7 ms·

Uber’s self-driving car unit was burning $20M a month

53 points by smallgovt 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
epa 8y ago
Thats it?
Trisell 8y ago
I feel like we are going to look back at Uber in like 10 years as the 'golden age' of startups. Where money was no object and it only mattered how much you 'produced' on your way to an IPO. In 20 years we will have the Wolf of SV movie about Uber.
- xattt 8y ago
  Was this not the thesis of the dot-com bubble?
- icedchai 8y ago
  Were you around in 1995 - 2000?
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  > In 20 years we will have the Wolf of SV movie about Uber. Is this not Sillicon Valley already, the TV Show?
linuxftw 8y ago
Uber's self-driving car killed a person because it had it's emergency braking system disabled due to too many false positives [1] That's all that ever needs to be said about Uber's self driving system, the company should be disbanded and whomever the highest-level person in the company knew vehicles were operating in such a way should be imprisoned. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detected-pedestrian-but-had-emergency-braking-disabled/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detect...
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  Uber's self-driving car killed a person because its driver was playing on his phone rather than doing his job.
  - umvi 8y ago
    Uber's self-driving car killed a person because the victim was jaywalking on an unilluminated section of 4-lane highway at night and did not stop, look, or listen before crossing
    - hnuser987654321 8y ago
      Said person was also high on meth and weed.
      - CompanionCuuube 8y ago
        People not on meth and weed jaywalk without stop, look, or listen before crossing. Or are you saying that this person normally does those things but the meth and weed inhibited them from doing that?
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    We don't know much about this person, what they were told to expect, what they believed their responsibilities were, what kind of training they had, or whether the person was obviously unfit for the task (eg, they hired a young person with no/little work history, etc).
  - SilasX 8y ago
    In a sense, I want to agree. That was a big no-no on her part. But ... for a project like this, it's the kind of thing they should have planned for and could have easily worked around. First of all, Uber's setup was to have one person do both the analytics monitoring and safety roles. That's ridiculous. The safety person needs to focus on that alone. Second, for any boring job, it's expected that people will tend to mentally check out, and you should design it so that a single checkout doesn't cascade to death. They could have had a periodic "press this button to prove you're paying attention", or limited the employee from bringing any device except a limited one with no distractions. So yeah, she shouldn't have been watching a movie, but Uber shouldn't have had better safeguards for the inevitable attention drift.
nategri 8y ago
It has been a long journey but I think I'm finally becoming a self-driving skeptic. And those cars driving around out in Arizona right now might as well be driving around in the Matrix---nowhere near a general purpose solution.
torbjorn 8y ago
Since Uber is about to ipo I have been hearing people question, "How can people highly value a company that is losing so much money???" The reason is (the potential for) self driving cars. Once/if there is mature self driving tech, they can eliminate the cost of having to pay human drivers. When you consider Uber in that light, as long as they don't run out of money before self driving maturity, then their high valuation makes sense. This may seem obvious to some but this fact has been entirely absent from every conversation I have heard about the valuation of uber's IPO ( looking at you Marketplace's "Make Me Smart" ;). It seems like it is taboo to point out that Uber needs to eventually eliminate all their human drivers from the equation.
- sonofaragorn 8y ago
  I've heard this argument before and I think it made sense the first time I heard it when self-driving systems were uncommon. But now every major tech/car company is working on it, should it still be considered? I mean, isn't it likely that a new company/startup will show up when self-driving systems are robust in 5-10-15 years?
- SilasX 8y ago
  I don't know why this is downvoted; it's just saying what everyone repeats every time this issue comes up. With that said, I think it's wrong. There is significant competition on the way to making a working SDC. And Uber will not be alone in producing one. If and when that happens, yes, they can pay a lot less for their inputs. But the output -- the value of the ride -- will also fall in value, since their competitors don't deal with that cost either! It doesn't translate into superprofits. At the most optimistic, Uber might arrive at a street-ready SDC two years before anyone else. Two years of above-normal profits, equal to keeping the revenue they'd pay human drivers, it just not enough to pay back the costs of the program and extreme returns investors demand. IMHO, it would make much more sense for Uber to just license the SDC tech as it becomes available, playing the vendors off each other, and focus on making their piece of the product -- the app/customer experience -- better.
- smallgovt 8y ago
  What I don't understand is why people think Uber will have a competitive advantage vs Waymo et al. once self-driving cars are adopted. Without a moat, there will be little to no long-term profits.
W-Stool 8y ago
I wonder if truly autonomous vehicles turn out to be another "so near but so far" experiences like nuclear fusion - when I was a kid, electricity courtesy of nuclear fusion reactors would be "too cheap to meter". Seems like ever since the industry keeps saying "We're nearly there - we just need to build a bigger one". I truly wonder if self-driving cars might turn out to be the same kind of thing.
- paxys 8y ago
  The difference is that nuclear fusion is "all or nothing", while self driving technology has a lot of real world benefits even if we never get to fully autonomous vehicles.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Yes, "uncanny valley" aside. But one of those benefits is not having a driverless taxi. It's assistive driving technology that can make driving your car easier and safer.
    - Judgmentality 8y ago
      The people working on fully autonomous driving are unlikely to be of much help for standard driver assistance packages, as they use completely different technology stacks. The approach Tesla is taking, which is definitely driver assist despite their baseless claims to the contrary, is wildly different from the approach Waymo is taking. You can get the sensor suite for a driver assist system for hundreds of dollars. The sensor and compute package for a truly driverless vehicle (of course, a truly driverless vehicle doesn't yet exist and prices will come down with time and scale) cost more than a luxury car itself. For instance, everybody seems to agree that lidar is the most important sensor for a truly driverless vehicle. And everybody agrees it's too expensive to sell to consumers. They're orthogonal approaches to similar problems with surprisingly little overlap. It's like comparing game development for a 2D sidescroller on the Nintendo Switch with a 3D first person shooter for a gaming PC. They're completely different technologically, even though at the end they're both making games.
    - 8y ago

53 points by smallgovt 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

epa 8y ago

Thats it?

Trisell 8y ago

I feel like we are going to look back at Uber in like 10 years as the 'golden age' of startups. Where money was no object and it only mattered how much you 'produced' on your way to an IPO. In 20 years we will have the Wolf of SV movie about Uber.

xattt 8y ago
Was this not the thesis of the dot-com bubble?
icedchai 8y ago
Were you around in 1995 - 2000?
JetSpiegel 8y ago
> In 20 years we will have the Wolf of SV movie about Uber. Is this not Sillicon Valley already, the TV Show?

linuxftw 8y ago

Uber's self-driving car killed a person because it had it's emergency braking system disabled due to too many false positives [1] That's all that ever needs to be said about Uber's self driving system, the company should be disbanded and whomever the highest-level person in the company knew vehicles were operating in such a way should be imprisoned. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detected-pedestrian-but-had-emergency-braking-disabled/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/uber-in-fatal-crash-detect...

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
Uber's self-driving car killed a person because its driver was playing on his phone rather than doing his job.
- umvi 8y ago
  Uber's self-driving car killed a person because the victim was jaywalking on an unilluminated section of 4-lane highway at night and did not stop, look, or listen before crossing
  - hnuser987654321 8y ago
    Said person was also high on meth and weed.
    - CompanionCuuube 8y ago
      People not on meth and weed jaywalk without stop, look, or listen before crossing. Or are you saying that this person normally does those things but the meth and weed inhibited them from doing that?
- linuxftw 8y ago
  We don't know much about this person, what they were told to expect, what they believed their responsibilities were, what kind of training they had, or whether the person was obviously unfit for the task (eg, they hired a young person with no/little work history, etc).
- SilasX 8y ago
  In a sense, I want to agree. That was a big no-no on her part. But ... for a project like this, it's the kind of thing they should have planned for and could have easily worked around. First of all, Uber's setup was to have one person do both the analytics monitoring and safety roles. That's ridiculous. The safety person needs to focus on that alone. Second, for any boring job, it's expected that people will tend to mentally check out, and you should design it so that a single checkout doesn't cascade to death. They could have had a periodic "press this button to prove you're paying attention", or limited the employee from bringing any device except a limited one with no distractions. So yeah, she shouldn't have been watching a movie, but Uber shouldn't have had better safeguards for the inevitable attention drift.

nategri 8y ago

It has been a long journey but I think I'm finally becoming a self-driving skeptic. And those cars driving around out in Arizona right now might as well be driving around in the Matrix---nowhere near a general purpose solution.

torbjorn 8y ago

Since Uber is about to ipo I have been hearing people question, "How can people highly value a company that is losing so much money???" The reason is (the potential for) self driving cars. Once/if there is mature self driving tech, they can eliminate the cost of having to pay human drivers. When you consider Uber in that light, as long as they don't run out of money before self driving maturity, then their high valuation makes sense. This may seem obvious to some but this fact has been entirely absent from every conversation I have heard about the valuation of uber's IPO ( looking at you Marketplace's "Make Me Smart" ;). It seems like it is taboo to point out that Uber needs to eventually eliminate all their human drivers from the equation.

sonofaragorn 8y ago
I've heard this argument before and I think it made sense the first time I heard it when self-driving systems were uncommon. But now every major tech/car company is working on it, should it still be considered? I mean, isn't it likely that a new company/startup will show up when self-driving systems are robust in 5-10-15 years?
SilasX 8y ago
I don't know why this is downvoted; it's just saying what everyone repeats every time this issue comes up. With that said, I think it's wrong. There is significant competition on the way to making a working SDC. And Uber will not be alone in producing one. If and when that happens, yes, they can pay a lot less for their inputs. But the output -- the value of the ride -- will also fall in value, since their competitors don't deal with that cost either! It doesn't translate into superprofits. At the most optimistic, Uber might arrive at a street-ready SDC two years before anyone else. Two years of above-normal profits, equal to keeping the revenue they'd pay human drivers, it just not enough to pay back the costs of the program and extreme returns investors demand. IMHO, it would make much more sense for Uber to just license the SDC tech as it becomes available, playing the vendors off each other, and focus on making their piece of the product -- the app/customer experience -- better.
smallgovt 8y ago
What I don't understand is why people think Uber will have a competitive advantage vs Waymo et al. once self-driving cars are adopted. Without a moat, there will be little to no long-term profits.

W-Stool 8y ago

I wonder if truly autonomous vehicles turn out to be another "so near but so far" experiences like nuclear fusion - when I was a kid, electricity courtesy of nuclear fusion reactors would be "too cheap to meter". Seems like ever since the industry keeps saying "We're nearly there - we just need to build a bigger one". I truly wonder if self-driving cars might turn out to be the same kind of thing.

paxys 8y ago
The difference is that nuclear fusion is "all or nothing", while self driving technology has a lot of real world benefits even if we never get to fully autonomous vehicles.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Yes, "uncanny valley" aside. But one of those benefits is not having a driverless taxi. It's assistive driving technology that can make driving your car easier and safer.
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    The people working on fully autonomous driving are unlikely to be of much help for standard driver assistance packages, as they use completely different technology stacks. The approach Tesla is taking, which is definitely driver assist despite their baseless claims to the contrary, is wildly different from the approach Waymo is taking. You can get the sensor suite for a driver assist system for hundreds of dollars. The sensor and compute package for a truly driverless vehicle (of course, a truly driverless vehicle doesn't yet exist and prices will come down with time and scale) cost more than a luxury car itself. For instance, everybody seems to agree that lidar is the most important sensor for a truly driverless vehicle. And everybody agrees it's too expensive to sell to consumers. They're orthogonal approaches to similar problems with surprisingly little overlap. It's like comparing game development for a 2D sidescroller on the Nintendo Switch with a 3D first person shooter for a gaming PC. They're completely different technologically, even though at the end they're both making games.
  - 8y ago