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This was always a clear threat. While Uber is also working in this space, it always seemed very clear to me that once you “solve” driverless cars, creating a ne
by ssharp 8y ago
This was always a clear threat. While Uber is also working in this space, it always seemed very clear to me that once you “solve” driverless cars, creating a network similar to Uber is relatively trivial, assuming human capital is not required 1:1 as it is with Uber.
In theory, to the customer, it doesn’t matter if a human or machine is driving, so you’re no longer dealing with a two-sided network, making adoption substantially easier, especially for a company like Google who can deploy massive capital.
The thing I never understood is how Uber’s investors rationalized this and thought it wouldn’t happen. Did they think self driving cars would not be a reality? Did they think Uber could get there first? Did they think there is still a profitable enough gap between current situation and the dreiverless future to hedge in case Uber doesn’t get there? Is the Uber brand and tech worth so much that they’ll get something back as an acquisition for whoever does get there first?
- fatbob 8y agoGiven all the problems that Uber, in particular, has had with their humans, I'd expect that customers would prefer a non-human driver.
- CydeWeys 8y agoI'd rather have a machine driving. I've had some frankly dangerous taxi or rideshare drivers.
- kornish 8y ago> Did they think Uber could get there first? Seems like exactly what they thought. Remember Uber acquiring Otto and Levandowski? AFAIK Travis was pushing hard for autonomous driving but accidents like the fatality in AZ and missteps like Levandowski's fraught relationship with Waymo led to deemphasizing autonomous driving for the time being. Dara's main job seems to be to take the company public, which requires scaling and fixing the margins on the products they already have in place. I don't work at Uber and perceptions are my own, so curious if any Uber employees agree.
- alexis_fr 8y agoHumans drivers could be necessary to... just lend the car. Not for their driving skills but for the money they invest. It’s much easier to let car owners take the risk of investing in a car, maintaining it, repairing it (for the moment they don’t repair themselves), cleaning up the Saturday night mishaps. It could be hundreds of billion dollars to populate the world with Google-owned self driving cars.
- mehwoot 8y agoAlphabet is making $8 billion a quarter in profit currently. They'd probably love to have some worthwhile investment to sink that money into.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Humans drivers could be necessary to... just lend the car. Unless the humans are losing money by doing so (which may be th case, but probably doesn't make a sustainable business model), the car service is ultimately fully paying for the car for the period it uses it, so it doesn't lose anything by doing so up front. It increases the up front capital requirements, but Google has more cash on hand than the market cap of some Fortune 500 firms, so that's not really an enormous issue for Google. > It’s much easier to let car owners take the risk of investing in a car, maintaining it, repairing it (for the moment they don’t repair themselves), cleaning up the Saturday night mishaps. Well, except humans lie about the last bit to get extra reimbursement, whichnpisses off customers. That kind of thing and other driver frauds is a compelling reason to get independent driver-owners out of the loop.
- xapata 8y agoConsider the fact that car manufacturers don't generally operate taxi services. For the same reason that Toyota sells Priuses (Prii?) to taxi companies, Waymo may choose to sell its technology to car manufacturers and via them to taxi services.
- redbrickroad 8y agoAt the current cost of a self-driving car (~$250K), it would be ridiculously expensive to build a fully self-driving ride-sharing fleet [1]. So expensive that I doubt it's possible to make real money that way right now. Self-driving cars are a long game until companies can bring down the costs. It might be years before that happens. Uber has the advantage of being able to ramp up self-driving cars as part of their existing fleet until then. Edit: Math mistake [1] https://qz.com/924212/what-it-really-costs-to-turn-a-car-into-a-self-driving-vehicle/ https://qz.com/924212/what-it-really-costs-to-turn-a-car-int... [2] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/ https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/
- lsh123 8y agoI don’t think you need same number of self driving cars as drivers and the ratio might be way higher than 1:3. Plus I think you have a math error and the total cost in your example is $250B which is doable for Google.
- bduerst 8y agoThis is trivial. Driverless cars are "always on" so it's not an apt comparison because you're going to always get more from less. Besides, ridesharing is already subsidized right now, so bottom line isn't an issue in the market. Likewise, ride-sharing with self driving cars is even easier since if you own a self driving car it can work on it's own while you are not using it, which is most of the time. There's no reason a similar asset sharing model won't spring up after economies of scale. You could also argue that it's cheaper to pay workers with their own textile equipment, rather than spend the CapEx on a weaving loom, yet here we are.
- asdff 8y agoIt's not trivial when we don't even know what sort of regulation will be required to maintain these vehicles' road legal status, let alone banking on future economies of scale. Would it be a simple license fee? Perhaps an inspection? An age requirement on the vehicle? Or perhaps the worst (and very possible) outcome, mandating that an undistracted driver be sitting behind the wheel at all times, ready to take control. It would take one trivial piece of legislation to turn this technology into a souped up cruise control rather than the world changing technology that its backers insist that it is. How could you even fight that sort of regulation without your argument boiling down to 'we promise we don't need human oversight.' One lazy 'think of the children!' retort later, and it's banned faster than mango juul pods. I don't understand the investor confidence here. To me this seems like basic research, critical for future technological developments, but a cash sink with no guarantee for profitability. Is this just a rat race between the giants throwing cash at this?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoPeople on this site have as recently as a few months ago predicted that full self-driving was more than fifteen years away.
- irq11 8y agoDeploying a preliminary taxi service in one city in a place with no weather is not even close to “full self-driving”. When they’re driving around with no safety drivers in Manhattan in the winter, we can talk about solved problems.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoThe goalposts have successfully been moved.
- conanbatt 8y agoWe now are going to get Uber complaining that Google is taking their jobs, and not being regulated like they are, and how technology shouldn't put people in the streets.