19 ms·

Uber will not re-apply for self-driving car permit in California

253 points by ExcelSaga 9y ago

walrus01 9y ago
for those who haven't seen it, the manufacturer of the lidar system believes their hardware was functioning normally, and the problem is in uber's software: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar-maker-velodyne-baffled-by-self-driving-ubers-failure-to-avoid-pedestrian/#56a42cec5cc2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar-ma...
- atomical 9y ago
  Shouldn't the investigation be criminal? Shouldn't someone go to jail over this?
  - xapata 9y ago
    An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know. As a pedestrian and a driver, I have mixed feelings about this.
    - rtpg 9y ago
      What about Toyotas faulty acceleration? My... My understanding was that you can totally have this be treated as criminal but that most families don't want to press charges? Because, well, all of it sucks.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        What faulty acceleration? You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle... ? > The most common problem was drivers hitting the accelerator pedal when they thought they were hitting the brake, which the NHTSA called "pedal misapplication.” Of the 58 cases reported, 18 were dismissed out of hand. Of the remaining 40, 39 of them were found to have no cause; the remainder being an instance of “pedal entrapment.”
        romwell 9y ago
        No, this faulty unintended acceleration: [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration#Sudden_Acceleration_in_Toyota_Vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration... [2]http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code?utm_content=bufferf2141&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        So... the NHTSA started an investigation in 2010, and Toyota 'provided to the American public, NHTSA and the United States Congress an inaccurate timeline of events that made it appear as if TOYOTA had learned of the sticky pedal in the United States in “October 2009,”', when "In fact, TOYOTA had begun its investigation of sticky pedal in the United States no later than August 2009, had already reproduced the problem in a U.S. pedal by no later than September 2009, and had taken active steps in the months following that testing to hide the problem from NHTSA and the public." But the NHTSA's 10-month investigation beginning in 2010 when Toyota had already informed them of the sticky pedals came to the conclusion that zero of the reported cases of unintended acceleration involved sticky pedals. That's a case for lying to the government, and we see a judgment against Toyota for lying to the government. How is it a case for unintended acceleration?
        romwell 9y ago
        Read the second line as well to make conclusions.
      - darpa_escapee 9y ago
        > What about Toyotas faulty acceleration? This is a great case to read up on. The testimony from experts in this case was top notch. I believe the criminal charges in the case were related to the degree of deception Toyota engaged in with regards to unintended acceleration in their vehicles. edit: Someone did a case study: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
      - sgc 9y ago
        Families don't press criminal charges, the DA does. But if someone doesn't want to testify, a case can fall apart.
      - danso 9y ago
        Toyota paid a huge fine and other penalties, but looks like the criminal charge has been dismissed: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-toyota/u-s-judge-dismisses-criminal-charge-in-toyota-sudden-acceleration-case-idUSKBN1CA2R2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-toyota/u-s-judge-dism...
      - skookumchuck 9y ago
        If you charge the engineers criminally, the result is that they won't cooperate with investigations, and will do their best to cover things up. With "no fault" investigations, the engineers work with the investigators to identify and fix the problems. The result is a lot better than the adversarial system.
        Hydraulix989 9y ago
        Has there ever been any back-stabbing after the engineers "cooperate" and volunteer potentially self-incriminating information?
        empath75 9y ago
        We aren’t talking about a micro service going down, we’re talking about someone dying. If that driver hadn’t been in a self driving car, they’d clearly be going to jail for looking at their phone while driving.
        skookumchuck 9y ago
        That's right, we're talking about someone dying. Is it better to have the problem fixed, or better to get revenge? In aviation, for example, some mechanics in Chicago were putting jet engines on using the wrong procedure. This resulted in a crack in the engine mount, the engine fell off during takeoff, resulting in a fiery crash where everyone died. Everyone cooperated with the investigation. The mechanics were not criminally charged. The procedures were changed so it wouldn't happen again. Under your proposal, the shop would have had every incentive to alter records, deny, obfuscate, and in general impede finding the truth as much as possible. Do you think that would have been better? I know of no cases where mechanics, engineers, air traffic controllers, regulators or pilots were criminally charged in a fatal accident. The result is we have incredibly safe air travel. I don't know about you, but I'm happy about that result.
    - atomical 9y ago
      A software developer fucked up. It could have been much worse. It's going to make our industry look worse if we aren't held accountable.
      - pentagonpapers 9y ago
        Nah, I'd rather not be held accountable for endless scope creep and 80 hour work weeks delivering a product I repeatedly called a pile of bugs
        m4x 9y ago
        Engineers who are held responsible for their work and can go to jail when they get it wrong don't accept work conditions like you describe. Software engineering might be a better profession to work in if it was regulated the same way other engineering fields are.
        lostlogin 9y ago
        Makes you wonder if a governing body will ever come about - eg medical councils/boards, engineers associations etc. Presumably it’s these type of problems that they came into existence for. It’s a double edged sword, but often works in the interest of the profession where I am. The biggest difficulty I’d see is that defining a software developer is not prticularly easy.
    - Mizza 9y ago
      A vehicle involved death is always treated as a potential criminal case.
      - xapata 9y ago
        Sure, the police always check for intoxication, etc.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Not sure about the US but in other countries it often is. In Australia for example if you are using your phone and kill someone you absolutely will be seeing jail time.
    - paulcole 9y ago
      > An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know They certainly should be treated like a criminal. They used a deadly weapon to kill someone because they didn’t respect their responsibility.
    - bunderbunder 9y ago
      It's generally considered a form of negligent homicide, which is a crime in the USA.
      - xapata 9y ago
        No, "ordinary" negligence justifies a charge of vehicular manslaughter, which has lesser penalties than plain manslaughter. Even then, it seems like many states require "gross" negligence, like speeding or intoxication to charge with a crime. Someone who simply "didn't see the pedestrian" but was otherwise following the law will likely not be charged with a crime. They'll get sued, of course.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know. It's usually, though exact standards vary, vehicular homicide if there is criminal negligence, which can include inattention while driving especially if it results in a citable (on its own, before considering the fatality) violation of a traffic mandate that causes then fatality.
  - ineedasername 9y ago
    But who would go to jail? The developer responsible for writing the faulty code? Or the QA team that missed it on review? The project lead who signed off and checked the code into the repo? The supervisors of any of these people? I'm really not sure how you aportion blame on something whose development is so widely distributed.
    - atomical 9y ago
      Yes, the developer.
      - Whitestrake 9y ago
        I'd argue that prosecuting a developer because his employer used his code to kill someone would be comparable to prosecuting a gun manufacturer because a customer used their weapon to kill someone.
        atomical 9y ago
        This is comparable to prosecuting the developer who works for a gun manufacturer when a new type of digital "safety" fails.
        Whitestrake 9y ago
        An equally fair comparison. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I'm really just spit-balling for discussion's sake and because I consider it interesting; please do poke holes in my reasoning. Presumably the developer in this scenario is not responsible for guaranteeing to and/or misleading a customer that his code adequately renders a deadly weapon safe, more likely that responsibility falls on the managers whose project it was to implement such a digital "safety" and instructed the developer to write the code in the first place. Assuming the developer did not write the code with the intent of bringing about a person's death, which might involve fooling his superiors as to the efficacy of his work, I'd wager he can't be guilty of a crime. Outside of that, I believe vicarious liability applies. Perhaps he was a one-man department of this hypothetical gun manufacturer, implementing, deploying, and marketing his product himself and of his own initiative; I don't think there's any doubt he'd be liable in this case, the extent of which is dependent on his intention. Perhaps our developer was self-employed as a contractor, and warranted to his client (the hypothetical gun manufacturer) that the code was safe; assuming the manufacturer used it as warranted, and it failed, I'd assume the developer would be mostly liable for the result.
  - alsetmusic 9y ago
    > Edit: It's disgusting you guys are down voting me over this. Adding this is not a mature response to downvotes. I was indifferent to your original comment. I downvoted because of this addendum.
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - deleted 9y ago
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    - deleted 9y ago
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    - atomical 9y ago
      No.
  - keyle 9y ago
    It would be involuntary man-slaughter at worst. Hard to prove right?
    - mtgx 9y ago
      Why? The car should have all the logs, shouldn't it? It's won't be 100% an account of what happened, but it should be pretty close - unless neither Uber's lidar nor radar was functioning, in which case that could ironically save the company.
  - ajross 9y ago
    Criminal negligence statutes (I don't know Arizona law in particular) virtually always have a "gross negligence" requirement. A reasonable person would have had to have known that the action was likely to cause harm. It's not enough just to make a fuckup. That just doesn't seem to apply here, absent evidence that we don't have (e.g. Uber knew the LIDAR was being ignored, something like that). This was just a software bug. You don't throw people in jail because they wrote buggy software.
    - atomical 9y ago
      Which is it? You're saying we don't have enough details AND that it's just buggy software.
      - ajross 9y ago
        Upthread it was pointed out that the LIDAR manufacturer believes their system was operating correctly. Assuming that, it becomes a software bug more or less by definition. But fine: let's say it was the LIDAR system was at fault. Do they go to jail, then? How about the bureaucrats who approved the test? All this doesn't matter. I'm simply saying that ALL the facts in evidence point to this being a reasonable mistake, and reasonable mistakes don't qualify for negligence prosecution. If you want to argue to the contrary you need evidence, which doens't seem to exist. Therefore the upthread question "shouldn't someone go to jail?" is answered with a firm "no".
        atomical 9y ago
        How could you possibly know if the mistake was reasonable?
        ajross 9y ago
        Because you're demanding jail time, and the burden of proof goes the other way. I don't need to know whether the mistake was reasonable, you need to prove it wasn't if you want to argue someone should go to jail.
  - DC-3 9y ago
    To be horribly utalitarian - every week you set back the development of self-driving tech, you're 'killing' future people who are involved in human-at-fault collisions. Counterintuitively, it is the most ethical choice to continue to accelerate self driving car development even if it is sometimes conducted in an unsafe manner.
    - danso 9y ago
      It would be utilitarian if we knew that self-driving tech was the best outcome out of all potential alternatives. We don't.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Not disagreeing, just curious: besides the obvious "drive it yourself", what are the in-the-works alternatives to self-driving cars? I'll admit I don't follow the space too closely.
        danso 9y ago
        I'm not in this crowd, but mass-transit advocates argue that the resources/attention poured into self-driving could be better allocated toward investment in mass transit infrastructure.
        TheGRS 9y ago
        This also assumes a good market of people who want to use mass transit vs something private.
        joejerryronnie 9y ago
        Mass transit infrastructure will not provide VC's with 100x returns.
      - TheGRS 9y ago
        Ehhh, I think given enough time and money just about any problem can be solved. Given what we know today, it seems pretty reasonable to say that we will achieve a car that can drive itself in any situation and not cause deaths...at some point in the future.
  - mrep 9y ago
    Over what? Correct me if I am wrong, but the car had the right of way and the person illegally crossed. Regardless of any improvements in what the self driving car/driver could/should have done, it seems clear cut to me that the root cause lies with the person.
    - atomical 9y ago
      Just because you have right of way does not allow you to murder someone.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        I know you're using hyperbole, but murder does imply a pre-determined intent to kill. At worst this is involuntary manslaughter.
      - mrep 9y ago
        Murder? This was not a premeditated killing. It was an accident that everyone involved certainly wishes did not happen. Although, you might be able to argue for involuntary manslaughter but I'm no expert.
        umanwizard 9y ago
        I’m not sure about Arizona, but murder in common law doesn’t require intent, only that a reasonable person could have predicted the action would lead to someone’s death.
    - mrep 9y ago
      So reading this article [0], it seems as though both parties are evaluated for their actions and blame is assigned proportionally. So while the women jaywalking would probably get the bulk of the blame for jaywalking, the driver/uber might also get some due to software error/driver inattention. My guess for why the cops are not really going after uber is because the women was reportedly homeless so she does not have any family to fight for her case. [0]: http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/pedestrian-fault-car-accident.html http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/pedestrian...
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Did you see the video? Imagine if it was just a person at the wheel. Would a person have gone to jail for hitting that person, in the video?
    - atomical 9y ago
      If the person knew they were there, yes. That's the case with the LIDAR.
    - alistairSH 9y ago
      The low quality dash-cam video that looks nothing like real life? Street lights and headlights cast more light than is evident in that video. Do you ever drive at night? Then you should intuitively know if it was really that dark, the headlights were off, or fog was present, or something else that would indicate a speed much lower than the posted limit was sensible (vs this car, which was speeding st the time).
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        That manipulated video does more to make me distrust Uber than the crash itself. They're showing what their true colors are, same as always. I don't trust them to do self-driving cars safely.
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Pedantry: video is probably not manipulated ("has not been postprocessed"), but it is manipulative ("released with intent to manipulate audience"): I've seen similarly crappy, unedited videos from cheap dashcams. Indeed, it would make sense to buy the worst-quality scapegoat camera - you could then claim "see, it's really, really dark out there, nothing we could have done!"
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        The selective choice of what to release, even though they clearly have much better information, is what's manipulative. No disagreement there.
  - chrononaut 9y ago
    Related, has anyone gone to jail for faulty aircraft surface control software?
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Would a human driver be prosecuted criminally?
    - atomical 9y ago
      If they had LIDAR capability, yes.
    - chopin 9y ago
      In Germany, almost certainly (involuntary manslaughter).
webkike 9y ago
Is this the death of Uber?
- striking 9y ago
  Probably just the death of the Uber self-driving program. Although that could perhaps spell death sometime in the future.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  I personally don't believe they can survive with human drivers (unit economics) and I personally don't believe they will catch up in engineering and technology of self driving cars, especially after this (but I never thought they would, too far behind from the start). So I would say maybe yes. But there are probably ways out of this for them. They will probably chug along for at least a decade and in that time anything can happen.
  - phil21 9y ago
    Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to operational profitability. Somewhere within 10-20%. I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.
    - dannyw 9y ago
      Uber is already doing pretty well with price segmentation in the US (the Uber Express POOL comes with a forced 2 minute wait); they can certainly: - raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL - reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?
jballanc 9y ago
I enjoy hating on Uber as much as the next person, but this honestly just sounds like shrewd focusing of effort in light of recent events on Uber's part. Their permit was expiring, and there was going to be a load of paperwork along with probably lengthy boardroom meetings with authorities explaining what went wrong and why it won't happen again, if Uber wanted to renew. I see no reason (in this article, at least) to suspect that Uber won't re-apply at a later date when they have a better handle on what went wrong in Tempe.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I think with all the other things we've learned about their self driving program, it's unlikely to return. Months before this, there were other articles posted here that talked about how some safety drivers needed to step in every couple of minutes. Uber's model is based around selling at a loss to undercut Taxis, Lyft and other ride sharing companies, just enough to keep the investment capital coming in, with the hopes of ultimately cutting costs by removing the driver. Even with Waymo, GM, Tesla and others, I don't think we're going to realistically see wide scale deployment for autonomous vehicles within the next ten years. They have money to burn. Uber doesn't. There's a lot of tax money going into that research too and it really needs to be fed back into the public transport infrastructure that's crumbling around the US. I wish research on autonomous road vehicles stayed in the private sector. They're cool tech, but they'll be useless if systems like the NYC Metro and Chicago CTA fall apart.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    I don't believe they will ever be widespread with infrastructure how it currently is. I don't believe it's the correct problem to be solving either. I feel self driving cars are a stop-gap for better public transport inside smarter layouts of cities where cars are not the primary method of getting people and stuff around. The only good fit for autonomous cars I see is long distance suburban commutes, or highway commutes, which is more a symptom of suburbia than a smart way to layout a city. Part of my reasoning involves the dispelling the assumption that we have a right to a car and road based travel option, so I get that I am probably in a minority of thought process. I also love my cars, love travelling on the open road and love combustion engines. But I would give it up for a safer, cleaner and more personable, community focused city.
jackconnor 9y ago
Good.
deleted 9y ago
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gringoDan 9y ago
Uber is a dying company that is bleeding out. Uber's current business model:[1] Uber is the middleman in a two-sided marketplace. It connects drivers with passengers, and takes a cut for this service. Uber's competitive advantage is that it had the capital to attract drivers - with lots of drivers on its network, costs & wait times are lower for passengers, so passengers use Uber. Cue flywheel metaphor. BUT Uber is still not profitable.[2] Unlike Amazon, there are no economies of scale in this business. Cities are local markets - Uber's dominance in A doesn't help it in B. And, as Uber acquires more customers, its cost of driver acquisition increases. Uber is so big that in many cities, it is churning through drivers and needs to incentivize the current drivers to stay on the platform. Counterpoint: This is all a short-term concern! Once drivers are eliminated from the equation, Uber will be insanely profitable! Wrong. Once self-driving cars go mainstream: Uber's competitive advantage completely disappears. As a passenger, all I care about is getting from point A to point B safely, quickly, and cheaply. As a manufacturer of self-driving cars, why would I sell or lease them to a middleman (or if we're getting extreme, even to consumers!) to take the profits in this space? As Tesla, GM, etc. I am going to pump out a fleet of self-driving cars and have consumers pay for a subscription plan (X number of minutes / miles per month on my fleet). Because this is a very capital-intensive business, the government will then grant local monopolies to different providers and regulate them as utilities, much as it does today with telecoms. Uber provides no value in this scenario. The winners in this space are going to be car manufacturers and the developers (licensers) of the self-driving software that get legal approval (and it seems extremely unlikely that this will be Uber). [1] Full disclosure, half of this is a repost of what I wrote on another thread earlier today. [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed-in-q4-but-theres-still-work-to-do-2018-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed-in-q4-b...
- xapata 9y ago
  > no economies of scale Brand is scalable. Company processes are scalable. There are many reasons to be a large company serving many cities.
  - gringoDan 9y ago
    Fair points. Perhaps I should have specified that the unit economics don't scale with expansion to new cities.
askafriend 9y ago
Just because they will not re-apply in California now doesn't mean their efforts are stopping - and it doesn't mean they won't apply for permits in different states or just re-apply in California at a later date. HN seems to be jumping to radical conclusions on the level of Reddit these days but I get that everyone is a bit emotional around Facebook / Uber during this news cycle...
- rtpg 9y ago
  But doesn't that mean they're scaling back testing? Considering the fact that Ubers entire valuation justification relies on them both getting self driving cars first....
  - askafriend 9y ago
    It just means they won’t test in California in the near future. It doesn’t automatically mean they will scale back their testing across the board.
- ExcelSaga 9y ago
  My guess is that they don’t want to be seen asking for something they’ll publically fail to get. At this point, outside of the world of tech, people who were downright alarmed by SDV’s now have a place to hang their hat. Politicians follow the direction of popular sentiment, and they’re not going to risk the next Uber fatality having their stamp on it. They’ll be thinking the next corpse might be a child’s as well, and how that would hurt their prospects for re-election. On HN there are a lot of Vulcans who have stats ready to go about human driver fatalities, but that’s far out of touch with the average voter. Fear = Dread/Sense of Control, and most people think they have a high degree of control as the driver of a car. I’m not arguing that they’re right, but they’re the majority.
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Even the stats are pretty bad for Uber: while the sample size is minimal, an average driver is expected to drive ~33x more miles than Uber did in total before a fatality.
lewis500 9y ago
The self driving car program seems like reaching for immortality. Just because your company identifies something that will eventually kill it on a long enough timeline doesn’t mean you need to develop that product yourself. Wonder how much better off they could have been if they had focused on tweaking aspects of their current service.
- skellera 9y ago
  Their business model would be destroyed by the first company to do self driving. The costs of paying drivers is a big part of the fee paid by riders. It was the natural progression for Uber. It just seems like Waymo is doing a much better job. The internal problems at Uber are going to have lasting effects even if the problems have already ended.
  - ineedasername 9y ago
    Yes, but there's a big difference between perfecting the tech and implementing it for a use case. Uber would have the logistics and infrastrcuture to implement it, that's an easy call to license the tech from someone that has the tech down pat but no interest in being a taxi company. Heck they could probably have partnered with Google as a testing partner.
    - mattnewton 9y ago
      They choose this path long ago when they took over a billion in investment + debt, and probably could be argued it was locked in even sooner than that. This a vehicle to get investors to that important rentier position and they have to make it or implode in debt trying. Their valuation has this fate baked in.
    - galdosdi 9y ago
      Well, but leverage matters. Whoever owns self driving patents will take close to 100% of the profit margins involved in taxis for the life of the patents. For example, Apple gets most of the margin out of an iPhone. Apple could switch hardware vendors. The hardware vendors can't find anyone else who sells the iPhone OS. Same thing here. If you have the self driving tech, the logistics and a shiny app and the dumb car hardware are the easy part you can buy for the lowest price available from many competing vendors (or conversely, license your technology exclusively to whoever pays the highest price -- either way, you have total leverage here and they have none, because without self driving tech there is no business) Anyway, Waymo does not seem at all disinterested in the taxi business, probably because they realize that's the easy part. Alphabet engineers can put out a decent dispatch app in a fiscal quarter easily, and it markets itself. Or they could create a bidding war between Uber, Lyft, Via, etc.... Even with massive investor subsidies, nobody will be able to beat the rock bottom prices of a true driverless taxi service. Uber investors know this, which is why Uber was forced to pretend to develop driverless tech, because if they don't, then Uber stock should be selling at earnings multiples more appropriate for a steel mill, not a software company.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
In related news Nvidia has also suspended its self-driving car tests in the wake of the Uber crash. Uber uses Nvidia’s self-driving technology in their cars.
- deleted 9y ago
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username223 9y ago
Uber could actually be a viable business if they gave up on being a unicorn. Right now, you can step out of an airport in a new country, pull out your phone, type in an address, and someone will drive you there. They're a universal ride-hailing service, and they could probably even charge a premium for that versus local taxis. Unfortunately, they're probably in too deep to become a medium-sized business. Also, building their own fleet of robo-taxis is insane when their current business model relies on (underpaying for using) people's personal cars.
mpreda 9y ago
I'm thinking about this simple trick to keep the safety driver focused: at random intervals, the software would provide a stimulus (such as a red LED light projected on windshield), and the person would need to react as quickly as possible by pushing a button. Thus the person would know she has to expect the need to react quickly, and the software can measure the level of attentiveness.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Self driving trains have been in existence for decades. In NYC (which I don't think is heavily automated) they require the drivers to point when they pull in to a station to prove they're paying attention. Many freight trains have a throttle that is dialed in to place at a set speed. To ensure engineers are focused there's a dead man's switch that requires activation at set intervals.
  - King-Aaron 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
- pessimizer 9y ago
  That sounds worse than just driving. It also definitely switches who is the machine and who is the master, like one of those breathalyzers attached to the ignition.
- make3 9y ago
  there are deep learning solutions that classify super well wether the driver is paying attention or not. you could just play a buzzer when that happens, and tell them they will get fired if it happens too often (after human review of the tapes ofc)
  - eyeing_see 9y ago
    To add to your comment: GM's SuperCruise semi-autonomous mode uses a real-time head and eye-tracking system to ensure the driver is alert. I don't know if it's based on DL, but it's available in a production vehicle.
yorby 9y ago
Which state/area is next on the list?
kozikow 9y ago
There should be a way of increasing safety driver attentiveness. E.g. make drivers labelers. E.g. driver have to label any pedestrians they see on a special HUD. Add financial incentives for labeling pedestrians quickly. Some variation of this idea may reduce data acquisition costs and improve safety drivers.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Munroe, R., https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/ [XKCD]
cletus 9y ago
Something is real fishy with Uber and the Arizona fatality. If you believe Uber's dashcam footage it was dark and hard to see the woman. Several people in the area posted comparison dashcam footage showing it just wasn't that dark [1]. This raises a bunch of questions: - Was this the unprocessed footage from a dashcam in the Uber car? - How bright were the headlights? - What other sensors could've and should've detected an object to be avoided on the road? I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here (probably because of the optimism for self-driving cars, which I share) but why isn't criminal negligence for Uber a possibility here? Apparently they also disabled one of the safety systems in the Volvo XC90 designed to avoid this sort of thing. If it does come to light that Uber misrepresented the conditions of the crash, tampered with the evidence in any way or even tampered with other safety measures then shouldn't a criminal case be a consideration? [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
- grzm 9y ago
  At this point we really don't have enough information to know what happened other than the car hit and killed the pedestrian. We don't know how or if this dash cam video played into the control systems of the car. The accident is tragic and of course should be looked into. The NTSB is investigating[0] and I assume will have access to a lot better information than we have at this point, including all of that you're interested in. Lots of arm-chair quarterbacking at this point, given the paucity of information available right now. As for "I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here", there are opinions all over the map, including those very similar to yours. This discussion has been going on for days in multiple submissions, and again, based on very little information. [0]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180320.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180320.as...
richardknop 9y ago
I think this might be the bursting of the Silicon Valley's self driving car bubble. People are starting to realise tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale. We still might be decade or more away from tech being advanced enough to consider going in this direction.
- FreakyT 9y ago
  > "tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale" To be more specific, Uber's tech is the one that's nowhere near feasible. According to recently leaked data, Uber's self driving system is literally orders of magnitude more failure prone than Waymo's[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driving-cars-arizona.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driv...
  - richardknop 9y ago
    That is probably correct. But I am skeptical of even Waymo. I don't think even with Waymo's tech it's reasonable to expect any deployment of self driving cars on a meaningful scale in next 5-10 years (apart from some very controlled conditions like roads or lanes dedicated to self driving cars but that will require infrastructure build-up which will take decade or two).
  - bkor 9y ago
    From what I understood elsewhere, the numbers in that article are about different measures (apples vs oranges comparison). Article states: > 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble Apparently they have a number for a) number of miles per intervention and b) number of miles per intervention to prevent an accident. Waymo's number is measure b, Uber's number if measure a.
- tim333 9y ago
  >nowhere near ... feasible On the other hand >Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15644680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15644680 > Waymo is doing it live. Two months after the Alphabet self-driving car spinoff announced it would start running a truly driver-free service in Phoenix this year (as in, cars romping about with no one at the wheel), the company now unveils how it will do it: with the help of thousands more Chrysler Pacifica hybrids. https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-launches-self-driving-minivans-fiat-chrysler/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-launches-self-driving-mini...
pure_ambition 9y ago
Has anyone asked how many hours or miles that self-driving car drove autonomously before the fatality? It could very well be that the accident proves that, while horrible, self-driving cars are much less susceptible to fatal accidents. To date, I have not seen this data anywhere...
- stetrain 9y ago
  I think those statistics are difficult to get a complete picture on. In california at least the manufacturers have to log miles driven in autonomous mode and the number of disengagement events over those miles. That can be misleading though, since a car could log thousands of miles on a nice smooth stretch of interstate over and over, then spend significant amount of time disengaged in areas with pedestrians, cross walks, and stop signs. The same pinch of salt should be applied to stats that someone like Uber themselves makes claims on, about how many miles they have driven autonomously with no incidents. We could probably draw conclusions about safety per mile travelled on highways but probably not in trickier surface street scenarios without a lot more detail from the manufacturers.
hashkb 9y ago
> “We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident,” They mean "reactively", not "proactively". Pathetic.

253 points by ExcelSaga 9y ago

for those who haven't seen it, the manufacturer of the lidar system believes their hardware was functioning normally, and the problem is in uber's software: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar-maker-velodyne-baffled-by-self-driving-ubers-failure-to-avoid-pedestrian/#56a42cec5cc2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar-ma...

atomical 9y ago
Shouldn't the investigation be criminal? Shouldn't someone go to jail over this?
- xapata 9y ago
  An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know. As a pedestrian and a driver, I have mixed feelings about this.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    What about Toyotas faulty acceleration? My... My understanding was that you can totally have this be treated as criminal but that most families don't want to press charges? Because, well, all of it sucks.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      What faulty acceleration? You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle... ? > The most common problem was drivers hitting the accelerator pedal when they thought they were hitting the brake, which the NHTSA called "pedal misapplication.” Of the 58 cases reported, 18 were dismissed out of hand. Of the remaining 40, 39 of them were found to have no cause; the remainder being an instance of “pedal entrapment.”
      - romwell 9y ago
        No, this faulty unintended acceleration: [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration#Sudden_Acceleration_in_Toyota_Vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration... [2]http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code?utm_content=bufferf2141&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        So... the NHTSA started an investigation in 2010, and Toyota 'provided to the American public, NHTSA and the United States Congress an inaccurate timeline of events that made it appear as if TOYOTA had learned of the sticky pedal in the United States in “October 2009,”', when "In fact, TOYOTA had begun its investigation of sticky pedal in the United States no later than August 2009, had already reproduced the problem in a U.S. pedal by no later than September 2009, and had taken active steps in the months following that testing to hide the problem from NHTSA and the public." But the NHTSA's 10-month investigation beginning in 2010 when Toyota had already informed them of the sticky pedals came to the conclusion that zero of the reported cases of unintended acceleration involved sticky pedals. That's a case for lying to the government, and we see a judgment against Toyota for lying to the government. How is it a case for unintended acceleration?
        romwell 9y ago
        Read the second line as well to make conclusions.
    - darpa_escapee 9y ago
      > What about Toyotas faulty acceleration? This is a great case to read up on. The testimony from experts in this case was top notch. I believe the criminal charges in the case were related to the degree of deception Toyota engaged in with regards to unintended acceleration in their vehicles. edit: Someone did a case study: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
    - sgc 9y ago
      Families don't press criminal charges, the DA does. But if someone doesn't want to testify, a case can fall apart.
    - danso 9y ago
      Toyota paid a huge fine and other penalties, but looks like the criminal charge has been dismissed: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-toyota/u-s-judge-dismisses-criminal-charge-in-toyota-sudden-acceleration-case-idUSKBN1CA2R2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-toyota/u-s-judge-dism...
    - skookumchuck 9y ago
      If you charge the engineers criminally, the result is that they won't cooperate with investigations, and will do their best to cover things up. With "no fault" investigations, the engineers work with the investigators to identify and fix the problems. The result is a lot better than the adversarial system.
      - Hydraulix989 9y ago
        Has there ever been any back-stabbing after the engineers "cooperate" and volunteer potentially self-incriminating information?
      - empath75 9y ago
        We aren’t talking about a micro service going down, we’re talking about someone dying. If that driver hadn’t been in a self driving car, they’d clearly be going to jail for looking at their phone while driving.
        skookumchuck 9y ago
        That's right, we're talking about someone dying. Is it better to have the problem fixed, or better to get revenge? In aviation, for example, some mechanics in Chicago were putting jet engines on using the wrong procedure. This resulted in a crack in the engine mount, the engine fell off during takeoff, resulting in a fiery crash where everyone died. Everyone cooperated with the investigation. The mechanics were not criminally charged. The procedures were changed so it wouldn't happen again. Under your proposal, the shop would have had every incentive to alter records, deny, obfuscate, and in general impede finding the truth as much as possible. Do you think that would have been better? I know of no cases where mechanics, engineers, air traffic controllers, regulators or pilots were criminally charged in a fatal accident. The result is we have incredibly safe air travel. I don't know about you, but I'm happy about that result.
  - atomical 9y ago
    A software developer fucked up. It could have been much worse. It's going to make our industry look worse if we aren't held accountable.
    - pentagonpapers 9y ago
      Nah, I'd rather not be held accountable for endless scope creep and 80 hour work weeks delivering a product I repeatedly called a pile of bugs
      - m4x 9y ago
        Engineers who are held responsible for their work and can go to jail when they get it wrong don't accept work conditions like you describe. Software engineering might be a better profession to work in if it was regulated the same way other engineering fields are.
      - lostlogin 9y ago
        Makes you wonder if a governing body will ever come about - eg medical councils/boards, engineers associations etc. Presumably it’s these type of problems that they came into existence for. It’s a double edged sword, but often works in the interest of the profession where I am. The biggest difficulty I’d see is that defining a software developer is not prticularly easy.
  - Mizza 9y ago
    A vehicle involved death is always treated as a potential criminal case.
    - xapata 9y ago
      Sure, the police always check for intoxication, etc.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Not sure about the US but in other countries it often is. In Australia for example if you are using your phone and kill someone you absolutely will be seeing jail time.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    > An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know They certainly should be treated like a criminal. They used a deadly weapon to kill someone because they didn’t respect their responsibility.
  - bunderbunder 9y ago
    It's generally considered a form of negligent homicide, which is a crime in the USA.
    - xapata 9y ago
      No, "ordinary" negligence justifies a charge of vehicular manslaughter, which has lesser penalties than plain manslaughter. Even then, it seems like many states require "gross" negligence, like speeding or intoxication to charge with a crime. Someone who simply "didn't see the pedestrian" but was otherwise following the law will likely not be charged with a crime. They'll get sued, of course.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > An inattentive driver killing a pedestrian isn't typically treated as criminal, as far as I know. It's usually, though exact standards vary, vehicular homicide if there is criminal negligence, which can include inattention while driving especially if it results in a citable (on its own, before considering the fatality) violation of a traffic mandate that causes then fatality.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  But who would go to jail? The developer responsible for writing the faulty code? Or the QA team that missed it on review? The project lead who signed off and checked the code into the repo? The supervisors of any of these people? I'm really not sure how you aportion blame on something whose development is so widely distributed.
  - atomical 9y ago
    Yes, the developer.
    - Whitestrake 9y ago
      I'd argue that prosecuting a developer because his employer used his code to kill someone would be comparable to prosecuting a gun manufacturer because a customer used their weapon to kill someone.
      - atomical 9y ago
        This is comparable to prosecuting the developer who works for a gun manufacturer when a new type of digital "safety" fails.
        Whitestrake 9y ago
        An equally fair comparison. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I'm really just spit-balling for discussion's sake and because I consider it interesting; please do poke holes in my reasoning. Presumably the developer in this scenario is not responsible for guaranteeing to and/or misleading a customer that his code adequately renders a deadly weapon safe, more likely that responsibility falls on the managers whose project it was to implement such a digital "safety" and instructed the developer to write the code in the first place. Assuming the developer did not write the code with the intent of bringing about a person's death, which might involve fooling his superiors as to the efficacy of his work, I'd wager he can't be guilty of a crime. Outside of that, I believe vicarious liability applies. Perhaps he was a one-man department of this hypothetical gun manufacturer, implementing, deploying, and marketing his product himself and of his own initiative; I don't think there's any doubt he'd be liable in this case, the extent of which is dependent on his intention. Perhaps our developer was self-employed as a contractor, and warranted to his client (the hypothetical gun manufacturer) that the code was safe; assuming the manufacturer used it as warranted, and it failed, I'd assume the developer would be mostly liable for the result.
- alsetmusic 9y ago
  > Edit: It's disgusting you guys are down voting me over this. Adding this is not a mature response to downvotes. I was indifferent to your original comment. I downvoted because of this addendum.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - atomical 9y ago
    No.
- keyle 9y ago
  It would be involuntary man-slaughter at worst. Hard to prove right?
  - mtgx 9y ago
    Why? The car should have all the logs, shouldn't it? It's won't be 100% an account of what happened, but it should be pretty close - unless neither Uber's lidar nor radar was functioning, in which case that could ironically save the company.
- ajross 9y ago
  Criminal negligence statutes (I don't know Arizona law in particular) virtually always have a "gross negligence" requirement. A reasonable person would have had to have known that the action was likely to cause harm. It's not enough just to make a fuckup. That just doesn't seem to apply here, absent evidence that we don't have (e.g. Uber knew the LIDAR was being ignored, something like that). This was just a software bug. You don't throw people in jail because they wrote buggy software.
  - atomical 9y ago
    Which is it? You're saying we don't have enough details AND that it's just buggy software.
    - ajross 9y ago
      Upthread it was pointed out that the LIDAR manufacturer believes their system was operating correctly. Assuming that, it becomes a software bug more or less by definition. But fine: let's say it was the LIDAR system was at fault. Do they go to jail, then? How about the bureaucrats who approved the test? All this doesn't matter. I'm simply saying that ALL the facts in evidence point to this being a reasonable mistake, and reasonable mistakes don't qualify for negligence prosecution. If you want to argue to the contrary you need evidence, which doens't seem to exist. Therefore the upthread question "shouldn't someone go to jail?" is answered with a firm "no".
      - atomical 9y ago
        How could you possibly know if the mistake was reasonable?
        ajross 9y ago
        Because you're demanding jail time, and the burden of proof goes the other way. I don't need to know whether the mistake was reasonable, you need to prove it wasn't if you want to argue someone should go to jail.
- DC-3 9y ago
  To be horribly utalitarian - every week you set back the development of self-driving tech, you're 'killing' future people who are involved in human-at-fault collisions. Counterintuitively, it is the most ethical choice to continue to accelerate self driving car development even if it is sometimes conducted in an unsafe manner.
  - danso 9y ago
    It would be utilitarian if we knew that self-driving tech was the best outcome out of all potential alternatives. We don't.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Not disagreeing, just curious: besides the obvious "drive it yourself", what are the in-the-works alternatives to self-driving cars? I'll admit I don't follow the space too closely.
      - danso 9y ago
        I'm not in this crowd, but mass-transit advocates argue that the resources/attention poured into self-driving could be better allocated toward investment in mass transit infrastructure.
        TheGRS 9y ago
        This also assumes a good market of people who want to use mass transit vs something private.
        joejerryronnie 9y ago
        Mass transit infrastructure will not provide VC's with 100x returns.
    - TheGRS 9y ago
      Ehhh, I think given enough time and money just about any problem can be solved. Given what we know today, it seems pretty reasonable to say that we will achieve a car that can drive itself in any situation and not cause deaths...at some point in the future.
- mrep 9y ago
  Over what? Correct me if I am wrong, but the car had the right of way and the person illegally crossed. Regardless of any improvements in what the self driving car/driver could/should have done, it seems clear cut to me that the root cause lies with the person.
  - atomical 9y ago
    Just because you have right of way does not allow you to murder someone.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      I know you're using hyperbole, but murder does imply a pre-determined intent to kill. At worst this is involuntary manslaughter.
    - mrep 9y ago
      Murder? This was not a premeditated killing. It was an accident that everyone involved certainly wishes did not happen. Although, you might be able to argue for involuntary manslaughter but I'm no expert.
      - umanwizard 9y ago
        I’m not sure about Arizona, but murder in common law doesn’t require intent, only that a reasonable person could have predicted the action would lead to someone’s death.
  - mrep 9y ago
    So reading this article [0], it seems as though both parties are evaluated for their actions and blame is assigned proportionally. So while the women jaywalking would probably get the bulk of the blame for jaywalking, the driver/uber might also get some due to software error/driver inattention. My guess for why the cops are not really going after uber is because the women was reportedly homeless so she does not have any family to fight for her case. [0]: http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/pedestrian-fault-car-accident.html http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/pedestrian...
- stale2002 9y ago
  Did you see the video? Imagine if it was just a person at the wheel. Would a person have gone to jail for hitting that person, in the video?
  - atomical 9y ago
    If the person knew they were there, yes. That's the case with the LIDAR.
  - alistairSH 9y ago
    The low quality dash-cam video that looks nothing like real life? Street lights and headlights cast more light than is evident in that video. Do you ever drive at night? Then you should intuitively know if it was really that dark, the headlights were off, or fog was present, or something else that would indicate a speed much lower than the posted limit was sensible (vs this car, which was speeding st the time).
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      That manipulated video does more to make me distrust Uber than the crash itself. They're showing what their true colors are, same as always. I don't trust them to do self-driving cars safely.
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Pedantry: video is probably not manipulated ("has not been postprocessed"), but it is manipulative ("released with intent to manipulate audience"): I've seen similarly crappy, unedited videos from cheap dashcams. Indeed, it would make sense to buy the worst-quality scapegoat camera - you could then claim "see, it's really, really dark out there, nothing we could have done!"
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        The selective choice of what to release, even though they clearly have much better information, is what's manipulative. No disagreement there.
- chrononaut 9y ago
  Related, has anyone gone to jail for faulty aircraft surface control software?
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Would a human driver be prosecuted criminally?
  - atomical 9y ago
    If they had LIDAR capability, yes.
  - chopin 9y ago
    In Germany, almost certainly (involuntary manslaughter).

webkike 9y ago

Is this the death of Uber?

striking 9y ago
Probably just the death of the Uber self-driving program. Although that could perhaps spell death sometime in the future.
cryptoz 9y ago
I personally don't believe they can survive with human drivers (unit economics) and I personally don't believe they will catch up in engineering and technology of self driving cars, especially after this (but I never thought they would, too far behind from the start). So I would say maybe yes. But there are probably ways out of this for them. They will probably chug along for at least a decade and in that time anything can happen.
- phil21 9y ago
  Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to operational profitability. Somewhere within 10-20%. I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Uber is already doing pretty well with price segmentation in the US (the Uber Express POOL comes with a forced 2 minute wait); they can certainly: - raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL - reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?

jballanc 9y ago

I enjoy hating on Uber as much as the next person, but this honestly just sounds like shrewd focusing of effort in light of recent events on Uber's part. Their permit was expiring, and there was going to be a load of paperwork along with probably lengthy boardroom meetings with authorities explaining what went wrong and why it won't happen again, if Uber wanted to renew. I see no reason (in this article, at least) to suspect that Uber won't re-apply at a later date when they have a better handle on what went wrong in Tempe.

djsumdog 9y ago
I think with all the other things we've learned about their self driving program, it's unlikely to return. Months before this, there were other articles posted here that talked about how some safety drivers needed to step in every couple of minutes. Uber's model is based around selling at a loss to undercut Taxis, Lyft and other ride sharing companies, just enough to keep the investment capital coming in, with the hopes of ultimately cutting costs by removing the driver. Even with Waymo, GM, Tesla and others, I don't think we're going to realistically see wide scale deployment for autonomous vehicles within the next ten years. They have money to burn. Uber doesn't. There's a lot of tax money going into that research too and it really needs to be fed back into the public transport infrastructure that's crumbling around the US. I wish research on autonomous road vehicles stayed in the private sector. They're cool tech, but they'll be useless if systems like the NYC Metro and Chicago CTA fall apart.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I don't believe they will ever be widespread with infrastructure how it currently is. I don't believe it's the correct problem to be solving either. I feel self driving cars are a stop-gap for better public transport inside smarter layouts of cities where cars are not the primary method of getting people and stuff around. The only good fit for autonomous cars I see is long distance suburban commutes, or highway commutes, which is more a symptom of suburbia than a smart way to layout a city. Part of my reasoning involves the dispelling the assumption that we have a right to a car and road based travel option, so I get that I am probably in a minority of thought process. I also love my cars, love travelling on the open road and love combustion engines. But I would give it up for a safer, cleaner and more personable, community focused city.

jackconnor 9y ago

Good.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gringoDan 9y ago

Uber is a dying company that is bleeding out. Uber's current business model:[1] Uber is the middleman in a two-sided marketplace. It connects drivers with passengers, and takes a cut for this service. Uber's competitive advantage is that it had the capital to attract drivers - with lots of drivers on its network, costs & wait times are lower for passengers, so passengers use Uber. Cue flywheel metaphor. BUT Uber is still not profitable.[2] Unlike Amazon, there are no economies of scale in this business. Cities are local markets - Uber's dominance in A doesn't help it in B. And, as Uber acquires more customers, its cost of driver acquisition increases. Uber is so big that in many cities, it is churning through drivers and needs to incentivize the current drivers to stay on the platform. Counterpoint: This is all a short-term concern! Once drivers are eliminated from the equation, Uber will be insanely profitable! Wrong. Once self-driving cars go mainstream: Uber's competitive advantage completely disappears. As a passenger, all I care about is getting from point A to point B safely, quickly, and cheaply. As a manufacturer of self-driving cars, why would I sell or lease them to a middleman (or if we're getting extreme, even to consumers!) to take the profits in this space? As Tesla, GM, etc. I am going to pump out a fleet of self-driving cars and have consumers pay for a subscription plan (X number of minutes / miles per month on my fleet). Because this is a very capital-intensive business, the government will then grant local monopolies to different providers and regulate them as utilities, much as it does today with telecoms. Uber provides no value in this scenario. The winners in this space are going to be car manufacturers and the developers (licensers) of the self-driving software that get legal approval (and it seems extremely unlikely that this will be Uber). [1] Full disclosure, half of this is a repost of what I wrote on another thread earlier today. [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed-in-q4-but-theres-still-work-to-do-2018-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed-in-q4-b...

xapata 9y ago
> no economies of scale Brand is scalable. Company processes are scalable. There are many reasons to be a large company serving many cities.
- gringoDan 9y ago
  Fair points. Perhaps I should have specified that the unit economics don't scale with expansion to new cities.

askafriend 9y ago

Just because they will not re-apply in California now doesn't mean their efforts are stopping - and it doesn't mean they won't apply for permits in different states or just re-apply in California at a later date. HN seems to be jumping to radical conclusions on the level of Reddit these days but I get that everyone is a bit emotional around Facebook / Uber during this news cycle...

rtpg 9y ago
But doesn't that mean they're scaling back testing? Considering the fact that Ubers entire valuation justification relies on them both getting self driving cars first....
- askafriend 9y ago
  It just means they won’t test in California in the near future. It doesn’t automatically mean they will scale back their testing across the board.
ExcelSaga 9y ago
My guess is that they don’t want to be seen asking for something they’ll publically fail to get. At this point, outside of the world of tech, people who were downright alarmed by SDV’s now have a place to hang their hat. Politicians follow the direction of popular sentiment, and they’re not going to risk the next Uber fatality having their stamp on it. They’ll be thinking the next corpse might be a child’s as well, and how that would hurt their prospects for re-election. On HN there are a lot of Vulcans who have stats ready to go about human driver fatalities, but that’s far out of touch with the average voter. Fear = Dread/Sense of Control, and most people think they have a high degree of control as the driver of a car. I’m not arguing that they’re right, but they’re the majority.
- dannyw 9y ago
  Even the stats are pretty bad for Uber: while the sample size is minimal, an average driver is expected to drive ~33x more miles than Uber did in total before a fatality.

lewis500 9y ago

The self driving car program seems like reaching for immortality. Just because your company identifies something that will eventually kill it on a long enough timeline doesn’t mean you need to develop that product yourself. Wonder how much better off they could have been if they had focused on tweaking aspects of their current service.

skellera 9y ago
Their business model would be destroyed by the first company to do self driving. The costs of paying drivers is a big part of the fee paid by riders. It was the natural progression for Uber. It just seems like Waymo is doing a much better job. The internal problems at Uber are going to have lasting effects even if the problems have already ended.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  Yes, but there's a big difference between perfecting the tech and implementing it for a use case. Uber would have the logistics and infrastrcuture to implement it, that's an easy call to license the tech from someone that has the tech down pat but no interest in being a taxi company. Heck they could probably have partnered with Google as a testing partner.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    They choose this path long ago when they took over a billion in investment + debt, and probably could be argued it was locked in even sooner than that. This a vehicle to get investors to that important rentier position and they have to make it or implode in debt trying. Their valuation has this fate baked in.
  - galdosdi 9y ago
    Well, but leverage matters. Whoever owns self driving patents will take close to 100% of the profit margins involved in taxis for the life of the patents. For example, Apple gets most of the margin out of an iPhone. Apple could switch hardware vendors. The hardware vendors can't find anyone else who sells the iPhone OS. Same thing here. If you have the self driving tech, the logistics and a shiny app and the dumb car hardware are the easy part you can buy for the lowest price available from many competing vendors (or conversely, license your technology exclusively to whoever pays the highest price -- either way, you have total leverage here and they have none, because without self driving tech there is no business) Anyway, Waymo does not seem at all disinterested in the taxi business, probably because they realize that's the easy part. Alphabet engineers can put out a decent dispatch app in a fiscal quarter easily, and it markets itself. Or they could create a bidding war between Uber, Lyft, Via, etc.... Even with massive investor subsidies, nobody will be able to beat the rock bottom prices of a true driverless taxi service. Uber investors know this, which is why Uber was forced to pretend to develop driverless tech, because if they don't, then Uber stock should be selling at earnings multiples more appropriate for a steel mill, not a software company.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

In related news Nvidia has also suspended its self-driving car tests in the wake of the Uber crash. Uber uses Nvidia’s self-driving technology in their cars.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

username223 9y ago

Uber could actually be a viable business if they gave up on being a unicorn. Right now, you can step out of an airport in a new country, pull out your phone, type in an address, and someone will drive you there. They're a universal ride-hailing service, and they could probably even charge a premium for that versus local taxis. Unfortunately, they're probably in too deep to become a medium-sized business. Also, building their own fleet of robo-taxis is insane when their current business model relies on (underpaying for using) people's personal cars.

mpreda 9y ago

I'm thinking about this simple trick to keep the safety driver focused: at random intervals, the software would provide a stimulus (such as a red LED light projected on windshield), and the person would need to react as quickly as possible by pushing a button. Thus the person would know she has to expect the need to react quickly, and the software can measure the level of attentiveness.

jdavis703 9y ago
Self driving trains have been in existence for decades. In NYC (which I don't think is heavily automated) they require the drivers to point when they pull in to a station to prove they're paying attention. Many freight trains have a throttle that is dialed in to place at a set speed. To ensure engineers are focused there's a dead man's switch that requires activation at set intervals.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
pessimizer 9y ago
That sounds worse than just driving. It also definitely switches who is the machine and who is the master, like one of those breathalyzers attached to the ignition.
make3 9y ago
there are deep learning solutions that classify super well wether the driver is paying attention or not. you could just play a buzzer when that happens, and tell them they will get fired if it happens too often (after human review of the tapes ofc)
- eyeing_see 9y ago
  To add to your comment: GM's SuperCruise semi-autonomous mode uses a real-time head and eye-tracking system to ensure the driver is alert. I don't know if it's based on DL, but it's available in a production vehicle.

yorby 9y ago

Which state/area is next on the list?

kozikow 9y ago

There should be a way of increasing safety driver attentiveness. E.g. make drivers labelers. E.g. driver have to label any pedestrians they see on a special HUD. Add financial incentives for labeling pedestrians quickly. Some variation of this idea may reduce data acquisition costs and improve safety drivers.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Munroe, R., https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/ [XKCD]

cletus 9y ago

Something is real fishy with Uber and the Arizona fatality. If you believe Uber's dashcam footage it was dark and hard to see the woman. Several people in the area posted comparison dashcam footage showing it just wasn't that dark [1]. This raises a bunch of questions: - Was this the unprocessed footage from a dashcam in the Uber car? - How bright were the headlights? - What other sensors could've and should've detected an object to be avoided on the road? I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here (probably because of the optimism for self-driving cars, which I share) but why isn't criminal negligence for Uber a possibility here? Apparently they also disabled one of the safety systems in the Volvo XC90 designed to avoid this sort of thing. If it does come to light that Uber misrepresented the conditions of the crash, tampered with the evidence in any way or even tampered with other safety measures then shouldn't a criminal case be a consideration? [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...

grzm 9y ago
At this point we really don't have enough information to know what happened other than the car hit and killed the pedestrian. We don't know how or if this dash cam video played into the control systems of the car. The accident is tragic and of course should be looked into. The NTSB is investigating[0] and I assume will have access to a lot better information than we have at this point, including all of that you're interested in. Lots of arm-chair quarterbacking at this point, given the paucity of information available right now. As for "I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here", there are opinions all over the map, including those very similar to yours. This discussion has been going on for days in multiple submissions, and again, based on very little information. [0]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180320.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180320.as...

richardknop 9y ago

I think this might be the bursting of the Silicon Valley's self driving car bubble. People are starting to realise tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale. We still might be decade or more away from tech being advanced enough to consider going in this direction.

FreakyT 9y ago
> "tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale" To be more specific, Uber's tech is the one that's nowhere near feasible. According to recently leaked data, Uber's self driving system is literally orders of magnitude more failure prone than Waymo's[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driving-cars-arizona.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driv...
- richardknop 9y ago
  That is probably correct. But I am skeptical of even Waymo. I don't think even with Waymo's tech it's reasonable to expect any deployment of self driving cars on a meaningful scale in next 5-10 years (apart from some very controlled conditions like roads or lanes dedicated to self driving cars but that will require infrastructure build-up which will take decade or two).
- bkor 9y ago
  From what I understood elsewhere, the numbers in that article are about different measures (apples vs oranges comparison). Article states: > 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble Apparently they have a number for a) number of miles per intervention and b) number of miles per intervention to prevent an accident. Waymo's number is measure b, Uber's number if measure a.
tim333 9y ago
>nowhere near ... feasible On the other hand >Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15644680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15644680 > Waymo is doing it live. Two months after the Alphabet self-driving car spinoff announced it would start running a truly driver-free service in Phoenix this year (as in, cars romping about with no one at the wheel), the company now unveils how it will do it: with the help of thousands more Chrysler Pacifica hybrids. https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-launches-self-driving-minivans-fiat-chrysler/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-launches-self-driving-mini...

pure_ambition 9y ago

Has anyone asked how many hours or miles that self-driving car drove autonomously before the fatality? It could very well be that the accident proves that, while horrible, self-driving cars are much less susceptible to fatal accidents. To date, I have not seen this data anywhere...

stetrain 9y ago
I think those statistics are difficult to get a complete picture on. In california at least the manufacturers have to log miles driven in autonomous mode and the number of disengagement events over those miles. That can be misleading though, since a car could log thousands of miles on a nice smooth stretch of interstate over and over, then spend significant amount of time disengaged in areas with pedestrians, cross walks, and stop signs. The same pinch of salt should be applied to stats that someone like Uber themselves makes claims on, about how many miles they have driven autonomously with no incidents. We could probably draw conclusions about safety per mile travelled on highways but probably not in trickier surface street scenarios without a lot more detail from the manufacturers.

hashkb 9y ago

> “We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident,” They mean "reactively", not "proactively". Pathetic.