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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

362 points by bsilvereagle 5y ago

throwaway189262 5y ago
Maybe we can finally lay self driving prophecies to rest. Self driven cars will never share the road with human drivers. There's no legal framework for liability. And AI is far from understanding human intentions and speech. One day we'll have purpose built lanes for robots, maybe. Boring highway routes between big cities will be first. I think tech wizards will take the easy road and automate planes and ships. There's too much crap and unpredictability on the ground. That's why all the automated military stuff flies or floats, or dives. Skittering along the ground is best left to meat control
eunos 5y ago
So Uber and Lyft are out. It seems only Didi Chuxing left as the ride hailing services with self driving development. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4
hijklmno 5y ago
How long will this game of musical chairs go on? Technologically we are not there yet. What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching". Can the current technology have its use cases? Sure. But calling it self-driving is laughable at best and deceptive at worst.
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  >What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching" You can describe humans in exactly the same way.
minimaxir 5y ago
Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-driving-car-prediction-2021-john-zimmer https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91 https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...
- perlgeek 5y ago
  My kids are now 7 and 10 years old, respectively. I wonder if they'll have to learn to drive, and make a driver's license? It could be that by the time they come of age, there are self-driving cars, but they're much more expensive than making their license (which in Germany costs around 2k Euro, including lessons). Or maybe there'll be no viable self-driving, fully autonomous cars by then? Who knows?
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  I wonder if it’s possible that this is true in some restricted area where companies are heavily testing their self-driving cars, and COVID reduced the amount of driving people do.
  - SECProto 5y ago
    From very brief observation a year ago, it seemed like Lombard Street [1] was 90% self-driving-car training. Definitely a very special case that just disproves the quote from Lyft's president. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8 https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8
- andyxor 5y ago
  nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s
  - bhk 5y ago
    It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.
gtirloni 5y ago
Well... "In December 2020, Lyft announced that it will launch a multi-city U.S. robotaxi service in 2023 with Motional." https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSKBN28Q2H2 https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSK...
- ra7 5y ago
  They also have a partnership with Waymo to provide autonomous rides. Ultimately, I think Lyft, Uber and the likes will just become a provider/maintainer of robotaxi rides, while the actual tech will be done by Waymo et al.
  - repsilat 5y ago
    Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber. If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a robot a third of what you need to pay a human, I wonder whether the negotiation would come out closer to 1. One part Uber, one part driver (so Uber's cut maintains its value) or 2. Still one part Uber, three parts driver, but the values are all lower and the total volumes higher. I'd think it would need to shake out closer to the latter case than the former to keep Uber in the game, for a few reasons: - Self-driving car companies are software companies. They can make Uber clones, given enough resources and time. - There isn't really a two-sided marketplace bootstrapping process. These companies have enough capital to put a lot of cars on the road, and I don't think the economies of scale are actually that big -- there isn't much cross-benefit from scale in disconnected cities, and inside a given city you need 4x as many cars to halve wait times so the scale benefits tail off sharply. And I bet there's little brand-loyalty. - If there are few self-driving car companies in a market, they'd have relatively large market power, so they could dictate rates more effectively than an atomised driver pool. Shrugs, it could happen if the rates were low enough, but I suspect it won't. But I'm probably greatly underestimating the benefits of partnership -- dispatching is probably easy, and AV companies will necessarily be savvy with regulators, but customer-interaction and "app surface-area" are likely places where the existing players have a real leg-up. That said, the labour market is pretty porous in the Bay Area...
fearling 5y ago
Did not know Lyft had a self-driving car initiative. Was that well known? Did they, like Uber, sink tons of money into it before bailing?
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Of course, yes and yes. The business model is complete nonsense otherwise.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    The business model isn't nonsense. It justifies a company existing to do what Lyft does, just at a much smaller scale and valuation.
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      Yes, that’s a good adjustment assuming the need for hundreds (or thousands?) of highly paid engineers isn’t baked into the business model/product.
quickthrowman 5y ago
Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, because Google isn’t trying to juice their stock price all the damn time, and they have operable robotaxis in AZ. I don’t think Waymo claims L5 capability either.
- rkalla 5y ago
  It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.
  - alpha_squared 5y ago
    Just like reliability SLAs, I suspect every extra nine requires an exponential increase in investment. My armchair-know-nothing assessment is we're maybe at 90% coverage* right now, with maybe 10x all investment up until this point needed to reach 99%; then 10x that to reach 99.9%. Even at 99.9%, though, a failure scenario still threatens injuring or killing 0.1% of drivers (350,000 motorists for US alone). * Coverage as a percentage of scenario's occurrence over the total duration of driving. For example, over 90% of a long-distance trip will be spent on a highway following traffic patterns within a lane with the occasional lane change.
    - walshemj 5y ago
      Would not they detect the gates where down ? or are there still that many crossings without gates in the USA
      - ecpottinger 5y ago
        The place I talked about had no gates, after the accident they added gates.
joshuawright11 5y ago
100m a year, 0 roi expense gone. Also no more shared rides due to COVID (which I expect will never come back to Uber or Lyft since they were gigantic money sinks). Assuming ridership is bouncing back from COVID I wouldn't be surprised if their first profitable quarter was this year.
- shaoonb 5y ago
  Uber and Uberlikes are doing fine here in New Zealand. As long as they can pump money into/scam drivers into being cheaper than taxis they will keep market share.
- petra 5y ago
  Why we're shared rides such gigantic money sinks ? In theory at least, it can just be some algorithm and some screen space on the app.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    I can try to explain: - Ideally in a shared ride what happens is that instead of 2 drivers, driving 12 miles for passenger A and 14 miles for passenger B, you have 1 driver who drives 15 miles for both passengers trips. - So 1 driver to pay who is now more efficient, and 2 paying customers. You charge each customer X% less, pay the driver Y% more, and theoretically you could keep your margin the same but now fulfill more rides (another driver is free now that you put two rides in 1 car) - However, now let's consider how much cheaper it can really be... - Sharing a ride for a cheaper cost makes sense when you and the person you share with have a generally overlapping route. The discount you get as a customer is a function of how likely you are to get matched with someone. - Turns out there aren't a lot of rides with good overlap (airport rides might be the best type of ride tbh). Thus the discount is quite small. If the discount is small it means you have less people using it. Less people using it makes the discount even smaller! Eventually you have no discount and no incentive to use the service. - To keep users incentivized to use the shared mode, Lyft and Uber have to subsidize the pricing to make sure that match rate stays high. Every "shared" mode ride that has only 1 person in it is a big loss, but incentivizing more people to use it can result in a smaller net loss across the marketplace
ipsum2 5y ago
I've seen some directors recently leave Lyft's "Level 5" division recently, in the last couple of months. I guess there were a lot of warning signs.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Score on the acquisition bingo card for the phrase “incredible journey”!
_____bee 5y ago
Most ride-hailing companies that invested in self-driving cars are giving up on these projects. Most of these startups struggle to sustain their business.
- alonmower 5y ago
  *Most ride-hailing companies that needed a narrative ahead of their IPO for why they had a defensible long term moat and leaned heavily on 'self driving' as their answer to that are now getting pressure from investors on why they keep sinking more money into a problem it doesn't seem they'll ever be able to solve
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    It truly is the issue of not knowing if it will ever be solved. The uncertainty of progress and uncertainty of a timeline is what really irks investors (who are right to question the investment given it is dragging down the not-quite-profitable main business)
    - _____bee 5y ago
      I wonder what is the general feeling towards startups that take a different approach such https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/ and https://wayve.ai/ https://wayve.ai/?. These startups take the approach of building "Android version" of self-driving cars, a technology that can be used as add-on in the existing cars.
elpakal 5y ago
I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how different things were when trying to get my driver's license in US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained in a world of rules and order and are then thrown into complete chaos in other places. What does training look like? Do self-driving cars only work in certain countries where they have been trained?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Well, they don't really "work" anywhere, if your standards are high enough. But your point is valid; making a self-driving car for many national markets has to be harder than making a regular car for those same markets.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals ... That's a lie, though. The meme that México is an uncivilized place is dumb and doesn't hold much substance. Edit: Downvote me all you want, GP's statement is laughably easy to disprove. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - bagels 5y ago
    The one time I went to Mexico, my taxi driver nearly crashed in to a police car because he and the police car both ran their stop signs at a four way stop. The police didn't pull him over, it's a normal occurrence, apparently. There was more mayhem, but that one is illustrative. In my experience, the laws are not as closely adhered to as I have seen in other places.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    As a Mexican-American living in San Diego, driving in TJ is way different. Like, so chaotic that I refuse to do it different. I leave the driving to the locals when I'm there. I don't think anyone's saying Mexico is uncivilized. It's a beautiful place with beautiful people, massive cultural output, great universities, etc. I'm just not going to invest in a startup trying to build self-driving cars for Latin America anytime soon.
darkwizard42 5y ago
Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with no reasonable end in sight. I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too damn expensive and uncertain as to when the breakthrough/development will happen
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  What will happen afterward? They'll get acquired by Uber or something?
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    I think Lyft's core ridesharing business will continue to become more profitable in a duopoly setting with Uber. Ridesharing is a network effect business, if the riders are there, the drivers will come, the more drivers you have, the more availability so you get more riders. The US has proven that it is capable of supporting two overlapping players (not all markets can support this and meet regulatory rules)
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      You’re assuming ridesharing in the way Lyft and Uber do it will last for long.. not a single place I’ve seen anyone confirm that it’s profitable or break even for the drivers. Almost no one drives for years with them, and they’re bound to run out of drivers who haven’t learned the lessons. Or their prices jack up to more than regular cab prices like in nyc. One way or another it’s a non zero possibility these companies won’t survive in the same shape.
      - darkwizard42 5y ago
        I don't think this is accurate at all. 1/ It is profitable/break even to the best drivers (this means you have to optimize and consider the external costs of doing the work... which unsurprisingly most people are bad at doing so). There are certainly cases of people who have leased a brand new car, with poor gas mileage, and then drive them into the ground surprised it hasn't paid off. However, using a Prius or all-electric vehicle with high reliability results in lower costs. If you run a business and poorly optimize around your costs you don't make profit... 2/ Drivers do drive for years for them, but the vast majority do not because it is not a great long term career and usually serves as a bridge of full-time work or regular part-time work. You can't get promoted, you can't get paid much more for tenure, and you don't pick up any new marketable skills. Even a career warehouse worker or McDonald's front-line worker has a path upwards...and people do work there for short and long periods of time. Just because everyone isn't a long term employee doesn't make a profession unsustainable...its just the nature of the job. The last statement is pure conjecture so I'm not sure how to address it outside of the fact that in an urban setting car ownership comes with a lot of costs and these services expand the radius of people's ability to navigate cities. There will be a premium for that and Lyft and Uber are working their way towards providing that service AND generating a profit.
tdhz77 5y ago
I keep getting downvoted. I’ll keep saying it, we need government investment into self driving. It cannot be done by private sector alone.
- cobaltoxide 5y ago
  In what way would government investment help here? The main players already have tons of funding. Also, why should self-driving be a government priority?
  - tdhz77 5y ago
    The main players have a lot of funding, but that isn’t the only function of government. Standards and infrastructure will be required for self driving to work. LIDAR, optics… it’s becoming more and more apparent that the current approach (Waymo ceo stepping down) (Tesla’s promises FSD) that its just not as simple as money. Governments job is to save lives, NHSTA has done hundreds of studies on the efficacy of self driving. They don’t need to be encouraged… they already know if it’s importance to safety.
- bbddg 5y ago
  It's bad enough private investors are wasting so much capital on self-driving. The last thing we need is the government doing the same.
  - tdhz77 5y ago
    https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl... Government has been studying this since the 1960’s…
    - astrange 5y ago
      This seems to be counting seat belts as an FSD technology since it's all under "safety".
- 5y ago
hcrisp 5y ago
Toyota / Woven Planet also just announced it was picking Apex.AI as their software platform: https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-to-develop-autonomous-platform/ https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-...
mNovak 5y ago
In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Toyota is the last company I expect to bring something new to market well. The last time they did that it was the Prius and it was kind of a fluke IMO. Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner will never see (spare us all the anecdote about your relative who trades in at 300k on the dot, I have one of those too). If robotaxi fleets become the game then Toyota is gonna lose because commercial buyers who buy us a fleet of whatever has the lowest all things included TCO over 3/5/10yr tend to buy a hell of a lot of Chrysler 200s, Nissan Sentras, Chevy Colorados, Chrysler Pacificas, Ford Transit Connects, and other not so premium vehicles. If FSD tech is viable in the next 20yr I'd be very surprised if the reality of what that will do to Toyota's business doesn't keep them from going all in enough to bring a viable version to market early enough to get a good market share at it.
  - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
    I can buy a Toyota here but not an Altima, Tahoe or a Pacifica. So Toyota's market is a little bigger than that. Regardless, there is no other car company doing anything like the Mirai.
  - rhodozelia 5y ago
    Not only are Toyota’s more reliable in the long run, they have fewer defects out of the factory, fewer lemons, and because of this reputation they don’t depreciate as quickly. I am going to get a new Tacoma every 2 years because I can sell the old one for nearly the same price as the new one. No more losing 50% of the value as soon as you drive it off the lot.
yalogin 5y ago
I have been saying this for at least 4 years now that Uber and Lyft shouldn't be doing FSD tech at all. Finally it materialized. After Uber sold their unit, Lyft selling theirs is just a matter of when, not if.
rachelbythebay 5y ago
This is probably for the best. Actual engineering (and actual engineers) and Lyft are two very different animals.
tedd4u 5y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Prop 22. At least in California there's no risk of losing margin to "employees" anymore. Maybe FSD is not required anymore for long-term viability of transportation network companies.
- okareaman 5y ago
  I keep reading about a shortage of Uber and Lyft drivers in California. I think this is correct because I was a driver and they've been trying hard to get me back. None of this would happen with FSD.
Animats 5y ago
Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora. Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1] Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020. No pricing yet, so this is still a demo. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-an-actual-public-driverless-taxi-service/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...
- litoorachure 5y ago
  Toyota's interest may not be in Level-5 autonomous taxis. They have a history of striving to fully understand every part of their supply chain; this could be a play at developing advanced in-house driver assists. As an example, I was surprised to learn that Toyota designed their own ECU chips rather than buying off-the-shelf automotive grade MCUs until 2019, when they spun that business off to a subsidiary[1]. They really take vertical integration seriously. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversary-toyota-in/how-toyota-thrives-when-the-chips-are-down-idUSKBN2B1005 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...
  - eCa 5y ago
    > advanced in-house driver assists One thing I wish any car manufacturer would do is create a system that helps their users use the turn indicator. It’s an endemic problem here. Something like an annoying voice telling them that they should have used it immediately after turning. And if they fail to use it in three turns during the same drive they get a mandatory safety briefing before they can lock the car.
    - nlitened 5y ago
      I think the better way would be automated cameras that fine vehicles that turn or change lanes without turning on the blinker beforehand.
twodave 5y ago
I feel like all these self-driving companies aren't actually in it to achieve the success. They know it's a long way off, they're just trying to hit enough milestones to get scooped up by somebody bigger. Perhaps with the exception of Tesla, who I have no explanation for. Self-driving cars are so far down the totem-pole in my opinion--if we're going to have to rework our roadways in order to accommodate self-driving cars, why not just innovate there? A roadway can be MUCH smarter than a car. Each segment of smart road is unique, and only has to worry about itself and whatever cars are present in the area. Smart roads could be managed by a few operators (in fact one operator could shepherd many road segments). Each smart car has to be able to account for all possible kinds of roads. Smart cars each require an operator who is essentially just sitting there waiting for the car to fail (and therefore the failures become more catastrophic as the tech gets better, since trust rises and attention spans fail). Put the tech into the ROADS, and just let the cars listen.
- Tsarbomb 5y ago
  I agree with you 100% but I'll try to condense what I think is the biggest hurdle for buy in. People want "their" car to be smart, they don't want "our" roads to be smart. I'm generalising but I hope you get what I'm saying.
  - twodave 5y ago
    I get it--pride. But mostly, it's easier to sell.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  Software would be great... if it worked. It's going to take a very clear failure of all self-driving software for anyone to even possibly invest in smart roads. Smart roads don't seem to be a startup thing to do - massive friction (like most infrastructure) and no promise of fantastic profits. Imagine the investors' horror of building smart roads a few years before someone figures out a pure software solution. It's hard to be sure that it won't happen.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  At a technical level, I think smart roads are more straightforward. However, I think a purely technical analysis ignores why self driving cars have been so popular. The cost of replacing the entire US road system with "smart" roads would doubtless be astronomical - as well as increase the maintenance and infrastructural requirements. We've probably had the technical capabilities to create self-driving-capable roads for years, but the costs are probably too high for people to take it seriously "at scale." Machines that do things "as well" as humans in similar roles have been a science fiction staple for over a century. That machines do focused tasks much, much better than humans haven't stopped people from searching for "drop in" replacements for tasks that currently use a human. Suddenly, the scale is on the level of a single vehicle - very manageable if it works. That's why people were so willing to spend billions of dollars to avoid spending trillions on all that road replacement - because they wanted the worlds they saw in science fiction.
ericmay 5y ago
Waymo is next. Off to Chrysler it’ll go.
- kgin 5y ago
  Why do you say this?
  - ericmay 5y ago
    I believe the only path to self-driving cars is through full-stack integration of hardware and software. Waymo doesn’t fit the bill and is progressing far too slowly, in my opinion. It’s more of a proof of concept than a serious effort. It’s great, but I don’t see a viable path forward for them that doesn’t involve their software and sensors on another manufacturer’s cars. Fine, but Google is allergic to anything not search related, and not with very good profit margins. At some point someone is going to say hey we are spending billions of dollars on this, and we have no near-term launch plans, let’s sell this thing and call it quits. Tons of people disagree I’m sure but IMO the writing is on the wall here, it’s just a matter of time.
    - jy1 5y ago
      I think Waymo is valued 4x Chrysler right now. More likely Waymo acquires a car company.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        That’ll never happen. Google won’t buy a car manufacturer. It’s possible they’ll try and license tech or something or integrate Waymo into cars as a subscription service but the click is ticking for them and I think they’ll lose the race to do so before Google pulls the plug.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Self-driving cars taking over the road are the new Linux desktop taking over personal computing.
andrewnc 5y ago
I loved my time working at Level 5, there were some really top notch folks there. But this isn't necessarily surprising news, a little sad, but not surprising.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lumost 5y ago
The thing is, there probably wasn't anyway anyone could convince lyft not to spend money on this. In 2016 investors were writing big checks that self-driving cars were around the corner based on vague demos. If anyone said it couldn't be done they'd simply be viewed as not AI enough.
tuatoru 5y ago
I think the appeal of self-driving to car manufacturers is that if it can be made to work, the households who actually buy new vehicles, affluent suburbanites, will buy more of them. Instead of just one car per adult in the household (and maybe recreational vehicles as well), these households will buy one per adult and up to one per child over six years old (plus recreational vehicles as before).
kumarvvr 5y ago
10 or 20 years down the line, perhaps we will have semi-autonomous vehicles (full self-driving is a pipe dream, IMV). But I still feel it is a waste of time and resources. A better use of them would be to improve current driving conditions for a driver, such as reducing the amount of human energy required for an average drive, or developing more efficient vehicles for single / two passengers. There is a large portion of the world that uses cars for daily commutes to office. If we can make that fleet much more efficient than current day, a lot of carbon output would be saved. Edit: Also, how about making cars safe and mesh enabled to drive further distances, faster and with less stress, so that cities and infrastructure can expand. 100 years down the line, what will survive is our infrastructure, the ability to move from A to B quickly and easily. Roads, bridges, highways, etc. Just look at the economic benefits of the German Auto Bahn. Imagine special highways, that connect major cities to spread out urban areas. Highways that are automated, where the cars on the highway know about each other and can drive as a swarm. Collectively, they can achieve much higher speeds. It maybe the time to divert investments to such projects and build autonomous driving from that base.

362 points by bsilvereagle 5y ago

Maybe we can finally lay self driving prophecies to rest. Self driven cars will never share the road with human drivers. There's no legal framework for liability. And AI is far from understanding human intentions and speech. One day we'll have purpose built lanes for robots, maybe. Boring highway routes between big cities will be first. I think tech wizards will take the easy road and automate planes and ships. There's too much crap and unpredictability on the ground. That's why all the automated military stuff flies or floats, or dives. Skittering along the ground is best left to meat control

eunos 5y ago

So Uber and Lyft are out. It seems only Didi Chuxing left as the ride hailing services with self driving development. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4

hijklmno 5y ago

How long will this game of musical chairs go on? Technologically we are not there yet. What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching". Can the current technology have its use cases? Sure. But calling it self-driving is laughable at best and deceptive at worst.

SquareWheel 5y ago
>What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching" You can describe humans in exactly the same way.

minimaxir 5y ago

Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-driving-car-prediction-2021-john-zimmer https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91 https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...

perlgeek 5y ago
My kids are now 7 and 10 years old, respectively. I wonder if they'll have to learn to drive, and make a driver's license? It could be that by the time they come of age, there are self-driving cars, but they're much more expensive than making their license (which in Germany costs around 2k Euro, including lessons). Or maybe there'll be no viable self-driving, fully autonomous cars by then? Who knows?
adamnemecek 5y ago
I wonder if it’s possible that this is true in some restricted area where companies are heavily testing their self-driving cars, and COVID reduced the amount of driving people do.
- SECProto 5y ago
  From very brief observation a year ago, it seemed like Lombard Street [1] was 90% self-driving-car training. Definitely a very special case that just disproves the quote from Lyft's president. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8 https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8
andyxor 5y ago
nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s
- bhk 5y ago
  It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.

gtirloni 5y ago

Well... "In December 2020, Lyft announced that it will launch a multi-city U.S. robotaxi service in 2023 with Motional." https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSKBN28Q2H2 https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSK...

ra7 5y ago
They also have a partnership with Waymo to provide autonomous rides. Ultimately, I think Lyft, Uber and the likes will just become a provider/maintainer of robotaxi rides, while the actual tech will be done by Waymo et al.
- repsilat 5y ago
  Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber. If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a robot a third of what you need to pay a human, I wonder whether the negotiation would come out closer to 1. One part Uber, one part driver (so Uber's cut maintains its value) or 2. Still one part Uber, three parts driver, but the values are all lower and the total volumes higher. I'd think it would need to shake out closer to the latter case than the former to keep Uber in the game, for a few reasons: - Self-driving car companies are software companies. They can make Uber clones, given enough resources and time. - There isn't really a two-sided marketplace bootstrapping process. These companies have enough capital to put a lot of cars on the road, and I don't think the economies of scale are actually that big -- there isn't much cross-benefit from scale in disconnected cities, and inside a given city you need 4x as many cars to halve wait times so the scale benefits tail off sharply. And I bet there's little brand-loyalty. - If there are few self-driving car companies in a market, they'd have relatively large market power, so they could dictate rates more effectively than an atomised driver pool. Shrugs, it could happen if the rates were low enough, but I suspect it won't. But I'm probably greatly underestimating the benefits of partnership -- dispatching is probably easy, and AV companies will necessarily be savvy with regulators, but customer-interaction and "app surface-area" are likely places where the existing players have a real leg-up. That said, the labour market is pretty porous in the Bay Area...

fearling 5y ago

Did not know Lyft had a self-driving car initiative. Was that well known? Did they, like Uber, sink tons of money into it before bailing?

ethanbond 5y ago
Of course, yes and yes. The business model is complete nonsense otherwise.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  The business model isn't nonsense. It justifies a company existing to do what Lyft does, just at a much smaller scale and valuation.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Yes, that’s a good adjustment assuming the need for hundreds (or thousands?) of highly paid engineers isn’t baked into the business model/product.

quickthrowman 5y ago

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, because Google isn’t trying to juice their stock price all the damn time, and they have operable robotaxis in AZ. I don’t think Waymo claims L5 capability either.

rkalla 5y ago
It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.
- alpha_squared 5y ago
  Just like reliability SLAs, I suspect every extra nine requires an exponential increase in investment. My armchair-know-nothing assessment is we're maybe at 90% coverage* right now, with maybe 10x all investment up until this point needed to reach 99%; then 10x that to reach 99.9%. Even at 99.9%, though, a failure scenario still threatens injuring or killing 0.1% of drivers (350,000 motorists for US alone). * Coverage as a percentage of scenario's occurrence over the total duration of driving. For example, over 90% of a long-distance trip will be spent on a highway following traffic patterns within a lane with the occasional lane change.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    Would not they detect the gates where down ? or are there still that many crossings without gates in the USA
    - ecpottinger 5y ago
      The place I talked about had no gates, after the accident they added gates.

joshuawright11 5y ago

100m a year, 0 roi expense gone. Also no more shared rides due to COVID (which I expect will never come back to Uber or Lyft since they were gigantic money sinks). Assuming ridership is bouncing back from COVID I wouldn't be surprised if their first profitable quarter was this year.

shaoonb 5y ago
Uber and Uberlikes are doing fine here in New Zealand. As long as they can pump money into/scam drivers into being cheaper than taxis they will keep market share.
petra 5y ago
Why we're shared rides such gigantic money sinks ? In theory at least, it can just be some algorithm and some screen space on the app.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I can try to explain: - Ideally in a shared ride what happens is that instead of 2 drivers, driving 12 miles for passenger A and 14 miles for passenger B, you have 1 driver who drives 15 miles for both passengers trips. - So 1 driver to pay who is now more efficient, and 2 paying customers. You charge each customer X% less, pay the driver Y% more, and theoretically you could keep your margin the same but now fulfill more rides (another driver is free now that you put two rides in 1 car) - However, now let's consider how much cheaper it can really be... - Sharing a ride for a cheaper cost makes sense when you and the person you share with have a generally overlapping route. The discount you get as a customer is a function of how likely you are to get matched with someone. - Turns out there aren't a lot of rides with good overlap (airport rides might be the best type of ride tbh). Thus the discount is quite small. If the discount is small it means you have less people using it. Less people using it makes the discount even smaller! Eventually you have no discount and no incentive to use the service. - To keep users incentivized to use the shared mode, Lyft and Uber have to subsidize the pricing to make sure that match rate stays high. Every "shared" mode ride that has only 1 person in it is a big loss, but incentivizing more people to use it can result in a smaller net loss across the marketplace

ipsum2 5y ago

I've seen some directors recently leave Lyft's "Level 5" division recently, in the last couple of months. I guess there were a lot of warning signs.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Score on the acquisition bingo card for the phrase “incredible journey”!

_____bee 5y ago

Most ride-hailing companies that invested in self-driving cars are giving up on these projects. Most of these startups struggle to sustain their business.

alonmower 5y ago
*Most ride-hailing companies that needed a narrative ahead of their IPO for why they had a defensible long term moat and leaned heavily on 'self driving' as their answer to that are now getting pressure from investors on why they keep sinking more money into a problem it doesn't seem they'll ever be able to solve
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  It truly is the issue of not knowing if it will ever be solved. The uncertainty of progress and uncertainty of a timeline is what really irks investors (who are right to question the investment given it is dragging down the not-quite-profitable main business)
  - _____bee 5y ago
    I wonder what is the general feeling towards startups that take a different approach such https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/ and https://wayve.ai/ https://wayve.ai/?. These startups take the approach of building "Android version" of self-driving cars, a technology that can be used as add-on in the existing cars.

elpakal 5y ago

I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how different things were when trying to get my driver's license in US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained in a world of rules and order and are then thrown into complete chaos in other places. What does training look like? Do self-driving cars only work in certain countries where they have been trained?

rossdavidh 5y ago
Well, they don't really "work" anywhere, if your standards are high enough. But your point is valid; making a self-driving car for many national markets has to be harder than making a regular car for those same markets.
moralestapia 5y ago
>where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals ... That's a lie, though. The meme that México is an uncivilized place is dumb and doesn't hold much substance. Edit: Downvote me all you want, GP's statement is laughably easy to disprove. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- bagels 5y ago
  The one time I went to Mexico, my taxi driver nearly crashed in to a police car because he and the police car both ran their stop signs at a four way stop. The police didn't pull him over, it's a normal occurrence, apparently. There was more mayhem, but that one is illustrative. In my experience, the laws are not as closely adhered to as I have seen in other places.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  As a Mexican-American living in San Diego, driving in TJ is way different. Like, so chaotic that I refuse to do it different. I leave the driving to the locals when I'm there. I don't think anyone's saying Mexico is uncivilized. It's a beautiful place with beautiful people, massive cultural output, great universities, etc. I'm just not going to invest in a startup trying to build self-driving cars for Latin America anytime soon.

darkwizard42 5y ago

Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with no reasonable end in sight. I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too damn expensive and uncertain as to when the breakthrough/development will happen

gher-shyu3i 5y ago
What will happen afterward? They'll get acquired by Uber or something?
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I think Lyft's core ridesharing business will continue to become more profitable in a duopoly setting with Uber. Ridesharing is a network effect business, if the riders are there, the drivers will come, the more drivers you have, the more availability so you get more riders. The US has proven that it is capable of supporting two overlapping players (not all markets can support this and meet regulatory rules)
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    You’re assuming ridesharing in the way Lyft and Uber do it will last for long.. not a single place I’ve seen anyone confirm that it’s profitable or break even for the drivers. Almost no one drives for years with them, and they’re bound to run out of drivers who haven’t learned the lessons. Or their prices jack up to more than regular cab prices like in nyc. One way or another it’s a non zero possibility these companies won’t survive in the same shape.
    - darkwizard42 5y ago
      I don't think this is accurate at all. 1/ It is profitable/break even to the best drivers (this means you have to optimize and consider the external costs of doing the work... which unsurprisingly most people are bad at doing so). There are certainly cases of people who have leased a brand new car, with poor gas mileage, and then drive them into the ground surprised it hasn't paid off. However, using a Prius or all-electric vehicle with high reliability results in lower costs. If you run a business and poorly optimize around your costs you don't make profit... 2/ Drivers do drive for years for them, but the vast majority do not because it is not a great long term career and usually serves as a bridge of full-time work or regular part-time work. You can't get promoted, you can't get paid much more for tenure, and you don't pick up any new marketable skills. Even a career warehouse worker or McDonald's front-line worker has a path upwards...and people do work there for short and long periods of time. Just because everyone isn't a long term employee doesn't make a profession unsustainable...its just the nature of the job. The last statement is pure conjecture so I'm not sure how to address it outside of the fact that in an urban setting car ownership comes with a lot of costs and these services expand the radius of people's ability to navigate cities. There will be a premium for that and Lyft and Uber are working their way towards providing that service AND generating a profit.

tdhz77 5y ago

I keep getting downvoted. I’ll keep saying it, we need government investment into self driving. It cannot be done by private sector alone.

cobaltoxide 5y ago
In what way would government investment help here? The main players already have tons of funding. Also, why should self-driving be a government priority?
- tdhz77 5y ago
  The main players have a lot of funding, but that isn’t the only function of government. Standards and infrastructure will be required for self driving to work. LIDAR, optics… it’s becoming more and more apparent that the current approach (Waymo ceo stepping down) (Tesla’s promises FSD) that its just not as simple as money. Governments job is to save lives, NHSTA has done hundreds of studies on the efficacy of self driving. They don’t need to be encouraged… they already know if it’s importance to safety.
bbddg 5y ago
It's bad enough private investors are wasting so much capital on self-driving. The last thing we need is the government doing the same.
- tdhz77 5y ago
  https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl... Government has been studying this since the 1960’s…
  - astrange 5y ago
    This seems to be counting seat belts as an FSD technology since it's all under "safety".
5y ago

hcrisp 5y ago

Toyota / Woven Planet also just announced it was picking Apex.AI as their software platform: https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-to-develop-autonomous-platform/ https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-...

mNovak 5y ago

In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Toyota is the last company I expect to bring something new to market well. The last time they did that it was the Prius and it was kind of a fluke IMO. Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner will never see (spare us all the anecdote about your relative who trades in at 300k on the dot, I have one of those too). If robotaxi fleets become the game then Toyota is gonna lose because commercial buyers who buy us a fleet of whatever has the lowest all things included TCO over 3/5/10yr tend to buy a hell of a lot of Chrysler 200s, Nissan Sentras, Chevy Colorados, Chrysler Pacificas, Ford Transit Connects, and other not so premium vehicles. If FSD tech is viable in the next 20yr I'd be very surprised if the reality of what that will do to Toyota's business doesn't keep them from going all in enough to bring a viable version to market early enough to get a good market share at it.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  I can buy a Toyota here but not an Altima, Tahoe or a Pacifica. So Toyota's market is a little bigger than that. Regardless, there is no other car company doing anything like the Mirai.
- rhodozelia 5y ago
  Not only are Toyota’s more reliable in the long run, they have fewer defects out of the factory, fewer lemons, and because of this reputation they don’t depreciate as quickly. I am going to get a new Tacoma every 2 years because I can sell the old one for nearly the same price as the new one. No more losing 50% of the value as soon as you drive it off the lot.

yalogin 5y ago

I have been saying this for at least 4 years now that Uber and Lyft shouldn't be doing FSD tech at all. Finally it materialized. After Uber sold their unit, Lyft selling theirs is just a matter of when, not if.

rachelbythebay 5y ago

This is probably for the best. Actual engineering (and actual engineers) and Lyft are two very different animals.

tedd4u 5y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Prop 22. At least in California there's no risk of losing margin to "employees" anymore. Maybe FSD is not required anymore for long-term viability of transportation network companies.

okareaman 5y ago
I keep reading about a shortage of Uber and Lyft drivers in California. I think this is correct because I was a driver and they've been trying hard to get me back. None of this would happen with FSD.

Animats 5y ago

Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora. Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1] Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020. No pricing yet, so this is still a demo. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-an-actual-public-driverless-taxi-service/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...

litoorachure 5y ago
Toyota's interest may not be in Level-5 autonomous taxis. They have a history of striving to fully understand every part of their supply chain; this could be a play at developing advanced in-house driver assists. As an example, I was surprised to learn that Toyota designed their own ECU chips rather than buying off-the-shelf automotive grade MCUs until 2019, when they spun that business off to a subsidiary[1]. They really take vertical integration seriously. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversary-toyota-in/how-toyota-thrives-when-the-chips-are-down-idUSKBN2B1005 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...
- eCa 5y ago
  > advanced in-house driver assists One thing I wish any car manufacturer would do is create a system that helps their users use the turn indicator. It’s an endemic problem here. Something like an annoying voice telling them that they should have used it immediately after turning. And if they fail to use it in three turns during the same drive they get a mandatory safety briefing before they can lock the car.
  - nlitened 5y ago
    I think the better way would be automated cameras that fine vehicles that turn or change lanes without turning on the blinker beforehand.

twodave 5y ago

I feel like all these self-driving companies aren't actually in it to achieve the success. They know it's a long way off, they're just trying to hit enough milestones to get scooped up by somebody bigger. Perhaps with the exception of Tesla, who I have no explanation for. Self-driving cars are so far down the totem-pole in my opinion--if we're going to have to rework our roadways in order to accommodate self-driving cars, why not just innovate there? A roadway can be MUCH smarter than a car. Each segment of smart road is unique, and only has to worry about itself and whatever cars are present in the area. Smart roads could be managed by a few operators (in fact one operator could shepherd many road segments). Each smart car has to be able to account for all possible kinds of roads. Smart cars each require an operator who is essentially just sitting there waiting for the car to fail (and therefore the failures become more catastrophic as the tech gets better, since trust rises and attention spans fail). Put the tech into the ROADS, and just let the cars listen.

Tsarbomb 5y ago
I agree with you 100% but I'll try to condense what I think is the biggest hurdle for buy in. People want "their" car to be smart, they don't want "our" roads to be smart. I'm generalising but I hope you get what I'm saying.
- twodave 5y ago
  I get it--pride. But mostly, it's easier to sell.
ahartmetz 5y ago
Software would be great... if it worked. It's going to take a very clear failure of all self-driving software for anyone to even possibly invest in smart roads. Smart roads don't seem to be a startup thing to do - massive friction (like most infrastructure) and no promise of fantastic profits. Imagine the investors' horror of building smart roads a few years before someone figures out a pure software solution. It's hard to be sure that it won't happen.
aeturnum 5y ago
At a technical level, I think smart roads are more straightforward. However, I think a purely technical analysis ignores why self driving cars have been so popular. The cost of replacing the entire US road system with "smart" roads would doubtless be astronomical - as well as increase the maintenance and infrastructural requirements. We've probably had the technical capabilities to create self-driving-capable roads for years, but the costs are probably too high for people to take it seriously "at scale." Machines that do things "as well" as humans in similar roles have been a science fiction staple for over a century. That machines do focused tasks much, much better than humans haven't stopped people from searching for "drop in" replacements for tasks that currently use a human. Suddenly, the scale is on the level of a single vehicle - very manageable if it works. That's why people were so willing to spend billions of dollars to avoid spending trillions on all that road replacement - because they wanted the worlds they saw in science fiction.

ericmay 5y ago

Waymo is next. Off to Chrysler it’ll go.

kgin 5y ago
Why do you say this?
- ericmay 5y ago
  I believe the only path to self-driving cars is through full-stack integration of hardware and software. Waymo doesn’t fit the bill and is progressing far too slowly, in my opinion. It’s more of a proof of concept than a serious effort. It’s great, but I don’t see a viable path forward for them that doesn’t involve their software and sensors on another manufacturer’s cars. Fine, but Google is allergic to anything not search related, and not with very good profit margins. At some point someone is going to say hey we are spending billions of dollars on this, and we have no near-term launch plans, let’s sell this thing and call it quits. Tons of people disagree I’m sure but IMO the writing is on the wall here, it’s just a matter of time.
  - jy1 5y ago
    I think Waymo is valued 4x Chrysler right now. More likely Waymo acquires a car company.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      That’ll never happen. Google won’t buy a car manufacturer. It’s possible they’ll try and license tech or something or integrate Waymo into cars as a subscription service but the click is ticking for them and I think they’ll lose the race to do so before Google pulls the plug.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Self-driving cars taking over the road are the new Linux desktop taking over personal computing.

andrewnc 5y ago

I loved my time working at Level 5, there were some really top notch folks there. But this isn't necessarily surprising news, a little sad, but not surprising.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lumost 5y ago

The thing is, there probably wasn't anyway anyone could convince lyft not to spend money on this. In 2016 investors were writing big checks that self-driving cars were around the corner based on vague demos. If anyone said it couldn't be done they'd simply be viewed as not AI enough.

tuatoru 5y ago

I think the appeal of self-driving to car manufacturers is that if it can be made to work, the households who actually buy new vehicles, affluent suburbanites, will buy more of them. Instead of just one car per adult in the household (and maybe recreational vehicles as well), these households will buy one per adult and up to one per child over six years old (plus recreational vehicles as before).

kumarvvr 5y ago

10 or 20 years down the line, perhaps we will have semi-autonomous vehicles (full self-driving is a pipe dream, IMV). But I still feel it is a waste of time and resources. A better use of them would be to improve current driving conditions for a driver, such as reducing the amount of human energy required for an average drive, or developing more efficient vehicles for single / two passengers. There is a large portion of the world that uses cars for daily commutes to office. If we can make that fleet much more efficient than current day, a lot of carbon output would be saved. Edit: Also, how about making cars safe and mesh enabled to drive further distances, faster and with less stress, so that cities and infrastructure can expand. 100 years down the line, what will survive is our infrastructure, the ability to move from A to B quickly and easily. Roads, bridges, highways, etc. Just look at the economic benefits of the German Auto Bahn. Imagine special highways, that connect major cities to spread out urban areas. Highways that are automated, where the cars on the highway know about each other and can drive as a swarm. Collectively, they can achieve much higher speeds. It maybe the time to divert investments to such projects and build autonomous driving from that base.