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Has Uber killed off its self-driving trucks?
- wmil 9y agoI hope not. After the Budweiser / Uber test I had an idea for a film script. Red necks with pre-electronic cars and an improvised EMP device are running around hijacking self driving beer trucks. I was thinking it would be kind of Fast & Furious style.
- pc86 9y agoWhy rednecks? There's a reason the mob would steal cigarette trucks then sell them below market value: quick cash.
- Retric 9y agoAlso a High value : weight ratio and easy storage which is where beer fails.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoI'd pay to watch a movie about the Redneck Mob. "Hey, Vinny. Hold my beer and watch this!"
- influx 9y agoYou're missing a remake of Smokey and the Bandit!
- wonderbread23 9y agoLmao This is great. I would watch it
- stale2002 9y agoThis fear is overblown. You can do everything you mentioned already. Just put up a barrier on a road to stop the truck, and then shoot the driver. Police aren't going to be able to protect drivers in the middle of nowhere. Now ask yourself, why does this not happen right now?
- Marazan 9y agoErrr because murder is a really serious crime?
- imesh 9y agoNobody is going to stay up at night having nightmares about the time they still beer from a big company. Very few people are actually capable of being murderers.
- dismantlethesun 9y agoBecause police are more inclined to pursue crimes with a human victim. It's like the difference between robbery and burglery being where someone is in the house or not. One gets harder look because there is a terrified victim and escalation could've meant death. The other is just property loss.
- zip1234 9y agoRandomly put a guy in 1/5 trucks but make the guy not visible. Loudly state on the outside of the trucks that many trucks are manned. Criminals have no way of knowing which trucks have people and which don't.
- Pxtl 9y agoBecause murder is much more serious than just stealing stuff. Somebody killing every trucker on the road? Cops swarming. Somebody making off with your merch? Ask a loss prevention officer how much cops care about that.
- code_duck 9y agoPerhaps you should ask yourself why that doesn't happen now. The driver is the part that makes it difficult. Even if one had no moral qualms about murder, law enforcement and the public would be much more concerned about homicide vs merely property destruction and theft. If you were to just hijack a beer truck and nobody got hurt, I bet the average member of the public would hear about that in 'funny news'. If you killed the driver, you'd be infamous and hunted down.
- Houshalter 9y agoIs it really easier to hijack a self driving truck than a manned one? You can just point a gun at the driver. And there probably aren't any cameras or sensors on the manned truck. Whenever a new technology comes along, people come up with tons of ways it could be abused and so won't work. I mean look at all the speculation around drones the past few years. The reality is most of our existing technology can be abused by creative people just the same way. The only reason society doesn't fall apart is because criminals happen to be fairly rare.
- adrianmonk 9y agoPointing a gun at a person is a different crime than computer hacking.
- defen 9y ago> You can just point a gun at the driver. Yeah but now you're looking at 20-30 years for armed robbery instead of being just the good ol' boys never meanin' no harm, just makin' their way the only way they know, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow.
- kjksf 9y agoLaws aren't static. If that happens often then we'll amend the law to increase punishment for this particular crime, just like we made a single act of copyright infringement worth up to $150k.
- throwaway2048 9y agoOr they could amend the law to fire you out of a cannon into the sun! What will that dastardly congress do next.
- stcredzero 9y agothe good ol' boys never meanin' no harm, just makin' their way the only way they know, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. The current political climate would never allow a car painted like that!
- Pxtl 9y agoI assume this would quickly be stamped out by sending convoys of trucks with a single driver/guard supervising it. So instead of 1 driver per-truck, you have a 5-truck convoy with a single on-site monitor/driver/supervisor/guard.
- stcredzero 9y agoRed necks with pre-electronic cars and an improvised EMP device are running around hijacking self driving beer trucks. I was thinking it would be kind of Fast & Furious style. Fast & Furious!? Go back further! Smokey & the Bandit! That's exactly the sort of thing they would do, if someone with a TARDIS plonked the Snowman and Bandit into the 21st century! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_and_the_Bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_and_the_Bandit
- no1youknowz 9y agoWouldn't it be disastrous to do so? Elon Musk said that Tesla will be releasing an electric truck in the later part of this year [1]. Of course, self driving capabilities will be added afterwards. Wouldn't it make sense for Uber to have this very same capability as well? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgMqaDlPONA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgMqaDlPONA
- skrause 9y agoAs a German the self driving company Otto is really confusing. It doesn't only have the same name but also almost exactly the same logo as Otto, the decades old and second largest online retailer in Germany: https://www.otto.de/ https://www.otto.de/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_(company)
- tw04 9y agoRight, absolute minimal effort required. The company was literally created as a way for uber to acquire stolen IP. They knew they'd never be around long enough to face a lawsuit, so just grab something easy to rip that's somewhat relevant and won't result in an immediate lawsuit.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Fricken 9y agoJust in the autonomous vehicle space there's Levandowski's Otto, Ottomatika (acquired by Delphi), and Otto Motors, which is working on autonomous vehicles for warehouses. It's confusing. https://www.ottomotors.com/ https://www.ottomotors.com/ http://www.ottomatika.com/ http://www.ottomatika.com/
- wil421 9y agoIs the autonomous Otto logo trying to look like the front of a truck? It seems like the retailer Otto wouldn't want a truck as their logo? For me it's the retailer's font choice that makes the logos look similar. Very similar to what jeep does: http://symbolsnet.com/symbols/jeep-grill-symbol.html http://symbolsnet.com/symbols/jeep-grill-symbol.html
- QML 9y agoI feel like the founders were just making a phonic play on the word 'auto'.
- Torwald 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_engine
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoI thought the logic of pursuing self-driving trucks was that it was generally easier than self driving taxi services: - Mostly highway miles (or you could arrange it to be so) - Fewer weight requirements - Better economics (a greater % of the economy is dependent upon trucking logistics than taxi services) This isn't to say that there's a big master plan of making a trucking company, more that making a self driving trucking company is a very practical step on the path to full autonomy.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoMy impression is that Uber simply can't afford to not be the absolute first in driverless taxis. They're burning money to stay in the taxi business. Their entire business model relies on keeping the price somewhere in the range of what it is now and not paying a driver. It might be that the marginal advantage of not having a driver on the highway section of truck delivery is not large enough to justify building out a trucking network. They'd have to establish relationships, buy trucks, service the trucks etc. all of that would be time and money that isn't going into their big bet.
- ghaff 9y agoI've said this before, but this just seems crazy to me. Nothing I see suggests that 100% autonomous door-to-door driving as a commercially offered service is just around the corner. Even if it reliably worked technically you're still years away from being able to offer it to the public. Not even Uber could flaunt the law that flagrantly. And the thing is that we're not there. Even if you say it's a decade out (which seems pie in the sky optimistic to me), can Uber really afford to burn through cash for another 10 years? [ADDED: I didn't make my point well. I do think legal/regulatory will take some time independent of technical readiness, but IMO it's technical readiness especially in all the corner cases that's the long pole.]
- placeybordeaux 9y agoI'd short Uber if it was publicly traded. I'm not sure how far away door to door taxis are, but I also would bet against Uber having a long enough market lock in to recoup losses.
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- Animats 9y ago"Uber Freight" was supposed to be a freight forwarder, a booking service for cargo. "Uber for semitrailers", if you will. Call for a truck and driver, and someone comes, connects to your trailer, and takes it somewhere. There are already other companies offering that service. There's no one dominant player, so Uber might be able to muscle in. Uber registered with the US DOT as a freight forwarder, not as a trucking company. Freight forwarders are carriers, even if they don't own any trucks. They have financial responsibility for the load getting to the destination in good condition. Uber doesn't get to claim they're just a booking agent. This service doesn't seem to have launched. But that's what previous reports said Uber Freight was.
- ithinkinstereo 9y agoAnother startup called Cargomatic tried to do this a few years ago. They raised $15MM but ended up shutting down last year due to logistical issues and not being able to meaningful generate revenue. One of the founders even came from a family who were in the trucking business. I think it's a good case study for the various challenges any entrant in this sector will need to solve in order to "disrupt" the old way of doing business. http://www.businessinsider.com/cargomatic-uber-for-truckers-history-founders-investors-2016-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/cargomatic-uber-for-truckers-...
- derefr 9y ago> logistical issues This is a funny excuse for a company in the logistics business. You'd think they'd be good at at least that one thing.
- ithinkinstereo 9y agoFunny, indeed! They supposedly had employees entering stuff into spreadsheets by hand. I recall that this was due to there being so many edge-cases, which made it difficult to automate processes. The bigger problem I think with freight ever moving to self-driving is the legal liabilities involved. Consequences of even minor accidents are amplified with the size+mass involved. We might see a hybrid system with auto-pilot doing the majority of the driving similar to how we currently fly planes, but I can't imagine how that would markedly improve the economic margins.
- sebleon 9y agoUber is likely keeping a low profile with its autonomous initiatives until the Waymo lawsuit blows overs. I'm sure we can expect big things from them as soon as that lawsuit ends.
- Fricken 9y agoIt's not exactly news that the Otto team went straight to work on cars after the acquisition. Nor is it news that Levandowski and Kalanick hatched this scheme while Levandowski was still with Google. (read the second from top comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205
- adam_gyroscope 9y agoI walk past the Uber/Otto trucks every day (three or four are kept on Harrison St in San Francisco between 3rd and 4th), and while the trucks are still their with their very visible lidar/cameras/etc, in the last week they've removed all mentions of Otto from the trucks (previously they had the Otto branding on the doors).
- julien_c 9y agoDo you have any pictures? I'd be interested in seeing them.
- smnscu 9y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=otto+trucks&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=otto+trucks&tbm=isch
- adam_gyroscope 9y agoYep! Specifically: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/otto_trucks_in_san_francisco.jpg?w=640 https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2017/... (that's them parked in the lot on Harrison) and then you'd erase all the OTTO branding :)
- pfarnsworth 9y agolol dozens of paragraphs of speculation, and then Uber directly denies it at the very end. Talk about a waste of a read. This pretty much summarizes most blog articles these days.