11 ms·

Uber’s Vision of Self-Driving Cars Begins to Blur

128 points by plasticchris 8y ago

chollida1 8y ago
I posted this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317214#14317443 > 1) Drop self driving cars completely. YOu aren't getting there first, second, or anywhere close to third, just partner with a car company and call it a day. > 2) Settle Google's lawsuit, hopefully 1 will help > 3) Hire a new CEO, Sheryl Sandberg is almost certainly not available but someone who can show that change will and is happening internally. They've completed 2 of the 3 things I thought they needed to go public. Dropping their own self driving car program was the third. They need to have their story figured out when they go public as investors will want to know if they are all in or all out on developing their own self driving cars. I can't see them going public with their current strategy for self driving cars, its a huge money pit with not much to show for it currently.
- dharmon 8y ago
  The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. I think they are aware that they don't have a chance at it long-term. A partnership isn't as sexy, but might be enough to eek out a $50B valuation.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    I think autonomy is existential for Uber, but I also think they have a decade or so before it will start having a deleterious impact on their bottom line. My thesis is that they shouldn't shudder ATG entirely, but should scale it back to a core group, and then consider dropping the dead weight and scaling it back up again slowly as certain performance milestones are met, meanwhile keeping a patient eye out for promising startups worthy of mid-stage investments sizeable enough to grant them an significant ownership stake.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      *shutter
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. This is pretty much it. Making an Uber clone is absolutely trivial, and they are being outcompeted in every single international market which has one. They also have zero customer loyalty, people will happily switch to another app the moment there is competition.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      > Making an Uber clone is absolutely trivial Maybe so but cloning Uber is absolutely not trivial.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      It seems like it would be difficult to clone their terrible GPS usage and mapping. Most drivers use Google maps in my experience. And now with Uber express pool it is pretty much guaranteed it will tell you the wrong location. If it says northeast corner, just go to the south west corner.
  - Animats 8y ago
    The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. Exactly. Uber still loses money on every ride.[1] They can't fix the losses without raising prices, which would lose their competitive edge. They've squeezed the drivers as hard as they can, and the drivers are pushing back successfully at last.[2] So Uber needs something they can hype. They already tried "China", and failed. "Self-driving" was next. That's not working out. Uber is getting into bike/scooter rental and food delivery, which are already crowded, low-margin industries. Self-driving didn't need to work, it just had to be hyped for investors. [1] http://fortune.com/2018/08/15/travis-kalanick-uber-still-posts-massive-losses-sees-revenue-growth-slow/ http://fortune.com/2018/08/15/travis-kalanick-uber-still-pos... [2] http://fortune.com/2018/08/08/new-york-freeze-ride-sharing-vehicles-minimum-wage-lyft-uber/ http://fortune.com/2018/08/08/new-york-freeze-ride-sharing-v...
    - SilasX 8y ago
      >Exactly. Uber still loses money on every ride. Please stop repeating this, or at least find a source that supports it. There's a big difference between "losing money in the aggregate" and losing money on each ride; the latter is only true if the marginal costs of providing each ride are greater than the revenues from it, and the source in [1] only reports the former kind of loss. It's very unlikely that each ride is actually costing them the ~$4 they take from it; that would be some pretty inefficient IT.
      - Animats 8y ago
        find a source that supports it. [1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-money/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-mo... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uber-valued-at-62-billion-still-loses-money-on-its-rides/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uber-valued-at-62-billion-still...
        SilasX 8y ago
        Those just repeat the original source, which (uncontroversially) says they lose money in the aggregate. Total operating costs minus total revenues is positive. None of them claim, as you did, and as I asked for, that each ride loses them money. The closest they Come is saying that some rides can lose money because of the formula. Do you understand the difference between “lose money on each ride” and “lose money overall”? All of your links only speak to the latter, not the former, and the former is what I was objecting to.
- curiousDog 8y ago
  Well their huge valuation hinges upon them eventually going into self-driving cars. It'd otherwise be hard to justify a $120billion IPO without rapid growth targets. They've already reached saturation points in most of the important metros and cities.
  - mathattack 8y ago
    Do they need to develop the technology themselves? So long as their cars don’t have drivers, they’re fine, no? Or is the issue that nobody would share with them?
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      Uber needs self-driving tech to be cheap and available. In the long run this seems likely, but in the short term Waymo seems to be gearing up to start their own app, and if they have a cost advantage over Uber, Uber will be burning even more cash subsidizing rides waiting for self-driving tech to become a commodity. At that point, why invest in Uber?
    - Lavery 8y ago
      Uber probably views it as important that they develop the self-driving tech because otherwise (if someone else develops it, licenses it to OEMs, and then Uber uses those cars), there's no lock-in to the Uber ecosystem. Either those OEMs will partner with Uber for a fee that will capture most of the profit Uber's valuation currently expects, the OEMs simply spin up their own Uber-style vehicle on demand program (far cheaper than Uber spinning up a car company), or people who can afford their own vehicles (likely a huge chunk of Uber's pool of users currently) just use their own now-autonomous vehicle a la carte, summoning it when they need a ride. In a pretty ironic twist, Uber et al have already started rumblings about how the third option needs to be made illegal, because there's no regulatory oversight on vehicle maintenance and safety. Having spent most of their life ignoring existing regulations, they soon may need them to survive.
      - mathattack 8y ago
        Couldn’t the lock-in be the Network of riders?
- telltruth 8y ago
  I love your naive hero worship. Suddenly you get Sheryl Sandberg on and all your problems are solved. Hint: Sandberg is not magician and not even that competent all rounder or polymath. She was recruited in FB because she precisely knew how ad business works and brought huge network of big players in this space with her. In a way its backstabbing to your previous employer but well who cares. Another thing to think about: Its almost exactly 10 years since Sandberg is at FB and its still one trick pony. In fact, much worse than one trick pony that Google is.
  - mifreewil 8y ago
    > she precisely knew how ad business works and brought huge network of big players in this space with her. In a way its backstabbing to your previous employer but well who cares. How is this backstabbing? Nobody is owned by their employer for life. People change jobs and bring customers with them to their new employer in all types of industries.
lx3459683 8y ago
Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time. The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.
- madengr 8y ago
  Delta City (aka New Detroit) would be the ideal for testing.
  - paganel 8y ago
    When I think of self-driving cars I always think of this taxi scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY) from Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven is a genius.
    - madengr 8y ago
      Isn’t that the one with the body scanners (at the airport)?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I really hope that the future won't be even more car centric but that's how things may go.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  I think the ambition will be adjusted and it will happen. The realization that will come is that solving the last percent (or five, or ten) of driving is so expensive that it's just not pursued. So we'll have these 99% autonomous cars that will be confused and handed off to a human driver, inside the car or remote. This will give most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. The race won't be to reach fully autonomous driving, but to reach 99.9% when the competition is 99.8%, because that is half the workforce needed to drive all those confused cars. If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.
liaukovv 8y ago
To me it looks like self-driving problem turned out much harder than anticipated by most players at first(10 years ago?)
- deleted 8y ago
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- 51Cards 8y ago
  Which kind of amazes me that it wasn't obvious. When I start to think of vision recognition issues, poor conditions, missing signs, markings, etc., unpredictable human drivers... then all of the edge cases I alone have seen in 30 years of driving... I would definitely have put the problem on the very edge of what might be solvable. And that's today, not 10 years ago. What amazes me more is that companies like Google have come as far as they have. My kudos to those who sought to tackle it.
  - bloorp 8y ago
    Yeah... Just yesterday I was driving at night, through road construction, with a torrential downpour, and nowhere to pull off, and it was freaking scary. And I remember just thinking, "This kind of thing happens to me maybe a few times a year and there's no way in 30 years that we're going to trust autonomy with this"
    - allannienhuis 8y ago
      but isn't that part of the point? I doubt any automated system would consider driving in those conditions 'safe', so it would deal with the situation by pulling over to a safer spot and stop driving. Humans make terrible risk decisions in cases like that - continuing to drive in horrible snowstorms, etc, when the risks a way higher than our already-risky roads in normal conditions. By not having the human make that decision, you save lives, even if some people arrive home late. It does raise the point of 'rescue' in certain dangerous conditions like winter storms. Extreme rain in the dark can probably normally be waited out, but snowstorms and other road-closure type conditions probably warrant a different proactive rescue type response if we'll have riders with no driving ability in self-driving cars.
Fricken 8y ago
I have no idea what's going on internally at Uber ATG, but they weren't doing well before the killing of Elaine Herzberg. There was a pattern amongst Autonomous driving outfits funded by well-heeled and impatient companies jumping in to the game late, going balls-to-the-wall, and mostly just wasting a lot of cash and resources on a gigantic clusterfuck. We can include Apple, Baidu and Uber in this category. Baidu has since done a reboot. I have no idea where Apple is at in terms of tangible progress, and then there's Uber. The companies doing well are Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox, and one thing common to all three of these is that they started small a few talented people and scaled up in stages when it appropriate. A testament to the whole 'just because 1 woman can make a baby in 9 months doesn't mean 9 women can make a baby in 1 month' analogy.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Very true. The over-exuberant business version of this is money-men types who see companies as a collection of investments and cash flows. This leads them to think of business problems in "resource allocation" terms. If company X's is bad at UI, customer service or whatnot than this will be fixed by "investing" more in it. Here they see a big juicy prize: first to market with self driving taxis. They understand that it's risky but they still assume a very strong correlation between the amount of money going in, and the probability of their big juicy prize coming out. The whole approach is a bad idea in new technology. Instead of thinking in expiremental, creative-discovery terms, they have a very precise destination and they try to brute force a way to that destination with money.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    Yes. I suppose in the scope of industrial process there are basically two types of action: shoveling (a scalable technique that is understood and can be trained) and invention (creating new scalable techniques). If it's just shoveling, capital investment may very well yield higher output. Invention on the other hand happens on a constrained pipeline. The shoveling that looks like invention is when an existing invention is adapted (and sometimes called innovation). I presume it's hard for outsiders to say when a subject on which expertise is not yet commoditized is ready for shoveling or not. I think this is what happened here - since everyone were hyping the AI revolution, they presumed the technique was ready for industrial adaption and only lacked in dedicated subject experts and existing processes which can be adapted. They presumed there was some core invention that could be adapted and monetized. Given how poorly understood subject AI is, and how lucrative a self driving car would probably be, some risk taking in this area is certainly understandable. I have no idea if the investments were in line with the risks and rewards or not.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system. They should have been shut down after it came out that they were cutting corners on safety and tech to get the program as far along as they could before it caught up with them. I can't believe Uber still exists at all with the negativity and corruption associated with the brand.
- deleted 8y ago
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- wiremine 8y ago
  > I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system. I agree, and it makes me wonder how this is going to shake out. In the automotive industry it's very common to have the tier 1s provide LOTS of tech to the OEMs, but it's typically isn't branded. Interiors, infotainment, brakes, etc. It feels like self-driving subsystems will be the same thing. So, I might not trust Uber-branded systems, but I might trust Apple or Microsoft (Just to use some common brands as placeholders). Would we trust those systems more than the OEM-branded systems?
Dwolb 8y ago
Uber is way way far out of their league here. Imagine being a software and services company trying to build one of the most mechanically and electronically complex items that humans have ever built with a team that has only built prototypes and not having the war chest of continuing positive cash flow to fund development. Not even looking at the strategy of it all, this program sounds like it needs to be dumped in favor of partnerships.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > with a team that has only built prototypes This is normal for research isn't it? If someone before you has already built a working version of something, then it isn't research any more. And Uber hires extraordinarily qualified AI researchers doesn't it?
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    I think what they're saying is that usually teams don't go that far out of their industrial strength. In a way, Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware, which is a big shift. Shipping hardware past the prototype phase is __HARD__ in ways that shipping a software app/building a marketplace isn't (not saying the latter aren't hard, but the two tasks take very different types of organizations).
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware But why would they do that, instead of hiring other developers? Surely Levandowski would have an idea of who to hire.
  - maym86 8y ago
    Reasarchers aren't normally expected to build a production system to sell as a product. They might be very smart people but for something like this you need a team with at least some members who have real experience delivering automotive hardware + safety critical systens + automation. Research tends to ignore the boring but important details that make a product.
tambourine_man 8y ago
It’s amazing how fast and radically the narrative shifts. An year or so ago self driving cars would be here anytime now. Now it’s almost consensus that it’s not for going to happen in the next decade.
- jonknee 8y ago
  Counterpoint, it's happening now with Waymo.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    Waymo's initial commercial deployment is imminent but is now a good 6 months behind their initial announcement last November. Waymo is still using safety drivers most of the time, and the commercial deployment will likely be confined to members of their EZ rider guinea pigs. It's very exciting seeing how far they've come, but for every new region they hope to roll out in there's going to be a ton of work. AI can interpolate but it cannot generalize. We're past peak hype and sliding into the trough of disillusionment.
    - tigershark 8y ago
      Why is 6 months behind if they said that they will launch a commercial service this year?
      - Fricken 8y ago
        Last November Krafcik said "In a few months". A few months later in March it was changed to "Later this year." Rumours circulated that they had planned for this month, August, which were corroborated by a big Bloomberg puff piece and a ballyhooed partnership announcement with the Valley transit authority, that came out late July, but still no deployment. They're hung up on something.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Right, right. Any moment now, and with flying cars, too. I am not holding my breath.
shriver 8y ago
Uber seem to have two really key problems: The first is that self-driving is super difficult, they don't really have the expertise, and a lot of their progress seems to have come from being able disregard proper safety procedures. So to move forward with it they'd need to fess up to investors that it'll take much longer than anticipated and it'll be much more expensive. That'll damage the company value significantly, and it's not really relevant to what the core of the business is doing right now. I actually find it fascinating - Uber has built an app that disrupts the traditional taxi marketplace. Separate to that they've got a division working on a produce to disrupt Uber's current market place. The second problem is that if they choose not to do autonomous driving their entire business proposition needs re-establishing. Can they actually make money doing what they're currently doing? Or are they doomed to sink huge venture capital sums into acquiring market shares, only to fail to reach a dominant enough position to actually raise prices and make bank. And part two to that question: Can they achieve that profitability and a good enough return to be worthwhile for investors before someone who does succeed in disrupting the taxi business with self-driving cars.
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  One problem I can see is that they're trying to implement autonomous cars too fast, and secondarily they're trying to replace Uber X with them. If they treated auto-cars the same way they treated Uber Black, and make it a more luxury choice with a higher price, they could slowly implement this into their business over time, one car at a time. I personally would pay more for an auto-car. But the big crux is your first point, and the solution in my mind is for them to just be way way slower and ensure full safety precautions. I don't think they have to dismantle the division nor do I think autonomous cars are out of the realm of possibility.
  - drywater 8y ago
    Why would one pay a higher price on a driverless ride?
    - sushid 8y ago
S_A_P 8y ago
Wasn't Uber's autonomous program basically a bunch of Carnegie Mellon researchers? My initial thought was that they actually had some of the best people in the field working on this problem. I vaguely even remember some criticism of Uber because they had plucked so many of the prominent researchers that there was brain drain at the university. What happened?
jgalt212 8y ago
What I don't get is why Travis thought whomever developed self driving cars wouldn't sell them to all comers? And even if the first guy didn't, under the guise hoping to create a vertically integrated monopoly, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... vendor would.
bogomipz 8y ago
The article states: >"The company, valued at $62 billion, has racked up billions of dollars in losses since it was founded in 2009 and needs to persuade investors that it can eventually create a sustainably profitable business. The self-driving efforts, which have been losing $100 million to $200 million a quarter, do little to help that case." Can anyone say or speculate what percentage or Uber's losses are a result of the ATG efforts? Would they be profitable without it now?
otakucode 8y ago
Did Uber figure out that if anyone can buy self-driving cars that their golden utopia vision of booting all drivers and simply maintaining a fleet of self-driving roving vehicles doesn't make sense? Did they figure out that someone else can run servers just as well as Uber and offer people the opportunity to lease out their self-driving cars, utterly destroying Ubers market (they would have to charge far more to maintain the whole lifespan of the self-driving car where someone only renting theirs out for a few hours a week would happily take far less)? Or have they just generally realized self-driving cars will never work because no company in the software space is capable of dedicating the years of testing necessary to make a truly reliable product, while those willing to cut every corner will be first to market.... and will proceed to destroy the market by turning society against them after some of their poorly-designed vehicles smear a few toddlers across the sidewalk.
tonyquart 8y ago
I personally think there are so many flaws in these self-driving cars safety features. There are quite many review by car owners on Youtube, forums, etc. I have also read an article that talks about this at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid.... I think until car companies fix these flaws, I myself will not try one of these cars.

128 points by plasticchris 8y ago

I posted this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317214#14317443 > 1) Drop self driving cars completely. YOu aren't getting there first, second, or anywhere close to third, just partner with a car company and call it a day. > 2) Settle Google's lawsuit, hopefully 1 will help > 3) Hire a new CEO, Sheryl Sandberg is almost certainly not available but someone who can show that change will and is happening internally. They've completed 2 of the 3 things I thought they needed to go public. Dropping their own self driving car program was the third. They need to have their story figured out when they go public as investors will want to know if they are all in or all out on developing their own self driving cars. I can't see them going public with their current strategy for self driving cars, its a huge money pit with not much to show for it currently.

dharmon 8y ago
The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. I think they are aware that they don't have a chance at it long-term. A partnership isn't as sexy, but might be enough to eek out a $50B valuation.
- Fricken 8y ago
  I think autonomy is existential for Uber, but I also think they have a decade or so before it will start having a deleterious impact on their bottom line. My thesis is that they shouldn't shudder ATG entirely, but should scale it back to a core group, and then consider dropping the dead weight and scaling it back up again slowly as certain performance milestones are met, meanwhile keeping a patient eye out for promising startups worthy of mid-stage investments sizeable enough to grant them an significant ownership stake.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    *shutter
- aphextron 8y ago
  >The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. This is pretty much it. Making an Uber clone is absolutely trivial, and they are being outcompeted in every single international market which has one. They also have zero customer loyalty, people will happily switch to another app the moment there is competition.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    > Making an Uber clone is absolutely trivial Maybe so but cloning Uber is absolutely not trivial.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    It seems like it would be difficult to clone their terrible GPS usage and mapping. Most drivers use Google maps in my experience. And now with Uber express pool it is pretty much guaranteed it will tell you the wrong location. If it says northeast corner, just go to the south west corner.
- Animats 8y ago
  The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough. Exactly. Uber still loses money on every ride.[1] They can't fix the losses without raising prices, which would lose their competitive edge. They've squeezed the drivers as hard as they can, and the drivers are pushing back successfully at last.[2] So Uber needs something they can hype. They already tried "China", and failed. "Self-driving" was next. That's not working out. Uber is getting into bike/scooter rental and food delivery, which are already crowded, low-margin industries. Self-driving didn't need to work, it just had to be hyped for investors. [1] http://fortune.com/2018/08/15/travis-kalanick-uber-still-posts-massive-losses-sees-revenue-growth-slow/ http://fortune.com/2018/08/15/travis-kalanick-uber-still-pos... [2] http://fortune.com/2018/08/08/new-york-freeze-ride-sharing-vehicles-minimum-wage-lyft-uber/ http://fortune.com/2018/08/08/new-york-freeze-ride-sharing-v...
  - SilasX 8y ago
    >Exactly. Uber still loses money on every ride. Please stop repeating this, or at least find a source that supports it. There's a big difference between "losing money in the aggregate" and losing money on each ride; the latter is only true if the marginal costs of providing each ride are greater than the revenues from it, and the source in [1] only reports the former kind of loss. It's very unlikely that each ride is actually costing them the ~$4 they take from it; that would be some pretty inefficient IT.
    - Animats 8y ago
      find a source that supports it. [1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-money/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-mo... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uber-valued-at-62-billion-still-loses-money-on-its-rides/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uber-valued-at-62-billion-still...
      - SilasX 8y ago
        Those just repeat the original source, which (uncontroversially) says they lose money in the aggregate. Total operating costs minus total revenues is positive. None of them claim, as you did, and as I asked for, that each ride loses them money. The closest they Come is saying that some rides can lose money because of the formula. Do you understand the difference between “lose money on each ride” and “lose money overall”? All of your links only speak to the latter, not the former, and the former is what I was objecting to.
curiousDog 8y ago
Well their huge valuation hinges upon them eventually going into self-driving cars. It'd otherwise be hard to justify a $120billion IPO without rapid growth targets. They've already reached saturation points in most of the important metros and cities.
- mathattack 8y ago
  Do they need to develop the technology themselves? So long as their cars don’t have drivers, they’re fine, no? Or is the issue that nobody would share with them?
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Uber needs self-driving tech to be cheap and available. In the long run this seems likely, but in the short term Waymo seems to be gearing up to start their own app, and if they have a cost advantage over Uber, Uber will be burning even more cash subsidizing rides waiting for self-driving tech to become a commodity. At that point, why invest in Uber?
  - Lavery 8y ago
    Uber probably views it as important that they develop the self-driving tech because otherwise (if someone else develops it, licenses it to OEMs, and then Uber uses those cars), there's no lock-in to the Uber ecosystem. Either those OEMs will partner with Uber for a fee that will capture most of the profit Uber's valuation currently expects, the OEMs simply spin up their own Uber-style vehicle on demand program (far cheaper than Uber spinning up a car company), or people who can afford their own vehicles (likely a huge chunk of Uber's pool of users currently) just use their own now-autonomous vehicle a la carte, summoning it when they need a ride. In a pretty ironic twist, Uber et al have already started rumblings about how the third option needs to be made illegal, because there's no regulatory oversight on vehicle maintenance and safety. Having spent most of their life ignoring existing regulations, they soon may need them to survive.
    - mathattack 8y ago
      Couldn’t the lock-in be the Network of riders?
telltruth 8y ago
I love your naive hero worship. Suddenly you get Sheryl Sandberg on and all your problems are solved. Hint: Sandberg is not magician and not even that competent all rounder or polymath. She was recruited in FB because she precisely knew how ad business works and brought huge network of big players in this space with her. In a way its backstabbing to your previous employer but well who cares. Another thing to think about: Its almost exactly 10 years since Sandberg is at FB and its still one trick pony. In fact, much worse than one trick pony that Google is.
- mifreewil 8y ago
  > she precisely knew how ad business works and brought huge network of big players in this space with her. In a way its backstabbing to your previous employer but well who cares. How is this backstabbing? Nobody is owned by their employer for life. People change jobs and bring customers with them to their new employer in all types of industries.

lx3459683 8y ago

Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time. The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.

madengr 8y ago
Delta City (aka New Detroit) would be the ideal for testing.
- paganel 8y ago
  When I think of self-driving cars I always think of this taxi scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY) from Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven is a genius.
  - madengr 8y ago
    Isn’t that the one with the body scanners (at the airport)?
maxxxxx 8y ago
I really hope that the future won't be even more car centric but that's how things may go.
alkonaut 8y ago
I think the ambition will be adjusted and it will happen. The realization that will come is that solving the last percent (or five, or ten) of driving is so expensive that it's just not pursued. So we'll have these 99% autonomous cars that will be confused and handed off to a human driver, inside the car or remote. This will give most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. The race won't be to reach fully autonomous driving, but to reach 99.9% when the competition is 99.8%, because that is half the workforce needed to drive all those confused cars. If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.

liaukovv 8y ago

To me it looks like self-driving problem turned out much harder than anticipated by most players at first(10 years ago?)

deleted 8y ago
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51Cards 8y ago
Which kind of amazes me that it wasn't obvious. When I start to think of vision recognition issues, poor conditions, missing signs, markings, etc., unpredictable human drivers... then all of the edge cases I alone have seen in 30 years of driving... I would definitely have put the problem on the very edge of what might be solvable. And that's today, not 10 years ago. What amazes me more is that companies like Google have come as far as they have. My kudos to those who sought to tackle it.
- bloorp 8y ago
  Yeah... Just yesterday I was driving at night, through road construction, with a torrential downpour, and nowhere to pull off, and it was freaking scary. And I remember just thinking, "This kind of thing happens to me maybe a few times a year and there's no way in 30 years that we're going to trust autonomy with this"
  - allannienhuis 8y ago
    but isn't that part of the point? I doubt any automated system would consider driving in those conditions 'safe', so it would deal with the situation by pulling over to a safer spot and stop driving. Humans make terrible risk decisions in cases like that - continuing to drive in horrible snowstorms, etc, when the risks a way higher than our already-risky roads in normal conditions. By not having the human make that decision, you save lives, even if some people arrive home late. It does raise the point of 'rescue' in certain dangerous conditions like winter storms. Extreme rain in the dark can probably normally be waited out, but snowstorms and other road-closure type conditions probably warrant a different proactive rescue type response if we'll have riders with no driving ability in self-driving cars.

Fricken 8y ago

I have no idea what's going on internally at Uber ATG, but they weren't doing well before the killing of Elaine Herzberg. There was a pattern amongst Autonomous driving outfits funded by well-heeled and impatient companies jumping in to the game late, going balls-to-the-wall, and mostly just wasting a lot of cash and resources on a gigantic clusterfuck. We can include Apple, Baidu and Uber in this category. Baidu has since done a reboot. I have no idea where Apple is at in terms of tangible progress, and then there's Uber. The companies doing well are Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox, and one thing common to all three of these is that they started small a few talented people and scaled up in stages when it appropriate. A testament to the whole 'just because 1 woman can make a baby in 9 months doesn't mean 9 women can make a baby in 1 month' analogy.

dalbasal 8y ago
Very true. The over-exuberant business version of this is money-men types who see companies as a collection of investments and cash flows. This leads them to think of business problems in "resource allocation" terms. If company X's is bad at UI, customer service or whatnot than this will be fixed by "investing" more in it. Here they see a big juicy prize: first to market with self driving taxis. They understand that it's risky but they still assume a very strong correlation between the amount of money going in, and the probability of their big juicy prize coming out. The whole approach is a bad idea in new technology. Instead of thinking in expiremental, creative-discovery terms, they have a very precise destination and they try to brute force a way to that destination with money.
- fsloth 8y ago
  Yes. I suppose in the scope of industrial process there are basically two types of action: shoveling (a scalable technique that is understood and can be trained) and invention (creating new scalable techniques). If it's just shoveling, capital investment may very well yield higher output. Invention on the other hand happens on a constrained pipeline. The shoveling that looks like invention is when an existing invention is adapted (and sometimes called innovation). I presume it's hard for outsiders to say when a subject on which expertise is not yet commoditized is ready for shoveling or not. I think this is what happened here - since everyone were hyping the AI revolution, they presumed the technique was ready for industrial adaption and only lacked in dedicated subject experts and existing processes which can be adapted. They presumed there was some core invention that could be adapted and monetized. Given how poorly understood subject AI is, and how lucrative a self driving car would probably be, some risk taking in this area is certainly understandable. I have no idea if the investments were in line with the risks and rewards or not.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system. They should have been shut down after it came out that they were cutting corners on safety and tech to get the program as far along as they could before it caught up with them. I can't believe Uber still exists at all with the negativity and corruption associated with the brand.

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wiremine 8y ago
> I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system. I agree, and it makes me wonder how this is going to shake out. In the automotive industry it's very common to have the tier 1s provide LOTS of tech to the OEMs, but it's typically isn't branded. Interiors, infotainment, brakes, etc. It feels like self-driving subsystems will be the same thing. So, I might not trust Uber-branded systems, but I might trust Apple or Microsoft (Just to use some common brands as placeholders). Would we trust those systems more than the OEM-branded systems?

Dwolb 8y ago

Uber is way way far out of their league here. Imagine being a software and services company trying to build one of the most mechanically and electronically complex items that humans have ever built with a team that has only built prototypes and not having the war chest of continuing positive cash flow to fund development. Not even looking at the strategy of it all, this program sounds like it needs to be dumped in favor of partnerships.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> with a team that has only built prototypes This is normal for research isn't it? If someone before you has already built a working version of something, then it isn't research any more. And Uber hires extraordinarily qualified AI researchers doesn't it?
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  I think what they're saying is that usually teams don't go that far out of their industrial strength. In a way, Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware, which is a big shift. Shipping hardware past the prototype phase is __HARD__ in ways that shipping a software app/building a marketplace isn't (not saying the latter aren't hard, but the two tasks take very different types of organizations).
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware But why would they do that, instead of hiring other developers? Surely Levandowski would have an idea of who to hire.
- maym86 8y ago
  Reasarchers aren't normally expected to build a production system to sell as a product. They might be very smart people but for something like this you need a team with at least some members who have real experience delivering automotive hardware + safety critical systens + automation. Research tends to ignore the boring but important details that make a product.

tambourine_man 8y ago

It’s amazing how fast and radically the narrative shifts. An year or so ago self driving cars would be here anytime now. Now it’s almost consensus that it’s not for going to happen in the next decade.

jonknee 8y ago
Counterpoint, it's happening now with Waymo.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Waymo's initial commercial deployment is imminent but is now a good 6 months behind their initial announcement last November. Waymo is still using safety drivers most of the time, and the commercial deployment will likely be confined to members of their EZ rider guinea pigs. It's very exciting seeing how far they've come, but for every new region they hope to roll out in there's going to be a ton of work. AI can interpolate but it cannot generalize. We're past peak hype and sliding into the trough of disillusionment.
  - tigershark 8y ago
    Why is 6 months behind if they said that they will launch a commercial service this year?
    - Fricken 8y ago
      Last November Krafcik said "In a few months". A few months later in March it was changed to "Later this year." Rumours circulated that they had planned for this month, August, which were corroborated by a big Bloomberg puff piece and a ballyhooed partnership announcement with the Valley transit authority, that came out late July, but still no deployment. They're hung up on something.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Right, right. Any moment now, and with flying cars, too. I am not holding my breath.

shriver 8y ago

Uber seem to have two really key problems: The first is that self-driving is super difficult, they don't really have the expertise, and a lot of their progress seems to have come from being able disregard proper safety procedures. So to move forward with it they'd need to fess up to investors that it'll take much longer than anticipated and it'll be much more expensive. That'll damage the company value significantly, and it's not really relevant to what the core of the business is doing right now. I actually find it fascinating - Uber has built an app that disrupts the traditional taxi marketplace. Separate to that they've got a division working on a produce to disrupt Uber's current market place. The second problem is that if they choose not to do autonomous driving their entire business proposition needs re-establishing. Can they actually make money doing what they're currently doing? Or are they doomed to sink huge venture capital sums into acquiring market shares, only to fail to reach a dominant enough position to actually raise prices and make bank. And part two to that question: Can they achieve that profitability and a good enough return to be worthwhile for investors before someone who does succeed in disrupting the taxi business with self-driving cars.

WilliamEdward 8y ago
One problem I can see is that they're trying to implement autonomous cars too fast, and secondarily they're trying to replace Uber X with them. If they treated auto-cars the same way they treated Uber Black, and make it a more luxury choice with a higher price, they could slowly implement this into their business over time, one car at a time. I personally would pay more for an auto-car. But the big crux is your first point, and the solution in my mind is for them to just be way way slower and ensure full safety precautions. I don't think they have to dismantle the division nor do I think autonomous cars are out of the realm of possibility.
- drywater 8y ago
  Why would one pay a higher price on a driverless ride?
  - sushid 8y ago

S_A_P 8y ago

Wasn't Uber's autonomous program basically a bunch of Carnegie Mellon researchers? My initial thought was that they actually had some of the best people in the field working on this problem. I vaguely even remember some criticism of Uber because they had plucked so many of the prominent researchers that there was brain drain at the university. What happened?

jgalt212 8y ago

What I don't get is why Travis thought whomever developed self driving cars wouldn't sell them to all comers? And even if the first guy didn't, under the guise hoping to create a vertically integrated monopoly, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... vendor would.

bogomipz 8y ago

The article states: >"The company, valued at $62 billion, has racked up billions of dollars in losses since it was founded in 2009 and needs to persuade investors that it can eventually create a sustainably profitable business. The self-driving efforts, which have been losing $100 million to $200 million a quarter, do little to help that case." Can anyone say or speculate what percentage or Uber's losses are a result of the ATG efforts? Would they be profitable without it now?

otakucode 8y ago

Did Uber figure out that if anyone can buy self-driving cars that their golden utopia vision of booting all drivers and simply maintaining a fleet of self-driving roving vehicles doesn't make sense? Did they figure out that someone else can run servers just as well as Uber and offer people the opportunity to lease out their self-driving cars, utterly destroying Ubers market (they would have to charge far more to maintain the whole lifespan of the self-driving car where someone only renting theirs out for a few hours a week would happily take far less)? Or have they just generally realized self-driving cars will never work because no company in the software space is capable of dedicating the years of testing necessary to make a truly reliable product, while those willing to cut every corner will be first to market.... and will proceed to destroy the market by turning society against them after some of their poorly-designed vehicles smear a few toddlers across the sidewalk.

tonyquart 8y ago

I personally think there are so many flaws in these self-driving cars safety features. There are quite many review by car owners on Youtube, forums, etc. I have also read an article that talks about this at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid.... I think until car companies fix these flaws, I myself will not try one of these cars.