money and have no plausible plan to reach profitability. Their best plan appears to literally be that the singularity might come early in the area of personal urban transit. They could get the benefit of the doubt... but then you see stunts like the recent self-driving fiasco.
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    I actually don't think the self-driving announcement and implementation was a fiasco. Message got out there, media ate it up, and any potential "controversy" only further strengthened their positioning efforts against Google, Tesla and Apple in the self-diving market.
  - xapata 10y ago
    > plausible I find it plausible that they can turn a profit on ride hails, despite it being a competitive market. FedEx, DHL, and UPS are all profitable.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      > FedEx, DHL, and UPS are all profitable. All of whom own or lease almost all of their transportation infrastructure (Note Amazon leased their own Prime planes).

Scoundreller 10y ago

503 Service Unavailable

nodesocket 10y ago
Fine for me from California.
- Scoundreller 10y ago
  And back up and running here. Hrmmm...
mtarnovan 10y ago
Why was parent downvoted? I'm seeing the same (503)...

jayjay71 10y ago

While I'm not sure how well this fits into Uber's business model (I feel like freight and taxi services are very different industries), the idea of automating trucking is great. It's a far easier technical problem, the logistics are simpler, and it's a $700 billion industry just in the United States. After acquiring Otto this year it's good to see them pursuing this aggressively. Although I'm not a big fan of Uber as a whole, there is a huge amount of money to be made in automated trucking and Uber has a good chance of taking the lead there. I feel like this is where we'll see the real competition for automated driving in the coming years.

rahimnathwani 10y ago
Where did you find the $700bn number? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it seems high, at ~3% of US GDP.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  It's $650 billion from 2013 and growing (see link), so I extrapolated and rounded. Over 1% of people in the United States work as truck drivers. http://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-industry-infographic-2013-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-industry-infographic...
edgyswingset 10y ago
How is it a far easier technical problem with simpler logistics?
- jayjay71 10y ago
  Driving on highways is far easier than driving in cities because it's a more controlled environment. There aren't supposed to be pedestrians, bikers, traffic lights, and it's generally a more constrained problem. Logistically, you can just have truckers drive in cities, get out at certain waypoints, and then have truckers take over again at waypoints (mostly located just outside cities). I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it's a much easier problem. You also don't have to be as concerned with public perception, as you aren't asking a consumer to get inside of it.

ylhert 10y ago

RIP all the "Uber for freight" and "Uber for trucking" startups

hayd 10y ago
except Otto which Uber acquired and presumably will be rolled into this at some point... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company)

shade23 10y ago

I do not live in the US. So would love some help understanding what could possibly happen here: -Do people own trucks or is it corporations/shipping-companies. - What happens to all the various forms of taxes (are there any?) which come into picture during long distance transporation - Is there a concept of toll tax on the roads. Who would be providing those? - How do you ensure legality of contents and prevent illegal transportation of goods here? - The USP of Uber is the being able to get the required service in a couple of minutes.Will this be applicable here? - Uber has always been in grey areas when it comes to personal vehicles being used commercially to drive single passengers. Transporting goods would cause the same issues on a larger scale right? On the website: It kind of sucks that you need to give an email id to get even basic information on what this is about[1]. https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver

jbob2000 10y ago
I don't think Uber will try to solve those problems right away. What Uber is good at is routing and handling payments, both of which are kind of annoying as a driver and dispatcher. It will be a boon to businesses who do a lot of ad-hoc local shipping rather than scheduled or specialized deliveries.
LyndsySimon 10y ago
I worked in the trucking industry for about seven years, so I can answer some of these. Most trucks in the US are owned by individuals are very small companies. I'm not aware of any taxes specific to interstate trucking. If you have a licensed and insured truck in one state you're good to go anywhere in the US. There are some slightly different regulations on trailer length and such, but there is a consistent baseline across the US. There are toll roads but they're uncommon, especially in the middle of the country where most of the freight is moving. Those that do exist are fairly inexpensive and would be trivially easy to price in. Carriers are generally not responsible for the contents of their cargo. If they accept a big 'ole pallet marked "cocaine" they're gonna be in trouble, but they're not required to ensure that the cargo matches the manifest. LTL (less-than-truckload) cargo is generally delivered to your doorstep on a given day, not at a given hour. Trucks are commercial vehicles, so insurance is going to be much less of an issue there.

parthdesai 10y ago

can somebody tell me the need to use react in such a simple website? I'm not being snarky, just curious.

jaredlunde 10y ago
It's doubtfully about need. Why did they use it? Probably because they have a solid workflow already based on a React tool chain - so why not? In that case you could similarly ask, why go out of their way to create a static page if they use React for everything else and it's how their programmers are used to thinking? You can use whatever you want as long as it gets the job done. It's about comfort zones and preference.
- ndirish1842 10y ago
  > Probably because they have a solid workflow already based on a React tool chain - so why not? Can confirm, lot of Uber's web infrastructure is modeled around React

rckrd 10y ago

Most likely related to their acquisition of Otto. Establish a trucking service so that they are ready for autonomous trucking.

Animats 10y ago

Well, at least they got their US Federal Motor Carrier broker registration and insurance: Date: 09/14/2016 USDOT Number: 2926893 Legal Name: UBER FREIGHT LLC They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt. Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service. Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber. The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small. Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.

elif 10y ago
1,000,000 / 1,200 = 833.3
- tsomctl 10y ago
  1,000,000 / 12,000 = 83.3
neximo64 10y ago
The stunts are to get press headlines. Fortunately trucking and freight are a bit too boring for the ordinary consumer to relate to. Their customers, corporations guarding themselves against risk want every checkbox checked and rechecked twice. That's why its no surprise they're not pulling off stunts here.
- jonwachob91 10y ago
  Too boring for the ordinary consumer, yes. Too boring for an investment banker weighing what price to purchase the stock at in an IPO, no. Depending on how they do the accounting for this it could be huge gains to the top line, something much needed to validate a $60bn valuation in the public markets.

hardwaresofton 10y ago

So I know of only one competitor in this space (I don't know very much about startups that do freight hauling) -- UShip. Wonder if this has even registered on their radar

paulgrimes1 10y ago

Interesting. How will they regulate shipping illegal goods? Moving people and food is fine, but this adds a layer of grey to the already blurry line uber are skirting.

LyndsySimon 10y ago
This generally isn't an issue as a carrier unless it can be shown that the carrier was aware (or should have been aware) of the cargo. FWIW, I've dealt with firearms being accidentally shipped to Canada. They were on a freight dock in Toronto before anyone realized. We (the carrier) were levied a fine and we shipped them back to the US without further incident. Being that it was self-reported, they didn't even send someone out.

blaincate 10y ago

There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license. for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber. who will work for uber freight?

LyndsySimon 10y ago
By the numbers, the vast majority of trucks in the US are owned by small companies.
ssclafani 10y ago
> The way most shipping works for most companies today is by going through a brokerage firm, which makes calls to trucking companies and arranges the best deals for its customers. The broker takes a commission of between 15 and 20%. To start, the Uber Freight marketplace will eliminate that middleman and offer shippers real-time pricing of what it will cost to move their goods based on supply and demand. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-to-launch-uberfreight-for-long-haul-trucking-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-to-launch-uberfreight-fo...
- aqme28 10y ago
  By "eliminate that middleman" do they mean "become that middleman"?
  - ssclafani 10y ago
    Yes. Uber Freight is basically a freight brokerage that's being operated at break-even levels: > UberFreight, which would not control the trucks it relies upon to move customers' freight, is building in only a 5-percent average margin for its net revenue per transaction, according to another person familiar with the matter. On average, net revenue, defined as the revenue a broker generates after its cost of purchased transportation, is around three times that for established brokers. UberFreight's other costs would then be subtracted from its net revenue threshold, leaving the brokerage business either to operate at break-even levels or be a loss leader for the San Francisco-based parent. Source: http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20161212--uberfreight-steps-up-efforts-to-expand-into-brokerage-sector/ http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20161212--uberfreight-ste...

smagch 10y ago

Amazon is also building an 'Uber for trucking' app according to http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-trucking-app-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-truc...

KaiserPro 10y ago

I look forward to the breathless praise from tech news, with lots of fluff about automation and driver-less lorries. I suspect that as they have to deal with real companies, with lawyers that do due diligence things won't be so smooth. Delivery is business critical to most companies, so Uber are going to have to make a pretty strong pitch to get business. I'm not sure who they are pitching at, companies that do lots of hauling will have decent relationships with haulage broker/companies directly. They'll do credit and guarantees. The other thing is that I'm strongly suspicious of Uber business practice, as they appear they'll do anything to make a quick buck. (drop drivers, jack up prices, lie, cheat and generally break the law) That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost"

phil21 10y ago
There are a number of small businesses who occasionally need LTL freight, a few times a year perhaps. I do believe that market is poorly served and is ripe for disruption. The number of "logistics 2.0" tech-focused startups lately seems to confirm that others share my belief. For those companies if your vendor doesn't have an existing relationship with a freight broker familiar with things you're in for a huge waste of time and a confusing mess where you feel you're likely being ripped off. If you could instead spend 5 minutes typing some stuff into Uber and clicking go it wins that market segment every time. We were this company until we got a bit larger and now have a relationship with a broker. But even now it's a little antiquated. > That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." This already happens, as anyone shipping throughout the year will attest to. Rates are a lesser form of airline pricing. > or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost" Trivial non-problem that again already exists in the market. This has happened, and it's just as rare as you'd expect it to be. > They'll do credit and guarantees Why wouldn't Uber? Considering their performance here in the consumer space I would expect them to be easier to work with here than current brokers who rely on that $200 to feed their kids that week.

codecamper 10y ago

Autonomous driving seems like a good OpenAI project. Letting one company control the autonomous driving market seems pretty bad for competition.

jayjay71 10y ago
There's a lot of competition in the autonomous driving space: Uber, Delphi, Cruise, Waymo, Ford, Volvo, Zoox, Varden Labs, Auro Robotics, Navya, Nuro.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Faraday Future, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Yutong, and there are others (including some in stealth mode that would rather not be mentioned). Udacity also has a course just for making a self-driving car, and you get to use a real car. https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nanodegree--nd013 https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nan...

polskibus 10y ago

Freight auctions connecting truck owners&drivers with shippers are quite common in Europe. Surely USA has had this kind of thing before right? Who's the incumbent?

AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
There's not really one incumbent in that market. There's a million small transportation brokerage firms which intermediate between shippers and trucking companies. Generally, the shippers will get better rates going through a brokerage even accounting for the fee the brokerage tacks on, unless they're big enough to have effectively their own brokerage in house.
brianwawok 10y ago
Thousands of small players.

tiatia 10y ago

Old idea. I used www.uship.com many years ago (5?). Worked well. I was able to ship two pallets from the west coast to the east coast, door to door. Costs: close to nothing. I think it was something in the range 250 to 380 US dollar.

sumedh 10y ago
Search engine was an old idea too until Google came along. If Uber can provide a better service, customers would switch.

deleted 10y ago

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edpichler 10y ago

I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. They are extremelly competent on creating good services in difficult business areas. They are hungry for new markets and keeps innovating.

ceejayoz 10y ago
> I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V8B5XO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V8B5XO/

drewvolpe 10y ago

In China, "Uber for trucking" services have off over the last year or two. The largest player, Huochebang, has registered more than 2 million drivers and is doing ~100,000 orders per day. They don't charge anything for using the platform and make money by selling other services to drivers.

Inthenameofmine 10y ago
Might I ask what some of these services are? This sounds intriguing.
- nols 10y ago
  "Unlike Uber, which takes a cut from every ride, Huochebang makes money primarily from selling toll cards, taking a cut from the card top-ups, and helping truckers with financing." From this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/china-s-uber-for-trucks-huochebang-fetches-1-billion-valuation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/china-s-u...

pinaceae 10y ago

kind of related question: why are trains, especially freight, not being automated? seems like a far simpler problem than autonomous cars, no?

nradov 10y ago
Trains are already highly automated. The largest trains have only a few workers on board so eliminating them won't cut costs much. But the new positive train control systems do lay the foundation for some level of further automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
- pinaceae 10y ago
  seems like a lot of costly accidents all point to human error of the "driver". falling asleep, speeding, etc. just seems very odd that no one from the big ones - Siemens, Bombardier, etc would go after that. Not even in Japan or China, both train heaven.

markwaldron 10y ago

Interested to see how Transfix will stand up to this: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix

CodeSheikh 10y ago

Why not just go and acquire an Austin based startup called uShip? https://www.uship.com/ https://www.uship.com/ Uber has a boatload of cash. Why reinvent a wheel? uShip has a funding of $44.71M in several rounds according to crunchbase. Uber sure has a vast collection fine-tuned maps, but freight routes are different from inner city routes.

colejohnson66 10y ago
Uber's in the negative. Have they ever turned a profit?
patch_collector 10y ago
Side note -- uShip is an excellent service. I needed to get a trailer from Southern California to the bay area, and uShip was half the price of the manufacturer's shipping.

ThomPete 10y ago

This to me have always been their endgame after they realized the value was in the logistics data rather than the actual drives.

treyfitty 10y ago

This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but after going through all the comments, and reflecting back on the general ethos of 2016, it's worth saying anyway: I received the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for Christmas, and there is a lot of "disruption leads to winner take all" talk in the book. I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb, but it's amazing that our lives are dominated by only a handful of companies (I'm willing to bet 90% of our daily time will be attributed to using a product made by either Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook). Now, the aforementioned companies generally do require scale, so my assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but in Uber's case... does freight really NEED scale? I've never needed to order freight, so I can't speak from experience here, but it seems like the social cost to having Uber win all may be far greater than the benefits in efficiency. I can imagine a future where we arrive at a new Era of Barons and legislation is passed to break them up (ala Rockefeller, Vanderbilt...etc.). Last but not least, we seem to be push for "Universal Income" as a means to assuage the pain caused by the Winner Take All economy, but I don't think that's fair to a lot of America. I think we should solve the problem in it's root before we talk about Universal Income- I don't mean to sound negative, but it just seems like a convenient cop out to the problems at hand.

marcosdumay 10y ago
Truck companies do need scale. People don't buy truck trips, they buy goods transportation. That means your company must at a minimum send stuff everywhere. Also, scale permits all kinds of cost-cutting that are the difference between failure and success on a low margin market like trucking. About universal income, I'm curious how do you think people could solve the winner take all problem at its root.
hx87 10y ago
IMHO, the solution to the "Winner Take All" economy isn't to prevent the winner from taking it all, but to make the "all" smaller so lots of people and companies can be winners of their own nonfungible markets. In effect, Winner Take All (of a niche) instead of Winner Take All (of everything).
- neon_electro 10y ago

kingmanaz 10y ago

A stepping stone to the unemployment of half the families in my small town. Yet, so long as narcissist STEM technocrats have money for their coffee shops the world will continue blindly "progressing".

soulashell 10y ago

I think they're doing factoring too, since the driver application says that the payment to the driver is made right after delivery.