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Fully self-driving cars hit a wall (no pun intended), and that was their only story for eventual profitability. Not surprising.

• toasterlovin 7y ago
  FWIW, I don’t think self driving cars would have made them a good business. Once you no longer need drivers, all you’re doing is deploying a fleet of automobiles. We already have companies that do this: taxi services and auto rental companies. They’re shitty, low margin businesses with tons of competition. The promise of Uber was being a monopoly because they were first mover on a market with network effects. Much like eBay. But self driving cars remove the network effect inherent in needing to attract both drivers and riders.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    They already have an app for hailing cars, viewing their status on a map, etc. which tons of people already have on their phones, as well as an extremely recognizable brand and lots of data-center investment to back it all. Competitors would pop up, but don't underestimate the value of those things.
    • toasterlovin 7y ago
      FWIW, they don’t control the default map apps for the two major phone platforms. Competitors will be desperate to fork over money to Apple or Google to get placement when people are planning routes. And Apple and Google may also be in the ride sharing game at that point, since they’re both currently working on self driving cars.
      • kickopotomus 7y ago
        I'm pretty positive that is Google's end goal. They even had (have?) and integration with Lyft/Uber at one point so that you could hail a ride from within the Google Maps app. My bet is that it was meant to be a proof-of-concept to see how hard it would be just to replace them with their own service.
        • toasterlovin 7y ago
          Yeah, Apple has this feature, too.
  • i_cant_speel 7y ago
    You aren't going to rent a car to take a fifteen minute trip across town, so that isn't really comparable. And yes, they would be a taxi service. But they would be a taxi service with lower costs since they don't need pay for a driver.
    • empath75 7y ago
      you would if it drove itself.
    • briankelly 7y ago
      Until the other taxi services have an autonomous fleet. Uber never had a unique position here. Not too mention these cars are not just around the corner.
    • toasterlovin 7y ago
      Right, but they wouldn't have a monopoly on being a taxi service. And literally every other business where you're managing a fleet of equipment is not a particularly special business. Why would Uber be any different?
  • mikeg8 7y ago
    >... in needing to attract both drivers and riders. The are not trying to attract drivers at all, they are trying to eliminate them. The drivers portion of the fair is the largest cost so removing drivers increases margins overall. Self driving cars are the only way this is a good business - which is why there is so much competition from many of the smartest innovators/investors in the world.
• watermall 7y ago
  IMO, the idea that fully self-driving cars are anywhere close to being created was always just a combination of hype and wildly irrational underestimation of how hard it is to create them. The challenge of building a road-safe fully self-driving car is not far from the challenge of building artificial general intelligence. I think that road-ready fully self-driving cars are many decades away, and they may never actually be created. What really surprises me is how many otherwise savvy and tech-knowledgeable people bought into the hype. That said, I also think that not everyone involved in spreading the hype does it for innocent reasons. For example, people often criticize Elon Musk for making absurd claims about self-driving cars, but then argue that he does it because he is innocently deluded. I suspect it's more likely that he is lying through his teeth.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    IMO, it was a combination of (to be relatively generous): 1. General AI optimism fueled by the almost incredibly fast rate of advance of progress enabled by supervised learning in certain domains and by reinforcement learning in an even narrower set of domains. 2. Adding to the above, progress enabled by super-precise mapping within constrained areas. 3. Probably some California-centrism. What's this weather thing of which you speak? 4. Silicon Valley techno-optimism that problems just need one more version to solve but 5. A great big game of topper in which, once various people started proclaiming that self-driving was just around the corner for whatever combination of over-optimism and because it was in their financial interest to do so, YOU had to fall in line or you'd be perceived as being hopelessly behind your competitors when you said self-driving was decades out. Further fueled by 6. The many young professional urbanites with no current interest in owning a car or even getting a driver's license who so desperately wanted to believe that their personal robotic chauffeur that they believed things that they never would have were they not otherwise so personally invested.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    It happened because the first 95% is tractable. Waymo probably got that far. But there's this infinitely-long tail of edge cases, and 95% isn't good enough when it's literally a matter of life-and-death.