8 ms·
They are basically biding their time until driverless cars take off it seems.
by procinct 9y ago
They are basically biding their time until driverless cars take off it seems.
- seibelj 9y agoDriverless cars in urban areas are decades away
- acmustudent 9y agoI see a lot of driverless ubers here in pittsburgh
- staticassertion 9y agoI saw one yesterday. There was a driver but like... come one, decades?
- seibelj 9y agoWhen driverless cars are common on midwestern highways every night, they will start moving into complex urban areas. We are very far from cars navigating downtown NYC, Seattle, SF, Boston, etc.
- woah 9y agoDo you live in NYC, Seattle, SF, or Boston?
- seibelj 9y agoYes, Boston, and when can I order my driverless car to pick me up?
- gpm 9y agoA few months ago if you ignore the safety driver [0]. If cars with safety drivers don't count, nearly a year ago if you move to Pheonix and get lucky [1]. They're apparently planning to launch in more cities "soon" (though I can't find a list or date) [2] and they've recently got permission to start charging passengers and intend to by the end of they year [3]. So I think "decades" is an exaggeration. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16742924/lyft-nutonomy-boston-self-driving-car https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16742924/lyft-nutonomy-bo... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15415840/waymo-self-driving-minivan-early-rider-phoenix https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15415840/waymo-self-drivi... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/waymo-maintains-huge-lead-in-self-driving-car-race/552059/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/waymo... [3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hailing-service/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hai...
- 60654 9y agoRe "midwestern highways": haha, I don't see a "self-driving" car navigating the I-90 in Chicago anytime sooner than SF. ;) At least SFBA has super mild weather that makes the obstacle detection problem much easier. Here there are only two seasons: winter and road construction. (But yeah, we are very far from cars navigating urban areas, or indeed anyplace where weather is inclement and so are people.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoPretty sure driverless cars are being tested in almost all of those cities already.
- astrodust 9y agoThe Falcon Heavy took five years to develop and it's basically just a bigger version of the same Falcon 9 rocket they've been sending up for years. Even if you have a driverless solution today it'll take years to test it and get it certified.
- debt 9y agoA gas-powered, highway-capable, driverless car feels callous. I hope those algos are good.
- ttul 9y agoRight. That must be why a Waymo drove itself past me in the Bay Area two weeks ago.
- seibelj 9y ago5 years ago I was told the same thing, and 5 years before that. Maybe 5 years from now, but it’s been the same story forever.
- simonw 9y agoYou saw a driverless car (with a safety driver) drive past you five and ten years ago?
- greeneggs 9y agoIn October 2010, Google announced that they'd logged 140,000 miles with a self-driving car, with a driver, including through San Francisco and a lot of California [1]. So eight years ago is possible, and I'm willing to grant a little hyperbole here. [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at...
- rweichler 9y agoYeah, I did 5 years ago.
- JackFr 9y agoHonestly, it really hasn't been the same story forever. In the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, of 21 teams entered, 15 qualified to race on the course, and none finished the 240 km course. The best result was 12km. That was off road, with no requirement to obey traffic laws or other cars to hit. Since 2009, Google/Waymo has 5 million driverless miles under their belt. Is it 5 years away? I don't know, but this is not the same story forever. This is iterating and improving at a breakneck pace.
- astrodust 9y ago
- jahaja 9y agoI find it interesting how the same people that have no problem accepting that the last 10% of a random software project accounts for a significant portion of the total time spent, can at the same time be so unreasonably optimistic that a whole sphere of tech can go from like 70% to 100% (where 100% is also the minimum amount required) in a really short period.
- prewett 9y agoProbably for the same reason software developers can't estimate tasks. At least for me the problem is that I figure out the algorithm at a high level and base my estimate around how long that will take me. But inevitably there are platform gotchas, or the API doesn't work the way I expect, or I forgot/didn't know about edge case. (I've done this enough that I have an idea of what kind of things can go wrong now) I think the optimists are thinking "oh, the high-level problem of image recognition and building a 3D model of the area around the car is pretty much a solved problem, great, done!" But in fact, it's all the edge cases that will kill you. What happens when it is dark and rainy and the car in front of you is black, with no license plate? What happens when the car in front of you hits something in front of them unexpectedly? What happens when the car gets a flat tire? What happens when someone doesn't look in their mirrors before changing lanes? What happens when your "there's a problem" solution (like, say, stopping or slowing down) is actually not a good solution?
- bsder 9y agoYou would have to defend that humans make good decisions in such cases. I would argue that, for the majority, they do not. I have been in all of those situations except for the black car, and the humans involved all made spectacularly poor decisions. People who claim that self-driving cars will have failure modes far underestimate the failure modes that humans have.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI think the disagreement is what the last 10% are. I see urban driving as part of the 90%. My 10% are rural gravel roads with puddles, snow covered roads and similar bad road and weather conditions.
- UncleEntity 9y agoI see those stupid robot cars all over the Phoenix metro area these days, whole packs of them roam Chandler/Tempe/Scottsdale areas. Now they have permits to run around 100% humanless apparently.
- nerfhammer 9y agoUrban areas are easy. Snow is a hundred times harder.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y agoYeah, but whoever is first to market on driverless (e.g., Tesla) has already said they will have a separate network for letting others use your Tesla to subsidize your ownership cost. Aka, your Tesla won't be a part of Uber's driverless fleet. So, at best, they become a 40-billion dollar driver/rider match-making algorithm and a pretty CRUD app. Unless Uber itself is working on autonomous driving technology. It's so easy for drivers and riders to switch between ridesharing apps (e.g., ever see an Uber driver that also has a Lyft sticker on their car? I have, many times), I don't see how any of them can solidify a competitive advantage of sorts long-term.
- gpm 9y agoIsn't Waymo already first to market?
- defap 9y agoWhat product do they have on the market?
- gpm 9y agoSelf driving cars... in Pheonix. But looks like I was wrong. They do have a self driving car service running for a group of testers, but apparently it is currently free so I don't think it counts. On the other hand they've got permission to start charging and have said they plan to this year, so I'd still expect them to beat Tesla. Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hailing-service/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-now-a-full-ride-hai...
- throwawayjava 9y ago> Unless Uber itself is working on autonomous driving technology https://www.uber.com/info/atg/ https://www.uber.com/info/atg/
- toomuchtodo 9y agoUber will exhaust their runway prior to reaching a level of autonomy sufficient to replace drivers. Quote me in 3 years.
- CaptainZapp 9y agoThat's what I never really got. The fact that self driving cars will be the savior for Uber. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the concept is viable in urban areas within 5 years and Uber puts a massive fleet of self driving vehicles on the road. While it's certainly true that they wouldn't have to pay drivers it would be a massive shift in capital investment. The "genius" of Uber is shifting the necessary capital investment for hundreds of thousands of vehicles onto the drivers. Assuming one car costs 30K (which I think is on the very low side) it costs 3Billion to put 100'000 cars (which also seems very low with Uber's global ambition) on the road. That's an upfront investment currently incurred by the drivers.
- mattmanser 9y agoAlso, where does Uber store all the cars outside of peak times? So it has to buy parking. What happens when they break down? Servicing. How often do they have to replace their fleet? $3 billion every 5 years.
- Bromskloss 9y ago> Also, where does Uber store all the cars outside of peak times? > So it has to buy parking. Rent parking spaces in people's driveways! :-)
- vmateixeira 9y agoI share your opinion. Also, I never understood what kind of problem companies are trying to solve with self driving cars to be honest. Traffic in cities will be the same, if not worse. And I consider driving as one of the things I really enjoy doing. Why take that away?
- slivym 9y agoWell I think there are two counter points: Uber already has a running business, so it's relatively easy for them to go to a bank and say 'Here's how much a fleet of cars cost, here are the running costs, would you finance us $3Bn for it'. The answer is almost certainly yes, and if not then venture capital would probably fill the gap. The second point is that there are two keys to making money out of this: Have self-driving cars, find customers to rent the self-driving cars. Uber is already established in the second part. So it might be true that another company buys the cars and tries to run the business, but uber has the established customer base. In my opinion the future of self-driving cars inevitably ends up with one of the big players buying uber to allow them to monetize their fleet.