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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

411 points by oflordal 3y ago

shoulderfake 3y ago
[dead]
SilverBirch 3y ago
This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.
- deleted 3y ago
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- DSingularity 3y ago
  Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house. The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a heat shield.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      Uber have always wanting to go autonomous cars. They poured a lot of money to try to develop them in-house and I think that they were too optimistic on how easy and quick that would be. But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    How much of Uber does Alphabet own? They do not show up in the top 10 list here, so presumably 1% at most? https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/ Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.
    - avrionov 3y ago
      According to this they own part of it: https://www.gv.com/portfolio https://www.gv.com/portfolio
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        That is not surprising, or in question. The claim I am questioning is: > Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.
      - htrp 3y ago
        I think google offloaded most of that stake when Uber went public
    - jefftk 3y ago
      They owned 5% from 2013 to at least 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-stake-has-gone-up-20x-since-2013.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-sta... I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-gv-could-sell-the-rest-of-its-uber-stake-at-the-end-of-its-lockup-period-next-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
    - riskable 3y ago
      I just want to chime in to say that it is ridiculous that such information is not so easy to come by. Billion-dollar corporations should not be allowed to keep their external investments so opaque! Especially businesses that are publicly-traded. Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.
- mbesto 3y ago
  > The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple. For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Just because uber is not profitable with human drivers doesn't mean it'll be the opposite without them.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    This is a win-win for Google. If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame Uber. Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people will think twice about Uber taking the blame.
  - jonas21 3y ago
    You say the answer is simple, but I can't tell what your answer is. The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of the value. The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value. So which is it?
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      No contradiction. The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to partner with, so they could play them against each other, so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.
      - jonas21 3y ago
        Got it. Maybe I was reading too much into the tone. I read "they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution" as them being desperate to get distribution and therefore willing to take a bad deal.
  - 3y ago
- osigurdson 3y ago
  To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.
  - toddmorey 3y ago
    Seems like but then why the interest from Waymo in an Uber partnership? They already have the Waymo One app. I think it’s because getting users to switch or use multiple apps proves difficult.
  - msoad 3y ago
    Or multiple on various places. Google Rides, Google Play Hail, Youtube Taxi and so on...
    - usrusr 3y ago
      And a betting platform about shutdown order?
  - htrp 3y ago
    Just like Google can bang out a messaging app in a weekend?
    - vsskanth 3y ago
      They have been. A new one every weekend.
  - nickfromseattle 3y ago
    >Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend. Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there. With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.
    - 3y ago
- makestuff 3y ago
  I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
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  - bartwr 3y ago
    Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
    - vasilipupkin 3y ago
      give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
      - JB_Dev 3y ago
        If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I think we’ll get quite a few riders in a short amount of time. Uber won’t be able to compete.
        shagie 3y ago
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  > Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a variety of reasons. It’s why local taxi dispatches are still in business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same. Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take. Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
- krebby 3y ago
  If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins. Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
  - deegles 3y ago
    What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either drive safely or they don't. We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history. Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice). The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).
    - repsilat 3y ago
      The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100 vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super important. Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
  - Tepix 3y ago
    If another company solves self driving after Waymo, they can still enter the market. I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't? Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.
- lhorie 3y ago
  The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto. The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm. Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
  - ra7 3y ago
    > The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.
    - id00 3y ago
      I think the more likely here is that Uber sold self-driving group (alongside other "big bets" like flying taxi research group) because of existential threat to the business during the start of COVID-19 which made them focusing on the main business (+eats) and sell parts that have no profitability in sight.
      - lhorie 3y ago
- chaostheory 3y ago
  For me the question is who is liable in an accident
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    This is America. When a "self driving" car kills someone, we blame the someone for daring to not pay due respect to the magic machine. They shouldn't have crossed the road in the dark! They should have been more visible! They should have been in their own big self driving box!
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    If it's the fault of the car, it has to be Waymo.
- 35997279 3y ago
  >surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
- deleted 3y ago
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- freejazz 3y ago
  > has all the customer service infra Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone
- wmf 3y ago
  Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to work as operators, let alone to design something like System X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D on an ongoing basis. The girls married, or got less boring jobs, or just left work, each time you must recruit and train replacements - but you design System X once and use it for forty years no problem. There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
    - wmf 3y ago
      No, I think the BOM cost of Waymo is higher.
      - fairity 3y ago
        By public accounts, the total hardware costs for one SDC is around $300k. If you amortize that over a 5 year lifespan & 50 rides a day, you get $3.28 of variable costs per ride. $3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should decrease over time.
        ghaff 3y ago
        An SDC has many of the same operational costs (and maybe more) than a human-driven car. (Also garaging, cleaning, etc. As well as the support staff if a car gets in trouble somehow.) You can admittedly assume electric and assume operational costs may be lower than say a Prius today. But I don't consider it a given that a company which purchases and operates an SDC fleet from Waymo can operate profitably while undercutting rideshare as it exists today.
DSingularity 3y ago
Alphabet investment synergy potential is high.
edgefield 3y ago
This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?
- smt88 3y ago
  This won't be in widespread use for quite a while. Places with weather still aren't great candidates for Waymo.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's raining heavily >10% of the time. The vast majority of rides in the US - and even in a place like Florida that's a swamp where it rains literally every day - happen under just fine conditions for Waymo. This is fine for a taxi service. If you make 10x as much profit in the vast majority of cases - you'll let someone else pick up the scraps in the edge cases. It's almost as if Waymo & Uber considered weather...
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I'm not sure how one gets to anything like 10x. Uber drivers maybe making minimum wage driving their own cars are just not that expensive.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      Automotive EE here, I could not disagree with you more on the state and expectations of self-driving vehicles. I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather and it’s a problem “to be solved later”. It’s all a joke. If we actually wanted this, it would be long haul A to B routes. Turning semi trucks into rail. Self-driving was already slowing down before the era of free money. So I expect this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else. The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.
      - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
propogandist 3y ago
old enemies coming together, they must be out of options https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former-google-engineer-at-center-of-waymo-uber-case-charged-with-stealing-trade-secrets/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Literally the only way out for Uber if they aren't to be a glorified taxi app.
  - spratzt 3y ago
    It’s just an attempt to distract people from realizing that’s all they are.
  - paganel 3y ago
    It goes the other way, too. Waymo has always been only "a few years away" from getting to autonomous driving.
kornhole 3y ago
If I can't bike or bus it, taxis paid with cash is still my first preference.
- spacKingChamath 3y ago
  Thanks for letting us all know.
- 35997279 3y ago
  Can you get a taxi to show up? The last two times I tried to rebel against the rideshare duopoly was the morning before international flights. Trips to the airport are the only use case I have for rideshare. Both times I scheduled the pick up by calling the phone number the day before, both times the driver just… didn’t show up. I panicked and downloaded Lyft. I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I’m going that route, I don’t see the point of not using Lyft.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    Yeah taxi dispatch is hit and miss. They might be in NYC somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > might be in NYC somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab Unless it’s shift change or you’re in the wrong neighbourhood or have the wrong skin colour.
  - ilikecakeandpie 3y ago
    Same. Every time we tried to call taxis pre-rideshare apps, we always got a "between 30 minutes and 2 hours" estimate if they ever showed up at all. Their CC machine was always conveniently broken unless you didn't have cash and the ATM was real far away. Good riddance.
    - 35997279 3y ago
mattlondon 3y ago
Shame Uber and to kill someone before just licensing the tech.
mduggles 3y ago
I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles. Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious approach seems to be the last real contender standing.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  Cruise and Zoox are still in the game.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    And Aurora
- dkislyuk 3y ago
  Uber sold off its own self-driving division back in 2020: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving-project-to-startup-aurora/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving... so this kind of partnership has probably been looming for a while.
- deleted 3y ago
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ra7 3y ago
From the TechCrunch news story [1]: > The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology. Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-will-be-available-on-ubers-app-starting-in-phoenix/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...
- notatoad 3y ago
  i think the main goal of licencing would be less capital costs. buying cars isn't cheap, especially not at scale - licencing their tech to somebody else means every car they put on the road is $150k waymo doesn't have to spend.
  - ra7 3y ago
    Good point. That would also allow them to bring true Level 4 autonomous driving to passenger cars with sufficient miniaturization of their sensor stack.
  - jfoster 3y ago
    Someone has to spend it, though. Uber seem in even less of a position to be footing that bill.
    - notatoad 3y ago
      but if uber spend a couple billion on cars, and lyft spend a couple billion, and didi spends a couple billion, etc, that's a lot more spend than if only waymo spends it.
ackbar03 3y ago
So now Uber is going to be a gazillion dollar company? Wasn't that sort of their value hypothesis?
omneity 3y ago
Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game. Interesting times. I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.
- d33 3y ago
  Do we have a proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...) They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.
- xur17 3y ago
  I think it also helps Waymo fill in the gaps between markets that they support. Customers get an app that works pretty much anywhere, and Waymo can drop into any given market with 10k self driving cars pretty much overnight.
  - nojs 3y ago
    This. Spinning up an Uber app clone is easy, actually running the service and having it available everywhere is hard and not something Google is likely to be good at.
boringg 3y ago
After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now they are going to go the route they should have always gone since they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off.. partnership.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :) >In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. >He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
  - boringg 3y ago
    I forgot he got pardoned. Trump presidency: if you have money you could use that money to literally buy a get out of jail card.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      It's not just Trump, democrats have done similar things in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers... especially Marc Rich
      - boringg 3y ago
        I know - its the brashness, level of ease and amount of pardons by the Trump presidency that makes it different. Not that it isn't done by other parties.
    - propogandist 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - 3y ago
hahaxdxd123 3y ago
This doesn't really make sense to me. What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through. Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
- sschueller 3y ago
  What people don't realize is that full autonomous does not work 100%. There are always people watching and taking over if something goes a foul. I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
  - ra7 3y ago
    To clarify: they have remote assistance teams, but they cannot “take over” and control the car at all. All they can do is things like plotting a path to go around if the vehicle gets stuck. They have no ability to do safety critical interventions, the vehicle is capable of reaching a ‘minimum risk condition’ all on its own. Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don’t believe this is likely.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    You can't drive the cars remotely. Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.
shmatt 3y ago
The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside" Now it's going to be a lot more interesting
- spiderice 3y ago
  I’m guessing this is a big city problem? I’ve never once experienced this
  - Gunnerhead 3y ago
    Neither have I in NYC.
- anaganisk 3y ago
  BeepbeeepBoop to you too and I'm gonna report you. 10sec later: You are banned from our platform for violation of our safety protocols.
mdale 3y ago
Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow. It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well. But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout. Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride. For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders. All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale. I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
- amelius 3y ago
  Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and completely destroy Uber. But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
  - belter 3y ago
    And why would this not wake them up?
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - 3y ago
rafaelero 3y ago
Sounds like a great deal for Uber and a meh deal for Waymo.
hardware2win 3y ago
I guess Anthony didnt have to steal Waymos secrets after all
wg0 3y ago
At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't. Isn't it or something has changed lately?
- sofixa 3y ago
  The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly at stake if things go wrong. For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis). Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end up cheaper than self owned cars)
    - sofixa 3y ago
      If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.
      - mrshadowgoose 3y ago
yalogin 3y ago
I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  Yes, but this is about PR and the stock price for both companies
- aardvarkr 3y ago
  I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
  - jahewson 3y ago
    Given that Waymo looses $5bn a year that seems like a drop in the ocean.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  Uber has saturated a lot of markets and might have a better legal foothold then Waymo/Google can spin up in a short time span. Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.
- hbn 3y ago
  Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily, but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which already exists that has the technology supplied by Google/Waymo.
nerdchum 3y ago
Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving? Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?
- TOMDM 3y ago
  I have literally never used an Internet connection that I feel is reliable enough to consider driving a real car over it
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    At this point even multiplayer driving games haven't figured out how to not kill half the field every time there is a single late packet. You cannot drive in a concrete jungle and get stable, reliable, verifiably usable internet.
- aardvarkr 3y ago
  Remote driving would likely result in worse safety with very little gained by a commercial transportation company. They still have to pay for a driver but now that driver is staring at a screen 12 hours a day. Humans are already mediocre drivers when physically present and that would get so much worse if they were doing everything remotely instead
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  As a passenger you want the driver to have skin in the game.
- plasticchris 3y ago
  Connectivity and latency. A stutter would be very bad.
- rafram 3y ago
  Drone planes are good for the military because they move all the risk from the pilot to the vehicle. Drone cars are bad for civilians because they move all the risk from the driver to the vehicle. What you’re suggesting would quickly replace America’s mass shooting problem with a VBIED problem. And it wouldn’t even save any time or effort! You’d still need to concentrate on driving the car.
mikeortman 3y ago
On a side note, I don't think anything screams big company enterprise more than contracts being announced with a horizontal bar between logos
- frutiger 3y ago
  > with a horizontal bar between logos I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized you meant a vertical bar.
fnord77 3y ago
ironic since Uber tried to steal Waymo's industrial secrets
haxton 3y ago
I had interviewed with Uber's ATG years ago and their pitch, even then, was that they were building a platform for whoever won the autonomous game to be available on uber, not just their own cars. Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.
boh 3y ago
One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.
- bhelkey 3y ago
  I imagine autonomous taxis will be significantly cheaper than driver taxis. From a quick search it looks like in general Uber drivers earn somewhere around $9 for a 30 minute ride [1]. [1] https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-financial-side-of-uber#:~:text=Generally%2C%20drivers%20keep%2075%25%20of,(gas%20and%20vehicle%20expenses) https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-fi....
  - ghoogl 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ghaff 3y ago
    And out of that $9, the driver has to pay for their gas (or electricity) and upkeep of the car. Uber apparently earns about $3-4 for their service. If Uber is now covering the costs of an expensive for now autonomous vehicle, it's not clear to me the fare drops at all.
- deleted 3y ago
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- bertil 3y ago
  This is very true, but it sounds to me like a classic case of design iterations: find patterns, develop them among users, learn ways to introduce new users… A search engine, an email, chat… non of that was natural, and the first iterations where clunky, but you know can’t imagine they’d be any simpler or that anyone would want anything else.
AndrewDucker 3y ago
So they're going to make the cars they're already running in Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then expand into other areas without having to spend money on advertising/operations? What's the game plan?
xnx 3y ago
Amazing headline given that someone tried to previously bring(/steal) Waymo's autonomous driving technology to Uber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski
hnburnsy 3y ago
Amazing that they can both get past the 245 million dollar lawsuit settlement over IP and trade secret theft.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Big companies are very good at letting bygones be bygones when behaviors and circumstances change. Look at the changed relationships between any number of companies and Microsoft.
EddieEngineers 3y ago
[flagged]
xyst 3y ago
Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.
  - snoochyboochies 3y ago
    Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      Don’t tell HN that, it would make them upset.
  - jorvi 3y ago
    Shunting away low-paying (usually with low education requirement) jobs doesn’t magically move people up the job totem pole. Those people need to be retrained, and during that training they still need to make a living, preferably above subsistence level.
- panarky 3y ago
  Yea let's just keep workers in such a precarious state that they not only must sell their labor for pennies, but incredibly they must now supply the capital to the corporation, all to do a job that isn't even necessary for a human to do, is hazardous for the worker and the public, and generates tremendous amounts of pollution. Why the "optics" aren't already absolute dog shit is left as an exercise for the reader.
  - morelisp 3y ago
dicroce 3y ago
I bet Alphabet has calculated that of all of the rides a typical ridesharing service offers only a subset is currently serviceable by autonomous vehicles. A deal (or buying) Uber allows them to offer the service on only the rides they are confident they can fulfill.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective? * Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber. * Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo. * Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber. * And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses. What's going on here?
- sidcool 3y ago
  Pivoting based on whatever works
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars or running their own data centers.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  All those things are related. Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on
deepzn 3y ago
I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta- one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it, which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets better and is able to prove better driving than a human, which seems possible in certain metros at least as Waymo is doing, then they can do an autonomous Uber network of their Teslas. But I think this is a smart move to join forces, and will give the consumer healthy competition in this space.
- shmatt 3y ago
  If Tesla's competitors were able to get government FSD permits without all that data. Maybe that data isn't really important to achieve the target
  - deepzn 3y ago
    if we're talking about overall effectiveness, then I think it is. Maybe passing a minimum threshold and having a safety effective of say 95% vs 99% or something. It's obviously going to be a very high percentage threshold that needs to be crossed to allow the public to use it. So, right now it's like a trial experiment with FSD, but I definitely feel like a data advantage would play out into a higher safety rating before it's in GA. Maybe eventually others will catch up, that could be quicker than longer, but it's a valid potential advantage for Tesla.
    - zamnos 3y ago
      just to nitpick, but with airline travel about five or six nines (99.9999%) safe, that is, one fatality every million miles of travel or so, 95% vs 99% is nowhere near good enough. https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commercial-airline-flights-in-2021/147791.article https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commerci...
      - 3y ago
Animats 3y ago
This may just mean that Waymo is outsourcing its Chandler AZ self-driving operations to Uber. That makes sense for Waymo. Have details come out about which way the money is flowing? For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.
elromulous 3y ago
I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next time. With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.
- bertil 3y ago
  I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?
    - bertil 3y ago
      They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?
justinzollars 3y ago
Exciting! Now Uber can drive to the wrong GPS location - and never be able to course correct. (For whatever reason my apartment building is NP-impossible to deliver to)
fairity 3y ago
People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware that Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.
- zamnos 3y ago
  Except this is Google we're talking about. Expect the Waymo One app to be discontinued in favor of the Uber app, so Uber can "own" the customer service costs.
- SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
  It's live in SF too, and the overall user experience is in a different league compared to UberX. The rides are much more comfortable, and quieter. I feel safer because it drives carefully and I'm not getting into a stranger's car. Pickup times and ETAs are actually accurate. It's like upgrading from cable to streaming, or from a Nokia 3310 to an iPhone. The only problem is the fleet size; there's still a waitlist and it can take 20 minutes to get a ride. But that's just because they're waiting on permits to scale up and start charging for autonomous rides in CA. It's not clear why Uber would choose to direct their customers to a superior product that they can't hope to beat on either price or UX -- except perhaps as a desperate move to squeeze the last dregs of revenue from the human-operated rideshare market before AV operators move in and clean house?
bertil 3y ago
Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while. If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because: - Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm. - Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them. - Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time. Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  [flagged]
AnishLaddha 3y ago
its probably the best way to approach this. Waymo doesn't need to waste its time on all the complicated regulations and technology around just ridesharing + Uber gets a foot back in the door to AVs.
borissk 3y ago
Uber had a lot of data scientists and AI engineers working on their autonomous driving technology. Wonder if they all left.
zodzedzi 3y ago
Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch. They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available. This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth. On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare. Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  I think my confusion is more about Uber’s incentives here. They’re providing a ramp-up platform for Waymo as you described, but as soon as it hits any scale Waymo can easily part ways.
  - jxramos 3y ago
    maybe even buy Uber if possible
    - asadm 3y ago
      Is there any value there? Seems like baggage. Waymo doesn’t have a distribution problem.
      - jxramos 3y ago
        brand name at the least
  - zodzedzi 3y ago
summerlight 3y ago
I think this makes sense for the both. Waymo's technological advantage won't last forever. Unless they can overtake the entire automaker industry in a foreseeable future (which is extremely challenging goal even with Google's money), it's probably better to put path dependencies on your potential future customers and make it much harder to change. Uber desperately want to reduce its spend on drivers, so this also aligns well with their goal.
- astrange 3y ago
  Having a sole source partner with self-driving cars doesn't help Uber reduce spending much; Waymo isn't charging Uber cost-plus pricing, they're charging as much as they can get away with. And Waymo has more negotiating power for its car fleet than individual Uber drivers have for their one car.
lchengify 3y ago
I expected this deal to happen right after Dara became CEO, and definitely after Uber sold off their self-driving division. This is why I've owned Uber stock since the IPO, despite the ongoing volatility. Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber). There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one. The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable. From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.
honeybadger1 3y ago
I am happy to see movement from any big player on autonomous driving. I still believe Tesla will win this war but I am happy to see healthy competition in this space, happy that partnerships forming to make it happen.
voz_ 3y ago
I was a founding engineer on the first uber platform for third party autonomous vehicles. It was just ~4 people and we got a ton done, growing to ~60 people and onboarding a lot of partners before I left. It was a really interesting time, and I wonder how much of that original code is still running here, or if the marketplace team (where the project eventually transferred) ended up replacing it all.
tamade 3y ago
Ironic given the legal saga between the two
cco 3y ago
Well...my prediction was off just a bit[1]. Waymo and Uber are partnering, not Cruise buying Lyft. imo the thesis is the same though, I would expect to see Cruise and Lyft partner and/or similar sometime in the near future. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710
realjohng 3y ago
Lol remember when Uber stole Wayne code? Now they’re buds. True settlement
Etrnl_President 3y ago
[dead]
KETpXDDzR 3y ago
I'm delighted to read these news. Uber finally found someone to partner with/get bought by. They offered their complete self-driving department for sale more than two years ago (I was part of a group to assess the deal with a possible buyer). I think Waymo also realized that Uber's self-driving devision is no competition to the big players. So I guess Waymo is mainly interested in their user base.

411 points by oflordal 3y ago

[dead]

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DSingularity 3y ago
Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house. The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a heat shield.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Uber have always wanting to go autonomous cars. They poured a lot of money to try to develop them in-house and I think that they were too optimistic on how easy and quick that would be. But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  How much of Uber does Alphabet own? They do not show up in the top 10 list here, so presumably 1% at most? https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/ Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.
  - avrionov 3y ago
    According to this they own part of it: https://www.gv.com/portfolio https://www.gv.com/portfolio
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      That is not surprising, or in question. The claim I am questioning is: > Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.
    - htrp 3y ago
      I think google offloaded most of that stake when Uber went public
  - jefftk 3y ago
    They owned 5% from 2013 to at least 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-stake-has-gone-up-20x-since-2013.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-sta... I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-gv-could-sell-the-rest-of-its-uber-stake-at-the-end-of-its-lockup-period-next-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
  - riskable 3y ago
    I just want to chime in to say that it is ridiculous that such information is not so easy to come by. Billion-dollar corporations should not be allowed to keep their external investments so opaque! Especially businesses that are publicly-traded. Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.
mbesto 3y ago
> The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple. For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Just because uber is not profitable with human drivers doesn't mean it'll be the opposite without them.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  This is a win-win for Google. If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame Uber. Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people will think twice about Uber taking the blame.
- jonas21 3y ago
  You say the answer is simple, but I can't tell what your answer is. The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of the value. The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value. So which is it?
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    No contradiction. The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to partner with, so they could play them against each other, so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.
    - jonas21 3y ago
      Got it. Maybe I was reading too much into the tone. I read "they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution" as them being desperate to get distribution and therefore willing to take a bad deal.
- 3y ago
osigurdson 3y ago
To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.
- toddmorey 3y ago
  Seems like but then why the interest from Waymo in an Uber partnership? They already have the Waymo One app. I think it’s because getting users to switch or use multiple apps proves difficult.
- msoad 3y ago
  Or multiple on various places. Google Rides, Google Play Hail, Youtube Taxi and so on...
  - usrusr 3y ago
    And a betting platform about shutdown order?
- htrp 3y ago
  Just like Google can bang out a messaging app in a weekend?
  - vsskanth 3y ago
    They have been. A new one every weekend.
- nickfromseattle 3y ago
  >Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend. Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there. With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.
  - 3y ago
makestuff 3y ago
I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- bartwr 3y ago
  Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
  - vasilipupkin 3y ago
    give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
    - JB_Dev 3y ago
      If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I think we’ll get quite a few riders in a short amount of time. Uber won’t be able to compete.
      - shagie 3y ago
Mistletoe 3y ago
> Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.
nashashmi 3y ago
Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a variety of reasons. It’s why local taxi dispatches are still in business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same. Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take. Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
krebby 3y ago
If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins. Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
- deegles 3y ago
  What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either drive safely or they don't. We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history. Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice). The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).
  - repsilat 3y ago
    The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100 vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super important. Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
- Tepix 3y ago
  If another company solves self driving after Waymo, they can still enter the market. I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't? Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.
lhorie 3y ago
The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto. The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm. Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
- ra7 3y ago
  > The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.
  - id00 3y ago
    I think the more likely here is that Uber sold self-driving group (alongside other "big bets" like flying taxi research group) because of existential threat to the business during the start of COVID-19 which made them focusing on the main business (+eats) and sell parts that have no profitability in sight.
    - lhorie 3y ago
chaostheory 3y ago
For me the question is who is liable in an accident
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This is America. When a "self driving" car kills someone, we blame the someone for daring to not pay due respect to the magic machine. They shouldn't have crossed the road in the dark! They should have been more visible! They should have been in their own big self driving box!
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  If it's the fault of the car, it has to be Waymo.
35997279 3y ago
>surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
freejazz 3y ago
> has all the customer service infra Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone
wmf 3y ago
Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to work as operators, let alone to design something like System X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D on an ongoing basis. The girls married, or got less boring jobs, or just left work, each time you must recruit and train replacements - but you design System X once and use it for forty years no problem. There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
  - wmf 3y ago
    No, I think the BOM cost of Waymo is higher.
    - fairity 3y ago
      By public accounts, the total hardware costs for one SDC is around $300k. If you amortize that over a 5 year lifespan & 50 rides a day, you get $3.28 of variable costs per ride. $3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should decrease over time.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        An SDC has many of the same operational costs (and maybe more) than a human-driven car. (Also garaging, cleaning, etc. As well as the support staff if a car gets in trouble somehow.) You can admittedly assume electric and assume operational costs may be lower than say a Prius today. But I don't consider it a given that a company which purchases and operates an SDC fleet from Waymo can operate profitably while undercutting rideshare as it exists today.

DSingularity 3y ago

Alphabet investment synergy potential is high.

edgefield 3y ago

This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?

smt88 3y ago
This won't be in widespread use for quite a while. Places with weather still aren't great candidates for Waymo.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's raining heavily >10% of the time. The vast majority of rides in the US - and even in a place like Florida that's a swamp where it rains literally every day - happen under just fine conditions for Waymo. This is fine for a taxi service. If you make 10x as much profit in the vast majority of cases - you'll let someone else pick up the scraps in the edge cases. It's almost as if Waymo & Uber considered weather...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I'm not sure how one gets to anything like 10x. Uber drivers maybe making minimum wage driving their own cars are just not that expensive.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Automotive EE here, I could not disagree with you more on the state and expectations of self-driving vehicles. I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather and it’s a problem “to be solved later”. It’s all a joke. If we actually wanted this, it would be long haul A to B routes. Turning semi trucks into rail. Self-driving was already slowing down before the era of free money. So I expect this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else. The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.
    - shrimp_emoji 3y ago

propogandist 3y ago

old enemies coming together, they must be out of options https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former-google-engineer-at-center-of-waymo-uber-case-charged-with-stealing-trade-secrets/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Literally the only way out for Uber if they aren't to be a glorified taxi app.
- spratzt 3y ago
  It’s just an attempt to distract people from realizing that’s all they are.
- paganel 3y ago
  It goes the other way, too. Waymo has always been only "a few years away" from getting to autonomous driving.

kornhole 3y ago

If I can't bike or bus it, taxis paid with cash is still my first preference.

spacKingChamath 3y ago
Thanks for letting us all know.
35997279 3y ago
Can you get a taxi to show up? The last two times I tried to rebel against the rideshare duopoly was the morning before international flights. Trips to the airport are the only use case I have for rideshare. Both times I scheduled the pick up by calling the phone number the day before, both times the driver just… didn’t show up. I panicked and downloaded Lyft. I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I’m going that route, I don’t see the point of not using Lyft.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Yeah taxi dispatch is hit and miss. They might be in NYC somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > might be in NYC somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab Unless it’s shift change or you’re in the wrong neighbourhood or have the wrong skin colour.
- ilikecakeandpie 3y ago
  Same. Every time we tried to call taxis pre-rideshare apps, we always got a "between 30 minutes and 2 hours" estimate if they ever showed up at all. Their CC machine was always conveniently broken unless you didn't have cash and the ATM was real far away. Good riddance.
  - 35997279 3y ago

mattlondon 3y ago

Shame Uber and to kill someone before just licensing the tech.

mduggles 3y ago

I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles. Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious approach seems to be the last real contender standing.

jonny_eh 3y ago
Cruise and Zoox are still in the game.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  And Aurora
dkislyuk 3y ago
Uber sold off its own self-driving division back in 2020: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving-project-to-startup-aurora/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving... so this kind of partnership has probably been looming for a while.
deleted 3y ago
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ra7 3y ago

From the TechCrunch news story [1]: > The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology. Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-will-be-available-on-ubers-app-starting-in-phoenix/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...

notatoad 3y ago
i think the main goal of licencing would be less capital costs. buying cars isn't cheap, especially not at scale - licencing their tech to somebody else means every car they put on the road is $150k waymo doesn't have to spend.
- ra7 3y ago
  Good point. That would also allow them to bring true Level 4 autonomous driving to passenger cars with sufficient miniaturization of their sensor stack.
- jfoster 3y ago
  Someone has to spend it, though. Uber seem in even less of a position to be footing that bill.
  - notatoad 3y ago
    but if uber spend a couple billion on cars, and lyft spend a couple billion, and didi spends a couple billion, etc, that's a lot more spend than if only waymo spends it.

ackbar03 3y ago

So now Uber is going to be a gazillion dollar company? Wasn't that sort of their value hypothesis?

omneity 3y ago

Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game. Interesting times. I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.

d33 3y ago
Do we have a proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...) They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.
xur17 3y ago
I think it also helps Waymo fill in the gaps between markets that they support. Customers get an app that works pretty much anywhere, and Waymo can drop into any given market with 10k self driving cars pretty much overnight.
- nojs 3y ago
  This. Spinning up an Uber app clone is easy, actually running the service and having it available everywhere is hard and not something Google is likely to be good at.

boringg 3y ago

After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now they are going to go the route they should have always gone since they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off.. partnership.

hardware2win 3y ago
Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :) >In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. >He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
- boringg 3y ago
  I forgot he got pardoned. Trump presidency: if you have money you could use that money to literally buy a get out of jail card.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    It's not just Trump, democrats have done similar things in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers... especially Marc Rich
    - boringg 3y ago
      I know - its the brashness, level of ease and amount of pardons by the Trump presidency that makes it different. Not that it isn't done by other parties.
  - propogandist 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - 3y ago

hahaxdxd123 3y ago

This doesn't really make sense to me. What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through. Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.

sschueller 3y ago
What people don't realize is that full autonomous does not work 100%. There are always people watching and taking over if something goes a foul. I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
- ra7 3y ago
  To clarify: they have remote assistance teams, but they cannot “take over” and control the car at all. All they can do is things like plotting a path to go around if the vehicle gets stuck. They have no ability to do safety critical interventions, the vehicle is capable of reaching a ‘minimum risk condition’ all on its own. Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don’t believe this is likely.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  You can't drive the cars remotely. Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.

shmatt 3y ago

The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside" Now it's going to be a lot more interesting

spiderice 3y ago
I’m guessing this is a big city problem? I’ve never once experienced this
- Gunnerhead 3y ago
  Neither have I in NYC.
anaganisk 3y ago
BeepbeeepBoop to you too and I'm gonna report you. 10sec later: You are banned from our platform for violation of our safety protocols.

mdale 3y ago

Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow. It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well. But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout. Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride. For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders. All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale. I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.

amelius 3y ago
Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and completely destroy Uber. But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
- belter 3y ago
  And why would this not wake them up?
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - 3y ago

rafaelero 3y ago

Sounds like a great deal for Uber and a meh deal for Waymo.

hardware2win 3y ago

I guess Anthony didnt have to steal Waymos secrets after all

wg0 3y ago

At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't. Isn't it or something has changed lately?

sofixa 3y ago
The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly at stake if things go wrong. For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis). Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end up cheaper than self owned cars)
  - sofixa 3y ago
    If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.
    - mrshadowgoose 3y ago

yalogin 3y ago

I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.

gitfan86 3y ago
Yes, but this is about PR and the stock price for both companies
aardvarkr 3y ago
I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
- jahewson 3y ago
  Given that Waymo looses $5bn a year that seems like a drop in the ocean.
tmpz22 3y ago
Uber has saturated a lot of markets and might have a better legal foothold then Waymo/Google can spin up in a short time span. Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.
hbn 3y ago
Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily, but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which already exists that has the technology supplied by Google/Waymo.

nerdchum 3y ago

Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving? Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?

TOMDM 3y ago
I have literally never used an Internet connection that I feel is reliable enough to consider driving a real car over it
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  At this point even multiplayer driving games haven't figured out how to not kill half the field every time there is a single late packet. You cannot drive in a concrete jungle and get stable, reliable, verifiably usable internet.
aardvarkr 3y ago
Remote driving would likely result in worse safety with very little gained by a commercial transportation company. They still have to pay for a driver but now that driver is staring at a screen 12 hours a day. Humans are already mediocre drivers when physically present and that would get so much worse if they were doing everything remotely instead
amadeuspagel 3y ago
As a passenger you want the driver to have skin in the game.
plasticchris 3y ago
Connectivity and latency. A stutter would be very bad.
rafram 3y ago
Drone planes are good for the military because they move all the risk from the pilot to the vehicle. Drone cars are bad for civilians because they move all the risk from the driver to the vehicle. What you’re suggesting would quickly replace America’s mass shooting problem with a VBIED problem. And it wouldn’t even save any time or effort! You’d still need to concentrate on driving the car.

mikeortman 3y ago

On a side note, I don't think anything screams big company enterprise more than contracts being announced with a horizontal bar between logos

frutiger 3y ago
> with a horizontal bar between logos I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized you meant a vertical bar.

fnord77 3y ago

ironic since Uber tried to steal Waymo's industrial secrets

haxton 3y ago

I had interviewed with Uber's ATG years ago and their pitch, even then, was that they were building a platform for whoever won the autonomous game to be available on uber, not just their own cars. Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.

boh 3y ago

One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.

bhelkey 3y ago
I imagine autonomous taxis will be significantly cheaper than driver taxis. From a quick search it looks like in general Uber drivers earn somewhere around $9 for a 30 minute ride [1]. [1] https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-financial-side-of-uber#:~:text=Generally%2C%20drivers%20keep%2075%25%20of,(gas%20and%20vehicle%20expenses) https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-fi....
- ghoogl 3y ago
  [dead]
- ghaff 3y ago
  And out of that $9, the driver has to pay for their gas (or electricity) and upkeep of the car. Uber apparently earns about $3-4 for their service. If Uber is now covering the costs of an expensive for now autonomous vehicle, it's not clear to me the fare drops at all.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bertil 3y ago
This is very true, but it sounds to me like a classic case of design iterations: find patterns, develop them among users, learn ways to introduce new users… A search engine, an email, chat… non of that was natural, and the first iterations where clunky, but you know can’t imagine they’d be any simpler or that anyone would want anything else.

AndrewDucker 3y ago

So they're going to make the cars they're already running in Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then expand into other areas without having to spend money on advertising/operations? What's the game plan?

xnx 3y ago

Amazing headline given that someone tried to previously bring(/steal) Waymo's autonomous driving technology to Uber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

hnburnsy 3y ago

Amazing that they can both get past the 245 million dollar lawsuit settlement over IP and trade secret theft.

ghaff 3y ago
Big companies are very good at letting bygones be bygones when behaviors and circumstances change. Look at the changed relationships between any number of companies and Microsoft.

EddieEngineers 3y ago

[flagged]

xyst 3y ago

Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1 The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

eptcyka 3y ago
Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people poor.
- snoochyboochies 3y ago
  Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    Don’t tell HN that, it would make them upset.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Shunting away low-paying (usually with low education requirement) jobs doesn’t magically move people up the job totem pole. Those people need to be retrained, and during that training they still need to make a living, preferably above subsistence level.
panarky 3y ago
Yea let's just keep workers in such a precarious state that they not only must sell their labor for pennies, but incredibly they must now supply the capital to the corporation, all to do a job that isn't even necessary for a human to do, is hazardous for the worker and the public, and generates tremendous amounts of pollution. Why the "optics" aren't already absolute dog shit is left as an exercise for the reader.
- morelisp 3y ago

dicroce 3y ago

I bet Alphabet has calculated that of all of the rides a typical ridesharing service offers only a subset is currently serviceable by autonomous vehicles. A deal (or buying) Uber allows them to offer the service on only the rides they are confident they can fulfill.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective? * Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber. * Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo. * Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber. * And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses. What's going on here?

sidcool 3y ago
Pivoting based on whatever works
VirusNewbie 3y ago
Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars or running their own data centers.
sangnoir 3y ago
All those things are related. Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on

deepzn 3y ago

I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta- one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it, which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets better and is able to prove better driving than a human, which seems possible in certain metros at least as Waymo is doing, then they can do an autonomous Uber network of their Teslas. But I think this is a smart move to join forces, and will give the consumer healthy competition in this space.

shmatt 3y ago
If Tesla's competitors were able to get government FSD permits without all that data. Maybe that data isn't really important to achieve the target
- deepzn 3y ago
  if we're talking about overall effectiveness, then I think it is. Maybe passing a minimum threshold and having a safety effective of say 95% vs 99% or something. It's obviously going to be a very high percentage threshold that needs to be crossed to allow the public to use it. So, right now it's like a trial experiment with FSD, but I definitely feel like a data advantage would play out into a higher safety rating before it's in GA. Maybe eventually others will catch up, that could be quicker than longer, but it's a valid potential advantage for Tesla.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    just to nitpick, but with airline travel about five or six nines (99.9999%) safe, that is, one fatality every million miles of travel or so, 95% vs 99% is nowhere near good enough. https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commercial-airline-flights-in-2021/147791.article https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commerci...
    - 3y ago

Animats 3y ago

This may just mean that Waymo is outsourcing its Chandler AZ self-driving operations to Uber. That makes sense for Waymo. Have details come out about which way the money is flowing? For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.

elromulous 3y ago

I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next time. With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.

bertil 3y ago
I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.
- kortilla 3y ago
  Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?
  - bertil 3y ago
    They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?

justinzollars 3y ago

Exciting! Now Uber can drive to the wrong GPS location - and never be able to course correct. (For whatever reason my apartment building is NP-impossible to deliver to)

fairity 3y ago

People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware that Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.

zamnos 3y ago
Except this is Google we're talking about. Expect the Waymo One app to be discontinued in favor of the Uber app, so Uber can "own" the customer service costs.
SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
It's live in SF too, and the overall user experience is in a different league compared to UberX. The rides are much more comfortable, and quieter. I feel safer because it drives carefully and I'm not getting into a stranger's car. Pickup times and ETAs are actually accurate. It's like upgrading from cable to streaming, or from a Nokia 3310 to an iPhone. The only problem is the fleet size; there's still a waitlist and it can take 20 minutes to get a ride. But that's just because they're waiting on permits to scale up and start charging for autonomous rides in CA. It's not clear why Uber would choose to direct their customers to a superior product that they can't hope to beat on either price or UX -- except perhaps as a desperate move to squeeze the last dregs of revenue from the human-operated rideshare market before AV operators move in and clean house?

bertil 3y ago

Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while. If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because: - Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm. - Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them. - Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time. Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.

i2cmaster 3y ago
[flagged]

AnishLaddha 3y ago

its probably the best way to approach this. Waymo doesn't need to waste its time on all the complicated regulations and technology around just ridesharing + Uber gets a foot back in the door to AVs.

borissk 3y ago

Uber had a lot of data scientists and AI engineers working on their autonomous driving technology. Wonder if they all left.

zodzedzi 3y ago

Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch. They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available. This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth. On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare. Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.

kevinventullo 3y ago
I think my confusion is more about Uber’s incentives here. They’re providing a ramp-up platform for Waymo as you described, but as soon as it hits any scale Waymo can easily part ways.
- jxramos 3y ago
  maybe even buy Uber if possible
  - asadm 3y ago
    Is there any value there? Seems like baggage. Waymo doesn’t have a distribution problem.
    - jxramos 3y ago
      brand name at the least
- zodzedzi 3y ago

summerlight 3y ago

I think this makes sense for the both. Waymo's technological advantage won't last forever. Unless they can overtake the entire automaker industry in a foreseeable future (which is extremely challenging goal even with Google's money), it's probably better to put path dependencies on your potential future customers and make it much harder to change. Uber desperately want to reduce its spend on drivers, so this also aligns well with their goal.

astrange 3y ago
Having a sole source partner with self-driving cars doesn't help Uber reduce spending much; Waymo isn't charging Uber cost-plus pricing, they're charging as much as they can get away with. And Waymo has more negotiating power for its car fleet than individual Uber drivers have for their one car.

lchengify 3y ago

I expected this deal to happen right after Dara became CEO, and definitely after Uber sold off their self-driving division. This is why I've owned Uber stock since the IPO, despite the ongoing volatility. Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber). There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one. The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable. From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.

honeybadger1 3y ago

I am happy to see movement from any big player on autonomous driving. I still believe Tesla will win this war but I am happy to see healthy competition in this space, happy that partnerships forming to make it happen.

voz_ 3y ago

I was a founding engineer on the first uber platform for third party autonomous vehicles. It was just ~4 people and we got a ton done, growing to ~60 people and onboarding a lot of partners before I left. It was a really interesting time, and I wonder how much of that original code is still running here, or if the marketplace team (where the project eventually transferred) ended up replacing it all.

tamade 3y ago

Ironic given the legal saga between the two

cco 3y ago

Well...my prediction was off just a bit[1]. Waymo and Uber are partnering, not Cruise buying Lyft. imo the thesis is the same though, I would expect to see Cruise and Lyft partner and/or similar sometime in the near future. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710

realjohng 3y ago

Lol remember when Uber stole Wayne code? Now they’re buds. True settlement

Etrnl_President 3y ago

[dead]

KETpXDDzR 3y ago

I'm delighted to read these news. Uber finally found someone to partner with/get bought by. They offered their complete self-driving department for sale more than two years ago (I was part of a group to assess the deal with a possible buyer). I think Waymo also realized that Uber's self-driving devision is no competition to the big players. So I guess Waymo is mainly interested in their user base.