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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars
- FandangoRanger 6y agoThere's just no way self-driving cars can meet the challenge with today's technology. These days the tests they are doing involve burying a wire in the road that the car can ride upon, which to me seems like covert recognition that computer vision and sensor data feeding AI is not equipped to handle the rigors of road travel quite yet. The theoretical arguments about how self-driving cars are better than human drivers remain theoretical.
- abrichr 6y ago> These days the tests they are doing involve burying a wire in the road that the car can ride upon Interesting, can you please share a source?
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoDidn't they lose a lawsuit against Waymo, which meant they had to build a lot of tech from scratch? From the point they got identified as IP thieves it became hard to believe they'd get anywhere.
- partingshots 6y ago> Didn't they lose a lawsuit against Waymo, which meant they had to build a lot of tech from scratch and, to add insult to injury, keep Waymo informed of the details? That’s really interesting. Does anyone have a link to where this was stated?
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoApologies, I deleted that last part of my comment after I tried to search for this and failed to find evidence. I'm not sure if I'm remembering wrong or if this detail was in some obscure article somewhere. The settlement is discussed for example here, but no mention is made of Uber having to disclose future developments: https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/alphabet-waymo-uber-trial-settlement/ https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/alphabet-waymo-uber-trial-...
- partingshots 6y agoNo worries. I also recall vaguely at least, that they had to give up their existing work that had been based off of stealing from Waymo. I don’t remember how exactly they were going to enforce things though, which is why I asked.
- xoxoy 6y agoI’ve become less convinced that governments are going to prioritize autonomous driving over electric.
- judge2020 6y agoThere's more real money (hint: lobbying money) backing electric cars right now than there is backing autonomy since everyone in the industry knows it's at least 5 years before we get borderline level 4/99.99% reliable level 3 driving and a good 30 years before we get the 8+ nines that are needed to truly go to level 5 autonomy; most local laws are already well equipped to handle people using level 4 autonomy, so it isn't a priority thing to address. Edit: I realize that level 4 doesn't ask you to take over, so I've edited my comments to reflect that.
- closeparen 6y agoCommuting 10k miles/year is nothing special. Only four nines is still an accident every year.
- judge2020 6y agoI'm talking about four nines in terms of reliability (not crashes) and on level 3, where the car still has all the regular driving controls - so if there is a problem or the system has high uncertainty about certain road situations it can force/return control to the driver and have them navigate the unknown situation. I'm also probably being too optimistic predicting four nines in 5 years, it'll probably be 10 years or more for people to be able to reliably take their hands off the wheel for extended periods of time on interstates. Edit: I realize that level 4 doesn't ask you to take over, so I've edited my comments to reflect that.
- xoxoy 6y agothe issue is that randomly requiring non-professional drivers to take over during a trip is an underestimated danger. people get accustomed to it working 99% of the time and get lazy - then the 1% it fails and the driver is asleep or distracted or watching a movie and becomes a major safety issue. ex all the horror stories of distracted Tesla drivers using autopilot like full autonomous driving today.
- malandrew 6y agoI thought The Information unlocked articles that made it to the HN front page.
- TuringNYC 6y agoLocked for me. This isnt even a WSJ/NYTimes style paywall where you can pay $5/mo ...it costs like $40/mo!
- person_of_color 6y agoIt’s a “waste” for whoever loses too i.e Cruise investors.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoThis article is behind a subscribe wall, which isn't very conductive to sharing. But upon reading, it seems to be that the technology is just not capable of performing the task. The assumption that deep learning is sufficient to be able to drive a car may be a faulty one.
- yholio 6y agoThey are doing much more than simply deep learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8qypWV2L2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8qypWV2L2g Deep learning alone has long since been considered a faulty approach (see ALVINN), since it could produce a car that can sort of drive, but nobody knows how, and when a road rule changes you have to retrain it from scratch.
- bobbyi_settv 6y agoThat's not what I got from the two paragraphs it's possible to read. It suggest Uber "is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway" which sounds like it is doable, just not by them
- wongarsu 6y agoWaymo seems to be doing much better than Uber, so it can't be just about what's possible. Waymo are also doing much more than just deep learning. For example a deep learning algorithm might be good for predicting possible paths of tracked pedestrians, but figuring out whether you will intersect any of those paths is better solved by a different non-learning algorithm.
- enlyth 6y agoAny way to read the article without paying $40 for a news website that I've never heard of?
- CamelCaseName 6y agoThe Information is a fairly reputable source, but I understand your frustration. I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. To answer your question, Outline.com doesn't seem to work here.
- nemothekid 6y ago>I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.
- xdavidliu 6y agoThis argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed comments?
- bostonpete 6y agoSo we should down-weight WSJ, NYT, and all the other sites that have paywalls?
- nemothekid 6y agoThe argument doesn't make sense to you because you assume every other person on the site isn't willing to pay for news. However, there is a 3rd option: you could just not participate. There is nothing in the HN rules that dictate you must participate in everything posted here. By HN design, if such sites aren't useful to the HN community, they wouldn't be regularly upvoted. However counter to that, every week you see an article from wsj.com, theinformation.com or bloomberg.com hit the front page, precisely because despite having paywalls they continue to produce good content. Given the amount of engineers sucking six figure salaries on this site, I'd say a good percentage of them who might value actual news may pay for a subscription, which is why these sites continue to be posted here. I wouldn't want to see wsj.com downweighted below buzzfeed.com just because buzzfeed is free. The ones who choose to complain, rather than just abstaining, are the problem. They could simply decide to not participate and HN wouldn't be any worse off. However the complaining that news organizations must (1) offer all news for free (2) don't use ad networks and (3) not be mouthpieces corporate PR is not going to accomplish anything.
- kristofferR 6y agoI hope someone can share the full article, but a Reddit post at least had some excerpts: > Numerous ATG employees have privately said that nobody else at the company appeared to pay a price for the blatant mistakes that preceded the deadly collision and the fact that the units management ignored clear warning signs. For instance, a manager directly warned Meyhofer and other leaders before the collision that the unit's robotaxi prototypes were dangerous-one of them had swerved onto a Pittsburgh sidewalk and continued driving — and that the company did not terminate human backup drivers even if they repeatedly screwed up. > In mid-2018, several months after the collision, a departing senior manager of ATG sent Khosrowshahi a 35-slide presentation outlining problems in the unit, according to a copy of the presentation that circulated across the company at the time and that The Information viewed. The document alleged that months after the collision the unit still had "inadequate" safety and testing procedures and a propensity for "theater" — celebrating what the team had designed "when we didn't yet have substance" in the form of a working prototype. > This manager also told Khosrowshahi that the unit's software engineering team was populated by "university researchers" — a reference to the CMU lab where many Uber engineers, including Meyhofer, came from who didn't have much experience in commercializing technology for the real world. > The former manager declined to discuss the presentation or their experience at the company with The Information. Uber has significantly upgraded its safety practices in recent years, according to Meyhofer and other employees. > In the same time period, Uber's vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience — such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement — every one-third of a mile on average. The company's leaders had hoped the figure would fall to just one bad experience every 10 miles by fall last year, said a person with direct knowledge of the goal. One person who worked on the effort told The Information they felt the prototypes were better than the data indicated. > Uber couldn't even get the prototype to drive a one-mile stretch between the unit's two Pittsburgh offices, with the goal of shuttling employees back and forth. Software leaders said they gave up trying because automating the route for internal use wouldn't help Uber develop software that it could apply to a broader array of routes. But other managers said the failure sent a message that Uber just couldn't pull it off. > For his part, Meyhofer said road testing helped the unit's broader mission, including giving the team ideas on how to improve the way it configures the car's laser sensors. "Every time we do any kind of development, it shows us a lot of things we can do that will get us even better results" in the next test, he said. > Meanwhile, the company is focusing on developing new autonomous driving software to replace the version now in its prototypes, which includes code academic researchers wrote about a decade ago. The new software, rNA, is nearly ready for testing on public roads. Meyhofer and other current and former employees said INA-which took longer to develop than originally anticipated-was a necessary upgrade to allow the company to incorporate new machine learning-related techniques that help vehicles better understand the world around them.
- throwaway2923 6y ago'The information' stories seem to always revolve around a disgruntled employee sharing internal documents that results in the most click bate worthy title possible. Its not an opinion piece its manufactured content and rumors. They have no interest in informing readers. It is just a tabloid for techies.
- not_a_moth 6y agoSince Levandowski is now suing Uber for $4B that number may climb.
- necubi 6y agoThe Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-third of a mile on average. That's really bad. While there are no uniform standards for what a "bad experience" entails, my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) are doing 10-100x better by that metric. Another damning bit: > Uber couldn’t even get the prototype to drive a one-mile stretch between the unit’s two Pittsburgh offices, with the goal of shuttling employees back and forth I don't even know what to say to that. If you can't make your cars work reliably on a known, one-mile stretch of road, what have you been doing for so many years? [Disclaimer: I work for Lyft, but not on the self-driving car program.]
- not_a_moth 6y ago> my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.
- nick0garvey 6y agoI interviewed at Cruise, and when speaking with them, Waymo was the main competitor and Tesla didn't come up.
- ummonk 6y agoNo, Tesla is nowhere near self-driving capability. Collecting a bunch of unsupervised data on its own is not that useful.
- revscat 6y agoI just drove from Dallas to southwestern Colorado and back. Of that, I estimate I drove ~15% of the entire miles driven. The rest was the car driving itself.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ceezy 6y agoAt they now have manager reporting the truth and not what the board want them to say.
- 1MoreThing 6y agoUh, it's pretty clear there's a board level leaker here. This kind of leak is how the board forces action onto the CEO.
- stephc_int13 6y agoThe real question should be: does driving a car requires human-level cognition?
- wongarsu 6y agoReal world evidence would suggest that human-level cognition is not enough to safely drive a car
- FandangoRanger 6y agoAnd yet, as of today self-driving cars aren't nearly as good as a human even after 2-3 beers.
- s0meone 6y agoHmmm.. Not accurate? At all?
- howlgarnish 6y agoIt's not that black and white. The unnerving thing is that self-driving cars have completely different failure modes than drunk humans: instead of falling asleep and drifting into the next lane, they do (to humans) absurd things like mistake the side of a tractor-trailer for empty space and merge into it.
- FandangoRanger 6y agoI firmly believe that the literature produced which shows self-driving cars are safe or even safer, and there is scads of it now, is mainly down to the program's ability to make sure a safe following distance is observed leading to greater reaction time for braking. I know a lot of driving tests have been done in simulators which show the AI can be safer but I agree with your statement. I also have very little confidence in the AI's ability to stop at road construction, make its way over temporary embankments and diversions placed for construction, navigating in inclement weather or adverse traction situations like a muddy drive, etc. I suppose the real goal here is for Wal-Mart and Amazon to move freight on the Interstates to begin with but I don't even see that happening any time soon. Your average Wal-Mart loading bay and parking areas are likely much more than any current AI can handle anyhow. How does the AI know the person in the mart cart isn't going to just jut out in front at the last second? Can't exactly make eye contact.
- DevKoala 6y agoI am not surprised. This is a competition between Tesla and Google, technology companies. I never saw Uber, a services company, as being part of this race.
- ajkjk 6y agoThat's a weird take. How come Tesla gets to be a technology company but Uber is a services company?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoUber has yet to show a vehicle with any semblance of reliable autonomy. Tesla has billions of experience miles at Level 2 autonomy (Navigate on Autopilot is close to, but not quite, level 3 autonomy).
- justapassenger 6y agoLevel 2 has 0 semblance of reliable autonomy. Those are completely different problems.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIt is a defined level of vehicle autonomy by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated-driving-graphic https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...
- maxerickson 6y agoI think they mean the green bits there are the part where the car can be relied on to drive by itself (with the blue bits requiring constant attention). Arguing about what to call it is boring. Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention? Or does it just have the bit that can successfully navigate a lot of situations?
- paxys 6y agoNo one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.
- kderbyma 6y agoit could also be people who are hoping the crowd can elucidate them on the article for the same said reason
- firaga01 6y agoIt’s been out since this morning for subscribers.
- FpUser 6y agoWelcome to Internet
- pvg 6y agoYou can flag articles that aren't supposed to be on the front page and help correct this sort of problem.
- felipelemos 6y agoSometimes I upvote an article not because I agree with it's content, but to see it discussed. The same goes for comments in a lesser extent.
- wongarsu 6y agoI would frame it as "in discussion forums people upvote articles because they spark interesting discussions, even if the article is uninteresting or only available to few"
- moralestapia 6y agoI'm pretty sure it has more to do with the HN algo where some keywords rank higher than others. "Uber" "Billion" "Self-Driving" are hot topics by themselves and this one is all of them in one.
- djsumdog 6y agoI wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test programs in some cities and it would still be more useful than the current state of self-diving tech. Self driving solves the wrong problem, and it's a good 15+ years until we see this vehicles, if we even see them at all.
- vaccinator 6y agoFew people will own a car if self driving cars become a reality.
- lallysingh 6y agoIt isn't the money that stops rail.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoEven Silicon Valley levels of money don’t approach that needed to purchase the land required for rail.
- jayd16 6y agoI love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.
- yholio 6y agoClearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And it could be done today, with simple algorithms: stay in your lane, coordinate with other vehicles and the trafic lights, and when anything that looks like an obstacle is in front, brake.
- paxys 6y agoI don't see how setting up an entire new parallel road network all over the world is "less ambitious". Some of the best funded cities in this country aren't even able to lay a few miles of fiber for broadband internet.
- yholio 6y agoWell, it would be the same network, with some road space dedicated to cars being repurposed for public transit. Cities do this all the time for buses.
- paxys 6y agoCities usually go as far as having dedicated lanes for buses on a few main thoroughfares. That is a far cry from having a self driving car not encounter any human driver during the drive from my home to my office or the grocery store, for example.
- yholio 6y agoThe goal is not to never encounter a car, but that the encounter is mediated with very robust and proven technology that is compatible with both human and current level AI, like a V2X enabled trafic light or a steel bollard. A car can still hit the pod if it disobeys the red light, but the driver would be culpable and the incident itself would be similar to a car hitting, say, a bike - not the fault of the bike. As for the density of such infrastructure, you don't need it on every street, just within a short walking distance to be practical, a few hundred meters maybe. Once you can reach the hail point, it can take you non-stop to any other in the area served, so something like 30 Km/h top speed can go a long way.
- howlgarnish 6y ago> Critics question why CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hasn’t held the team accountable. Because Uber's insane valuation is largely predicated on them being able to pivot out of expensive human "driver-partners" into cheap and compliant robots, and any sort of public acknowledgement that this is not going to happen would tank their stock.
- paxys 6y agoThere is really nothing to back that claim. There are plenty of other companies in similar sectors (ridesharing, transportation, food delivery) in the US and beyond with similar valuations and no self driving ambitions or technology. Uber's self driving research has been seen from day 1 as an expensive hobby, nothing more. A company which can achieve level 5 automation and has the capability to roll it out worldwide is worth a hell of a lot more than $60 billion.
- rdw 6y agohttps://www.inc.com/jason-aten/uber-lyft-are-betting-that-driverless-cars-will-help-them-finally-make-money-heres-why-it-wont-work.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/uber-lyft-are-betting-that-dr... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/19/ubers-self-driving-car-unit-valued-at-73bn-as-it-gears-up-for-ipo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/19/ubers-sel... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/01/24/uber-profitability-self-driving-cars.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/01/24/ube... https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-uber-ipo-stock-price-self-driving-20190513-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-uber-ipo-stock-price-... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-a-key-to-its-path-to-profitability.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-... https://www.wired.com/story/bet-uber-bet-self-driving/ https://www.wired.com/story/bet-uber-bet-self-driving/ I think the broadest interpretation is that autonomous driving was one of a few irons Uber has had in the fire to achieve profitability. The other irons include Uber Eats, Jump, and lately, grocery delivery. The miracle hasn't happened yet!
- paxys 6y ago
- viburnum 6y agoWhat I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?
- maxerickson 6y agohttps://www.gearbrain.com/waymo-driverless-car-hand-signals-2629692132.html https://www.gearbrain.com/waymo-driverless-car-hand-signals-... I actually found that looking for a years old article about Google's system accounting for bicyclists making hand signals, but there you go.
- thatcat 6y agoHand signals and gestures have been used with kinect systems for awhile now.
- wongarsu 6y agoHand signals are pretty standardised and obvious, and even the first Kinect (XBox accessory from 2010) can estimate people's skeletons sufficiently well to figure out construction worker hand signals. I would expect that you can solve this pretty well even without any ML at all.
- criswell 6y agoYeah, but humans.
- objektif 6y agoWhat if we replace them with cheap light signals?
- aembleton 6y agoLights can fail. When that happens you need a human to direct traffic.
- vsareto 6y ago
- vippy 6y agoDara Khosrowshahi on line one, for George Hotz.....
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI would not say they "wasted" that money. It's a moonshot, and the first to get it right will make far more than $2.5B in revenue.
- RobLach 6y agoA moonshot isn't something that you need to figure out how to achieve, it's something you already know you can do as long as you dedicate a lot of operational and material resources to it.
- duxup 6y agoI wonder, did Uber even have to do so? Would nobody sell them such tech or do they think anyone who solves this problem will put Uber out of business?
- femto113 6y agoI remember doing some napkin math back in 2017 and coming out with "driverless won't make Uber any more money, why are they spending so much on this?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15744074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15744074
- p1necone 6y agoDid actual business goals ever align with the aspirational marketing though? I find it hard to believe that the actual people building it didn't know that real widespread autonomous driving was more than a pipe dream in the foreseeable future. They still managed to suck up piles of investor cash, maybe that was the real goal?
- tmsh 6y agoI’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Self-driving tech should be focused on driver enhancement and big replacement. This is an incremental evolution area. The self-driving enhancements they could give to existing Uber drivers to help them stay safe over long driving periods would be huge. Drive that flywheel. Let drivers multitask under safe scenarios in under 10mph traffic jams, open areas. Build up those enhancements and you have a formidable, cheaper driver fleet that people would use v. buying a car. Boil the ocean and you’ll be useful merely for your learnings to others.
- tmsh 6y agoI’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Self-driving tech should be focused on driver enhancement and not replacement. This is an incremental evolution area until all the 100 edge cases are 100%. The self-driving enhancements they could give to existing Uber drivers to help them stay safe over long driving periods would be huge. Drive that flywheel (easier driving leads to more drivers, cheaper trips, more riders, etc.). Let drivers multitask under safe scenarios in under 10mph traffic jams, open areas, queues, etc. Build up those enhancements and you have a formidable, cheaper driver fleet that people would use perhaps v. buying a car. Just saying it should happen in stages.
- rreichman 6y agoBad headline.
- khazhoux 6y agoI interviewed at Uber a few year ago, pre-IPO (bullet dodged!). Their pitch, from a senior VP, was all about self-driving, even though I wasn't even looking at a self-driving role. But at the time, it struck me as a complete farce that this company that made its success by replacing cab drivers, was trying to convince me that it's actual success would come from them cracking a problem they hadn't cracked, which no one had cracked, which was not even close to being proven feasible. Somehow they felt that they would simply "be the world's transportation" (their stated goal) based on a completely unproven technology.
- DoctorNick 6y agoThey rushed headlong into this, knowingly stealing IP from Google in the process, because their business model is currently unsustainable with human labor and this is the only way to make it work. It's unsurprising that they're struggling.