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I am surprised Toyota would want to work with Uber at this point - it seems Uber's ills are piling up faster than their successes. Could this be a desperation p

I am surprised Toyota would want to work with Uber at this point - it seems Uber's ills are piling up faster than their successes. Could this be a desperation play where if Toyota doesn't partner up with somebody, they won't have a part in a driverless future that looks like it will belong to Waymo and friends?

sebleon 8y ago
What ills do you speak of? The negative media narrative is not a full reflection of reality, rather what will attract the most eyeballs to monetize in this current media cycle.
- MBCook 8y ago
  Uber’s history outside of self-driving cars is hardly clean either. My only guess would be Toyota is hoping that when Uber goes full self-driving they would use Toyota vehicles to do it.
  - chriselles 8y ago
    That’s what I’m thinking. A large investment in a potentially very large future customer. Would Boeing invest money in an autonomous flight project by Southwest Airlines in hopes of locking in a Boeing 737 only fleet?
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    I hope this is the strategy instead of Toyota wanting to use Uber on their cars as the main source of AI. To this day Uber hasn't done anything to impress me and probably most people. Their corporate culture doesn't help either.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- smt88 8y ago
  Their reckless (compared to Waymo) behavior with self-driving car testing is certainly more than negative press. It seems to reflect their entire culture.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  Everything that came out after that last fatality points to Uber trailing everyone else in terms of functionality and sacrificing safety to appear further along.
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  Uber's self driving cars killed a woman...
  - sorokod 8y ago
    Self driving cars don't kill people. Programmers that program self driving cars kill people.
- schaefer 8y ago
  Link to the report from Uber's fatal accident: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... To summarize what happened - Uber's autopilot makes decisions about when emergency braking is necessary. But the software was braking so often on public roads that overall it's driving was erratic. So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases. This essentially turned the car into a missile on our public roads. at the time of the accident, the autopilot detected the pedestrian. Calculated an imminent collision, and initiated emergency braking. Instead of actually breaking, the message to break simply went to the logs. Combine that with a safety driver that was looking down at the console and not up at the road - and the fatality was the result. -- It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads. How many times have you seen footage of a crash test dummy safely landing in an air bag? I want to see footage of crash test dummies getting pushed out in front of autopilot cars - and hopefully, never getting run down.
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    > It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads. Because the inefficiencies of government are catching up with them as they'd rather right each other (different parties) rather than be productive and move the country forward.
    - kartan 8y ago
      > inefficiencies of government You misspelled lobbing.
      - hammeiam 8y ago
        > You misspelled lobbing. You misspelled lobbying.
    - andygates 8y ago
      Technology always outpaces legislation. It's been that way since the telegraph and earlier. Legislators can't rule for stuff that isn't there, and tech changes spec all the time. Once there actually are fully-autonomous vehicles on public roads, the rules will come together. For now it's humans, just like every other vehicle.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sdgfd33fasdf22 8y ago
The ills you speak of is called FUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt). HackerNews is an echo chamber for pessimists guised as realists. You see this in threads ranging from FB, Uber, Bitcoin, Tesla, people showing off weekend projects, etc. It's a common phenomenon and in mainstream culture we call them "haters".
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  Do you have other information about the self driving fatality? While its a tall order, the self driving cars should perform better than humans when it comes to reaction times in incidents like this.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    The car didn't do anything wrong, emergency braking was disabled and relied on human intervention. Now why it was disabled is another question. Most likely because their system isn't anywhere near ready. The only value I see from the whole of Uber is know how and practical examples of how not do solve this. The fatality didn't change anything, it is (and was) painfully apparent that it was only a matter of time.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    The Volvo collision system had been disabled, the Uber system didn't detect the woman crossing the road, and the driver was watching Hulu or similar on her phone. Uber had also gone from teams of two doing the autonomous testing to teams of one. Oh yeah, and Uber released a super contrasty picture to justify their car's behavior. Less biased sources showed that there was plenty of visibility on that stretch of road. If you're looking for sources, Ars covered everything in pretty good detail.
    - rasz 8y ago
      This isnt true, Uber system detected obstacle, categorized it as bicycle and send emergency braking signal .. which went straight to /dev/null and logs.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
I wish they had invested 500 million into buying a self-driving startup or something instead. Or just opening up a new AI branch for Toyota / Lexus. It's not like people en masse are driving around in self driving cars while asleep at the wheel yet so the race for self-driving is still a turtle race. They have the resources imho to do great things, maybe they're afraid after the software issues where cars would keep accelerating, but that shouldn't stop them from getting in on the game. Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.
- newfocogi 8y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future. It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. Does anyone have a name for this type of advantage, or know of examples in other areas?
  - Yahivin 8y ago
    Compound interest, Pareto principle, Matthew Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
  - gwern 8y ago
    > It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. This doesn't seem to be the case. Look at the California disengagement statistics over cumulative miles - it looks like it's logarithmic or something, certainly not accelerating. Or look at Waymo in Arizona: they are driving, what, 70,000 miles per month and have racked up cumulative millions there already; if there really were some sort of compound interest or exponential improvement, then after they solved it well enough to go live and started racking up all those miles, self-driving cars should be on the verge of being solved & going global unless you postulate an enormous distance in between 'good enough to drive customers around Arizona' and 'good enough to drive customers around everywhere'.
karthikb 8y ago
A huge fraction of cars driven by Uber drivers are made by Toyota. More often than not, you'll get picked up by a Prius, Corolla, or Camry. So to some extent, this is about maintaining market share.
- MBCook 8y ago
  Is it really larger than expected? Or could it simply be a reflection of how popular Toyota cars are in general?
  - karthikb 8y ago
    Toyota has an existing partnership with Uber for leases to drivers. If Uber's thesis - that app-hailing will supplant car ownership - is correct, then car manufacturers have an incentive to either create their own hailing networks or partner with existing ones.
rightbyte 8y ago
My guess is that Volvo ditched them after they messed up Volvo's emergency-brake for some homebrew VC version.
mvpu 8y ago
I think this isn't just about self-driving tech (I believe Toyota already partnered with Waymo on that given the old Google self driving cars were Lexus RX and Prius) - but this is also about car sharing. I think car sharing might be a bigger and sooner threat to car manufacturers than self driving cars. By partnering with Uber Toyota gets to hedge.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Notably, Toyota Prius is the sole vehicle for Gig.

sebleon 8y ago

What ills do you speak of? The negative media narrative is not a full reflection of reality, rather what will attract the most eyeballs to monetize in this current media cycle.

MBCook 8y ago
Uber’s history outside of self-driving cars is hardly clean either. My only guess would be Toyota is hoping that when Uber goes full self-driving they would use Toyota vehicles to do it.
- chriselles 8y ago
  That’s what I’m thinking. A large investment in a potentially very large future customer. Would Boeing invest money in an autonomous flight project by Southwest Airlines in hopes of locking in a Boeing 737 only fleet?
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  I hope this is the strategy instead of Toyota wanting to use Uber on their cars as the main source of AI. To this day Uber hasn't done anything to impress me and probably most people. Their corporate culture doesn't help either.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
smt88 8y ago
Their reckless (compared to Waymo) behavior with self-driving car testing is certainly more than negative press. It seems to reflect their entire culture.
JamesBarney 8y ago
Everything that came out after that last fatality points to Uber trailing everyone else in terms of functionality and sacrificing safety to appear further along.
henryfjordan 8y ago
Uber's self driving cars killed a woman...
- sorokod 8y ago
  Self driving cars don't kill people. Programmers that program self driving cars kill people.
schaefer 8y ago
Link to the report from Uber's fatal accident: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... To summarize what happened - Uber's autopilot makes decisions about when emergency braking is necessary. But the software was braking so often on public roads that overall it's driving was erratic. So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases. This essentially turned the car into a missile on our public roads. at the time of the accident, the autopilot detected the pedestrian. Calculated an imminent collision, and initiated emergency braking. Instead of actually breaking, the message to break simply went to the logs. Combine that with a safety driver that was looking down at the console and not up at the road - and the fatality was the result. -- It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads. How many times have you seen footage of a crash test dummy safely landing in an air bag? I want to see footage of crash test dummies getting pushed out in front of autopilot cars - and hopefully, never getting run down.
- hanniabu 8y ago
  > It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads. Because the inefficiencies of government are catching up with them as they'd rather right each other (different parties) rather than be productive and move the country forward.
  - kartan 8y ago
    > inefficiencies of government You misspelled lobbing.
    - hammeiam 8y ago
      > You misspelled lobbing. You misspelled lobbying.
  - andygates 8y ago
    Technology always outpaces legislation. It's been that way since the telegraph and earlier. Legislators can't rule for stuff that isn't there, and tech changes spec all the time. Once there actually are fully-autonomous vehicles on public roads, the rules will come together. For now it's humans, just like every other vehicle.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sdgfd33fasdf22 8y ago

The ills you speak of is called FUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt). HackerNews is an echo chamber for pessimists guised as realists. You see this in threads ranging from FB, Uber, Bitcoin, Tesla, people showing off weekend projects, etc. It's a common phenomenon and in mainstream culture we call them "haters".

petermcneeley 8y ago
Do you have other information about the self driving fatality? While its a tall order, the self driving cars should perform better than humans when it comes to reaction times in incidents like this.
- tjoff 8y ago
  The car didn't do anything wrong, emergency braking was disabled and relied on human intervention. Now why it was disabled is another question. Most likely because their system isn't anywhere near ready. The only value I see from the whole of Uber is know how and practical examples of how not do solve this. The fatality didn't change anything, it is (and was) painfully apparent that it was only a matter of time.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  The Volvo collision system had been disabled, the Uber system didn't detect the woman crossing the road, and the driver was watching Hulu or similar on her phone. Uber had also gone from teams of two doing the autonomous testing to teams of one. Oh yeah, and Uber released a super contrasty picture to justify their car's behavior. Less biased sources showed that there was plenty of visibility on that stretch of road. If you're looking for sources, Ars covered everything in pretty good detail.
  - rasz 8y ago
    This isnt true, Uber system detected obstacle, categorized it as bicycle and send emergency braking signal .. which went straight to /dev/null and logs.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

I wish they had invested 500 million into buying a self-driving startup or something instead. Or just opening up a new AI branch for Toyota / Lexus. It's not like people en masse are driving around in self driving cars while asleep at the wheel yet so the race for self-driving is still a turtle race. They have the resources imho to do great things, maybe they're afraid after the software issues where cars would keep accelerating, but that shouldn't stop them from getting in on the game. Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.

newfocogi 8y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future. It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. Does anyone have a name for this type of advantage, or know of examples in other areas?
- Yahivin 8y ago
  Compound interest, Pareto principle, Matthew Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
- gwern 8y ago
  > It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. This doesn't seem to be the case. Look at the California disengagement statistics over cumulative miles - it looks like it's logarithmic or something, certainly not accelerating. Or look at Waymo in Arizona: they are driving, what, 70,000 miles per month and have racked up cumulative millions there already; if there really were some sort of compound interest or exponential improvement, then after they solved it well enough to go live and started racking up all those miles, self-driving cars should be on the verge of being solved & going global unless you postulate an enormous distance in between 'good enough to drive customers around Arizona' and 'good enough to drive customers around everywhere'.

karthikb 8y ago

A huge fraction of cars driven by Uber drivers are made by Toyota. More often than not, you'll get picked up by a Prius, Corolla, or Camry. So to some extent, this is about maintaining market share.

MBCook 8y ago
Is it really larger than expected? Or could it simply be a reflection of how popular Toyota cars are in general?
- karthikb 8y ago
  Toyota has an existing partnership with Uber for leases to drivers. If Uber's thesis - that app-hailing will supplant car ownership - is correct, then car manufacturers have an incentive to either create their own hailing networks or partner with existing ones.

rightbyte 8y ago

My guess is that Volvo ditched them after they messed up Volvo's emergency-brake for some homebrew VC version.

mvpu 8y ago

I think this isn't just about self-driving tech (I believe Toyota already partnered with Waymo on that given the old Google self driving cars were Lexus RX and Prius) - but this is also about car sharing. I think car sharing might be a bigger and sooner threat to car manufacturers than self driving cars. By partnering with Uber Toyota gets to hedge.

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Notably, Toyota Prius is the sole vehicle for Gig.