7 ms·

Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous ride-hailing to Austin and Atlanta

34 points by ra7 2y ago

ra7 2y ago
The most interesting bit is that Uber is responsible for operations. > Through this expanded partnership, Uber will provide fleet management services including vehicle cleaning, repair, and other general depot operations. Waymo will continue to be responsible for the testing and operation of the Waymo Driver, including roadside assistance and certain rider support functions.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  That tracks. Google doesn't want to get bogged down with operational work. A lot of the operations for Waymo were also done by contractors Alphabet hired via Adecco. Most contract hiring at Google is hired from Adecco. For example - https://www.adecco.com/en-us/job-search/project-manager-ii-mountain-view-california/us_en_99_025107_2305642 https://www.adecco.com/en-us/job-search/project-manager-ii-m...
- e_y_ 2y ago
  I thought Uber just let drivers ("independent contractors") deal with the vehicle maintenance and cleaning up when someone pukes in the back. Do they even have their own depots?
  - nfw2 2y ago
    I expect Uber is feeling extreme pressure to stay relevant, which may means changing the operational model significantly
    - dkrich 2y ago
      100% this. Dara came in and pulled all the P&L levers he could- basically closing down their own autonomous unit and buying a stake in aurora technology to allow another company to lose money and not have it show on their balance sheet. Then raising prices and lowering pay as much as possible. They are now entirely reliant on quarter to quarter consumer spending and the performance of three stock holdings which are completely out of their hands. Expect more and more manufactured headlines to keep the AV story in tact.
- angryasian 2y ago
  yeah this is interesting. I forgot where I read recently but Google needs to build out big depots where the cars can come back and charge etc. Its a huge cost of operations. Offloading all that to Uber who can basically become a marketplace of robotaxis and service many companies makes a lot of sense for both companies.
  - dkrich 2y ago
    The economics of this seem highly questionable. After all how many robotaxi companies can there possibly be given the costs associated with vehicle ownership and autonomous software development? In a world where it costs nothing to create content or launch a drop shipping business aggregators like meta and Amazon make sense. But if you end up with like three AV providers, Uber seems like an unnecessary middleman in a business where margins are already incredibly tight. You have to always remember that the competition is a guy in a car charging a couple bucks a mile
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lopkeny12ko 2y ago
Can anyone explain how this makes any business sense? Doesn't Uber have a self-driving business that competes directly with Waymo? Wasn't one of Uber's early engineering motivations for running on-prem infrastructure (instead of cloud) to avoid being cut off from GCP should Google decide to start competing? And now Uber is directly partnering with Google to offer a Google service through their platform?
- ra7 2y ago
  Uber doesn’t have a self driving business anymore. That was shut down after they killed a person in Arizona during testing. They divested much of it into Aurora, which I believe Uber still has a stake in. How this makes sense for Uber is that they don’t want to be left out when robotaxis replace human-driven ride hailing vehicles.
  - Onavo 2y ago
    Nah, they shut down their self driving car division because they needed a boring conservative safe pair of hands for operations and the current CEO wasn't much of a visionary unlike the founder. Say what you must about Kalanick being a frat boy but he embodied "move fast and break things" like no other.
    - Atotalnoob 2y ago
      Woah man, this post seems a little out there. They killed someone. That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business. Their self driving car division was, by the accounts I read, never going to achieve self-driving and had serious problems. If being a visionary means you are okay with killing people, then fuck being a visionary. “Moving fast and breaking things” should NEVER include killing people.
      - jonas21 2y ago
        > That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business. Which line of business would that be? Maybe the one involving human drivers that leads to ~75 deaths per year [1]? Though that's still a lower-than-average death rate compared to the general population (so shutting it down without a replacement could cause even more deaths). You could argue that Uber has a moral imperative to replace its human drivers with automation as soon as possible. [1] https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?uclick_id=f43f1de6-27ff-43ab-bd20-eaf23373b8b0 https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?...
melling 2y ago
“Waymo’s fully autonomous, all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles” Wonder if air quality improves in cities that get a large adoption of autonomous electric vehicles.
- brainwad 2y ago
  You could look at Norway for an idea, (non-autonomous) electric cars have captured the market for new cars and for long enough that the older fleet is ageing out. They are at 26% of registered cars: https://elbil.no/elbilstatistikk/ https://elbil.no/elbilstatistikk/
- ravetcofx 2y ago
  Except most pollution from modern standard vehicle is tire particulate dust which is worse than ICE vehicles due to increased weight and road friction. Long story short we need more walking, cycling and trains, cars aren't the answer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
  - melling 2y ago
    I look forward to you convincing Americans to give up their cars. It’ll take decades to get the infrastructure once you do. I’m personally waiting for low-speed maglevs to catch on. In the meantime, there are 16 million Ford F150s on the road. They’re heavy too, comparable to many EVs. https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023/12/06/see-where-americans-reside-in-the-united-states-of-f-150.html https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023... EVs turned political and people threw out the extra weight of batteries without comparing that to the weight of the current SUVs, etc that Americans drive.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    Don't just focus on headlines. From the article you shared: > The wear rate of different tyre brands varied substantially and the toxic chemical content varied even more, he said, showing low-cost changes were feasible to cut their environmental impact. And also > Dr James Tate, at the University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies in the UK, said the tyre test results were credible. “But it is very important to note that BEVs are becoming lighter very fast,” he said. “By 2024-25 we expect BEVs and [fossil-fuelled] city cars will have comparable weights. Only high-end, large BEVs with high capacity batteries will weigh more.” And > The average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs. Once we've stamped out emissions from ICE vehicles, we have a new goal: stricter regulations for tires. Developing countries often have less strict tailpipe emissions standards than developed ones. They'd also benefit from large-scale EV adoption.
dchuk 2y ago
It sure feels like, barring some major regulatory setback/surprise, that within 5 years it will be funny to remember getting into an uber or cab driven by a real person when in any major city. The biggest challenge overall is going to be overcoming the issues with autonomous driving in inclement weather. But I’m sure it’s doable eventually.
- ProllyInfamous 2y ago
  >autonomous driving in inclement weather They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection). >within 5 years As for predicting the future: I think within five years ALL vehicles on public roadways will require a beacon for travel, simply to alert other self-driven vehicles & intersection controllers. This process will be gradual, akin to "insurance discounts" for allowing driving habit monitoring (e.g. without a beacon, traffic lights won't auto-cycle for you).
  - roninorder 2y ago
    What's the value of a beacon vs vision+Lidar for autonomous vehicles?
    - johntb86 2y ago
      Yeah, a beacon isn't that useful unless you want to require that all pedestrians wear them as well. The only self-driving-car-related serious injuries/deaths I can remember are Uber hitting a pedestrian and Cruise running over a pedestrian.
  - ctvo 2y ago
    > They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection). Who handles liability if you get into an accident? When does it take control of the vehicle away? The most likely scenario is the car pulls over safely and asks you to get out or wait. There are _many_ people who cannot or will not driver. They won't just take over control of a vehicle they're unfamiliar with. Teenagers, the elderly, people without a driver's license, people injured, ...
Bjorkbat 2y ago
This is going to be the real test for Waymo. From anecdotal experience, Austin has more inclement weather, and its road infrastructure is lacking in some parts of town.
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  More inclement than the SF fog? https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/
  - Atotalnoob 2y ago
    Yes. SF doesn’t get snow or hurricanes
    - lern_too_spel 2y ago
      Austin doesn't get hurricanes either. The tropical storms it gets have precipitation roughly equivalent to an atmospheric river. Austin gets snow once every two years, and it exceeded one inch only once since 2010. That amount of snow is hardly noticeable.
    - adrianmonk 2y ago
      Another danger is cars getting swept away at low water crossings. You hear "turn around, don't drown" repeated a lot in Austin. It is not at all unusual for people to get killed this way. They think their car can make it across, and they're wrong. It's a problem in many parts of Texas because severe thunderstorms happen frequently and some of them bring heavy rain. But in Austin, it's especially bad because Austin is hilly, which makes flash floods worse.
      - Kirby64 2y ago
        Flooding on roads is not super common in Austin. Some areas have flooding, sure, but it’s extremely localized. I think you hear it a lot as outreach related to other Texas cities. Houston, by comparison, might as well be a river for how often it floods and how widespread flooding tends to be there.
MichaelNolan 2y ago
So bynext year Waymo’s rollout will look like this: * Los Angeles - Waymo One * San Francisco- Waymo One * Phoenix - Waymo One, Uber * Austin - Uber * Atlanta - Uber It’s still early days for AVs, so I’m guessing Waymo is still experimenting with which model they want to go with. I wonder if we will see Waymo or Cruise launch on Lyft as well.
- derwiki 2y ago
  Waymo launched on Lyft in 2019, paused during the pandemic, and then resumed with Uber.
  - MichaelNolan 2y ago
    Wow, how’d I miss that? I can’t find any articles about the partnership ending. Did they ever reach the stage where the cars were actually available for riders? Or did it end before that? https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/partnering-with-lyft-to-serve-more-riders/ https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/partnering-with-lyft-to-serve...
    - derwiki 2y ago
      It was a quiet ending; not surprised there aren’t any articles about it. Cars were definitely available, many rides happened. I think they had safety drivers sitting in the driver’s seat but wouldn’t swear to it. You can find Youtube videos of the rides around Chandler, AZ.

34 points by ra7 2y ago

ra7 2y ago

The most interesting bit is that Uber is responsible for operations. > Through this expanded partnership, Uber will provide fleet management services including vehicle cleaning, repair, and other general depot operations. Waymo will continue to be responsible for the testing and operation of the Waymo Driver, including roadside assistance and certain rider support functions.

alephnerd 2y ago
That tracks. Google doesn't want to get bogged down with operational work. A lot of the operations for Waymo were also done by contractors Alphabet hired via Adecco. Most contract hiring at Google is hired from Adecco. For example - https://www.adecco.com/en-us/job-search/project-manager-ii-mountain-view-california/us_en_99_025107_2305642 https://www.adecco.com/en-us/job-search/project-manager-ii-m...
e_y_ 2y ago
I thought Uber just let drivers ("independent contractors") deal with the vehicle maintenance and cleaning up when someone pukes in the back. Do they even have their own depots?
- nfw2 2y ago
  I expect Uber is feeling extreme pressure to stay relevant, which may means changing the operational model significantly
  - dkrich 2y ago
    100% this. Dara came in and pulled all the P&L levers he could- basically closing down their own autonomous unit and buying a stake in aurora technology to allow another company to lose money and not have it show on their balance sheet. Then raising prices and lowering pay as much as possible. They are now entirely reliant on quarter to quarter consumer spending and the performance of three stock holdings which are completely out of their hands. Expect more and more manufactured headlines to keep the AV story in tact.
angryasian 2y ago
yeah this is interesting. I forgot where I read recently but Google needs to build out big depots where the cars can come back and charge etc. Its a huge cost of operations. Offloading all that to Uber who can basically become a marketplace of robotaxis and service many companies makes a lot of sense for both companies.
- dkrich 2y ago
  The economics of this seem highly questionable. After all how many robotaxi companies can there possibly be given the costs associated with vehicle ownership and autonomous software development? In a world where it costs nothing to create content or launch a drop shipping business aggregators like meta and Amazon make sense. But if you end up with like three AV providers, Uber seems like an unnecessary middleman in a business where margins are already incredibly tight. You have to always remember that the competition is a guy in a car charging a couple bucks a mile

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lopkeny12ko 2y ago

Can anyone explain how this makes any business sense? Doesn't Uber have a self-driving business that competes directly with Waymo? Wasn't one of Uber's early engineering motivations for running on-prem infrastructure (instead of cloud) to avoid being cut off from GCP should Google decide to start competing? And now Uber is directly partnering with Google to offer a Google service through their platform?

ra7 2y ago
Uber doesn’t have a self driving business anymore. That was shut down after they killed a person in Arizona during testing. They divested much of it into Aurora, which I believe Uber still has a stake in. How this makes sense for Uber is that they don’t want to be left out when robotaxis replace human-driven ride hailing vehicles.
- Onavo 2y ago
  Nah, they shut down their self driving car division because they needed a boring conservative safe pair of hands for operations and the current CEO wasn't much of a visionary unlike the founder. Say what you must about Kalanick being a frat boy but he embodied "move fast and break things" like no other.
  - Atotalnoob 2y ago
    Woah man, this post seems a little out there. They killed someone. That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business. Their self driving car division was, by the accounts I read, never going to achieve self-driving and had serious problems. If being a visionary means you are okay with killing people, then fuck being a visionary. “Moving fast and breaking things” should NEVER include killing people.
    - jonas21 2y ago
      > That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business. Which line of business would that be? Maybe the one involving human drivers that leads to ~75 deaths per year [1]? Though that's still a lower-than-average death rate compared to the general population (so shutting it down without a replacement could cause even more deaths). You could argue that Uber has a moral imperative to replace its human drivers with automation as soon as possible. [1] https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?uclick_id=f43f1de6-27ff-43ab-bd20-eaf23373b8b0 https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?...

melling 2y ago

“Waymo’s fully autonomous, all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles” Wonder if air quality improves in cities that get a large adoption of autonomous electric vehicles.

brainwad 2y ago
You could look at Norway for an idea, (non-autonomous) electric cars have captured the market for new cars and for long enough that the older fleet is ageing out. They are at 26% of registered cars: https://elbil.no/elbilstatistikk/ https://elbil.no/elbilstatistikk/
ravetcofx 2y ago
Except most pollution from modern standard vehicle is tire particulate dust which is worse than ICE vehicles due to increased weight and road friction. Long story short we need more walking, cycling and trains, cars aren't the answer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
- melling 2y ago
  I look forward to you convincing Americans to give up their cars. It’ll take decades to get the infrastructure once you do. I’m personally waiting for low-speed maglevs to catch on. In the meantime, there are 16 million Ford F150s on the road. They’re heavy too, comparable to many EVs. https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023/12/06/see-where-americans-reside-in-the-united-states-of-f-150.html https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023... EVs turned political and people threw out the extra weight of batteries without comparing that to the weight of the current SUVs, etc that Americans drive.
- triceratops 2y ago
  Don't just focus on headlines. From the article you shared: > The wear rate of different tyre brands varied substantially and the toxic chemical content varied even more, he said, showing low-cost changes were feasible to cut their environmental impact. And also > Dr James Tate, at the University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies in the UK, said the tyre test results were credible. “But it is very important to note that BEVs are becoming lighter very fast,” he said. “By 2024-25 we expect BEVs and [fossil-fuelled] city cars will have comparable weights. Only high-end, large BEVs with high capacity batteries will weigh more.” And > The average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs. Once we've stamped out emissions from ICE vehicles, we have a new goal: stricter regulations for tires. Developing countries often have less strict tailpipe emissions standards than developed ones. They'd also benefit from large-scale EV adoption.

dchuk 2y ago

It sure feels like, barring some major regulatory setback/surprise, that within 5 years it will be funny to remember getting into an uber or cab driven by a real person when in any major city. The biggest challenge overall is going to be overcoming the issues with autonomous driving in inclement weather. But I’m sure it’s doable eventually.

ProllyInfamous 2y ago
>autonomous driving in inclement weather They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection). >within 5 years As for predicting the future: I think within five years ALL vehicles on public roadways will require a beacon for travel, simply to alert other self-driven vehicles & intersection controllers. This process will be gradual, akin to "insurance discounts" for allowing driving habit monitoring (e.g. without a beacon, traffic lights won't auto-cycle for you).
- roninorder 2y ago
  What's the value of a beacon vs vision+Lidar for autonomous vehicles?
  - johntb86 2y ago
    Yeah, a beacon isn't that useful unless you want to require that all pedestrians wear them as well. The only self-driving-car-related serious injuries/deaths I can remember are Uber hitting a pedestrian and Cruise running over a pedestrian.
- ctvo 2y ago
  > They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection). Who handles liability if you get into an accident? When does it take control of the vehicle away? The most likely scenario is the car pulls over safely and asks you to get out or wait. There are _many_ people who cannot or will not driver. They won't just take over control of a vehicle they're unfamiliar with. Teenagers, the elderly, people without a driver's license, people injured, ...

Bjorkbat 2y ago

This is going to be the real test for Waymo. From anecdotal experience, Austin has more inclement weather, and its road infrastructure is lacking in some parts of town.

lern_too_spel 2y ago
More inclement than the SF fog? https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/
- Atotalnoob 2y ago
  Yes. SF doesn’t get snow or hurricanes
  - lern_too_spel 2y ago
    Austin doesn't get hurricanes either. The tropical storms it gets have precipitation roughly equivalent to an atmospheric river. Austin gets snow once every two years, and it exceeded one inch only once since 2010. That amount of snow is hardly noticeable.
  - adrianmonk 2y ago
    Another danger is cars getting swept away at low water crossings. You hear "turn around, don't drown" repeated a lot in Austin. It is not at all unusual for people to get killed this way. They think their car can make it across, and they're wrong. It's a problem in many parts of Texas because severe thunderstorms happen frequently and some of them bring heavy rain. But in Austin, it's especially bad because Austin is hilly, which makes flash floods worse.
    - Kirby64 2y ago
      Flooding on roads is not super common in Austin. Some areas have flooding, sure, but it’s extremely localized. I think you hear it a lot as outreach related to other Texas cities. Houston, by comparison, might as well be a river for how often it floods and how widespread flooding tends to be there.

MichaelNolan 2y ago

So bynext year Waymo’s rollout will look like this: * Los Angeles - Waymo One * San Francisco- Waymo One * Phoenix - Waymo One, Uber * Austin - Uber * Atlanta - Uber It’s still early days for AVs, so I’m guessing Waymo is still experimenting with which model they want to go with. I wonder if we will see Waymo or Cruise launch on Lyft as well.

derwiki 2y ago
Waymo launched on Lyft in 2019, paused during the pandemic, and then resumed with Uber.
- MichaelNolan 2y ago
  Wow, how’d I miss that? I can’t find any articles about the partnership ending. Did they ever reach the stage where the cars were actually available for riders? Or did it end before that? https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/partnering-with-lyft-to-serve-more-riders/ https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/partnering-with-lyft-to-serve...
  - derwiki 2y ago
    It was a quiet ending; not surprised there aren’t any articles about it. Cars were definitely available, many rides happened. I think they had safety drivers sitting in the driver’s seat but wouldn’t swear to it. You can find Youtube videos of the rides around Chandler, AZ.