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Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies
- jdeibele 5mo agoI'm old. Was anyone else's reaction to wonder what Uber was doing for audio-video companies? The original title says "self-driving" and that's much more clear.
- jhfdbkofdchk 5mo agoI read it first as anti virus lol
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- darknavi 5mo agoI was also picturing Uber drivers with a bundle of composite video cables in their hands.
- philipov 5mo agoAV obviously stands for Adult Video.
- xp84 5mo agoYeah apparently JAV is a Toyota that drives itself now
- whynotmaybe 5mo agoRumor has it that some adults video are filmed in a taxi so I guess it figures.
- darth_avocado 5mo agoAV stands for anti vehicle.
- rjmunro 5mo agoSometimes AV is supposed to mean Anti Virus or Alternative Vote and that's really confusing because it really means Audio Visual. Anything else, no. I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.
- brendoelfrendo 5mo agoImmediately after leaving this thread I saw a post on Bluesky where someone was discussing the GUARD act and used AV to mean "age verification." It's out of control!
- bonoboTP 5mo agoSuperficial comment
- KaiserPro 5mo agoPithy reply
- dalmo3 5mo agoAugmented Virtuality?
- thaumasiotes 5mo agoAdult Video.
- nickvec 5mo agoSorry, having “self-driving” in the title went over the HN title char limit, so I opted for AV (autonomous vehicles) instead.
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- nerdsniper 5mo agoI feel like they should have done this 6 years ago. Most AV companies already have tons of their own data today. But how would it work to install expensive LIDAR sensors on privately-owned vehicles?
- mohsen1 5mo agoI was working at Lyft 8 years ago and suggested this to the head of AV program then. They didn't listen.
- themanmaran 5mo agoExactly my take as well. This would have been the right diversification move a decade ago. Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.
- Rebelgecko 5mo agoFWIW, a large fraction of Uber drivers aren't actually driving their own personal cars, at least around me nowadays. They're either rented or some sort of fleet vehicle (complete with TCP #)
- reaperducer 5mo agoMost AV companies already have tons of their own data today. Real-world data spoils faster than a gas station banana. If your AV company is relying on data from six years ago, you're going to kill someone.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoI asked an Uber driver, formerly a taxi driver in LA, how he felt about the fact that his driving data was being used to build his replacement. He said he “didn’t care and besides what was he going to do about it anyway, it’s going to happen no matter what” I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no. I think we’re only about another generation before the only purpose for human labor is to train and check the outputs of a machine.
- jcgrillo 5mo agoI'm not too worried about it. Yeah, it's bad that people don't understand how labor organizing works. It's bad they're not willing to stand up to shitty employers and take a little risk to make life better. But in this particular case the fear is totally illusory. It's just another silicon valley conman selling some warped "dream" that probably won't actually materialize[1]. "Autonomous Vehicles" are nowhere near production ready, and they're not going to be any time soon. Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it. Until then, it's just about the same category as flying cars--sure, we have these hexacopter contraptions which can (barely) lift a single person for 20min. Not interesting. [1] Here's how you know: “Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it I think enough people haven’t been in a Waymo to realise that the technology is basically here, and that we’re like 10 to 20 years of doubling away from AVs doing tens of millions of trips a day in America. By the time anyone has invested in true mass production of AVs, we’ll already be so far down that path that the policy deck will be dealt.
- jcgrillo 5mo agoI've been to san francisco before, it doesn't even snow there
- LeoPanthera 5mo agoI'm honestly surprised that Tesla never took advantage of all the cameras in all its cars to do some kind of mapping project. I always thought that was incredibly valuable data. Sort of an automatically crowd-sourced street view.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> surprised that Tesla never took advantage of all the cameras in all its cars to do some kind of mapping Don’t they [1][2]? [1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-leads-way-data-collection-automobile-manufacturers https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-lea... [2] https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amount-data-full-self-driving-test-fleet/ https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amoun...
- Animats 5mo agoHow much cellular uplink data does a Tesla vehicle transmit per minute? Anyone know? If they're collecting video it would have to be a lot.
- rjmunro 5mo agoSome people would tell me that they do, but only for training their internal self-driving AI. I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.
- croes 5mo agoSo once again the employees should bring the data to replace them
- Hamuko 5mo agoIsn't Uber also replacing itself? If you use your human drivers to train other companies' robot taxis, aren't you gonna ruin both the human driver service and the data collection service?
- mrweasel 5mo agoShareholders won't like the plan of limiting growth. That's a really interesting point, what's the plan for when human drivers can no longer generate new data and they've already sold they what they've managed to collect to all the car markers who want to buy? It sounds like a terrible business plan.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoHow useful are these generic sensor inputs for AVs? Like, how much more valuable is a Waymo’s data for a Waymo than something Uber collects?
- neuroelectron 5mo agoI mean, yeah of course they do
- ra7 5mo ago> The insight driving the program, Naga said, is that the limiting factor for AV development is no longer the underlying technology. “The bottleneck is data,” he said. “[Companies like Waymo] need to go around and collect the data, collect different scenarios. You may be able to say: in San Francisco, ‘At this school intersection, I want some data at this time of day so I can train my models.’ The problem for all these companies is access to that data, because they don’t have the capital to deploy the cars and go collect all this information.” You can’t be the CTO of Uber wanting to do AVs, and get the data collection requirement shockingly wrong. Waymo’s bottleneck has never been data. When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation/ https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f... Waymo is able to deploy with less (but targeted and high quality) data collection by having world class simulation capabilities. Not that they haven't collected huge amounts of data as it's no doubt important (I've heard their onboard storage is transferred and emptied every few days), it's just not a bottleneck. They have the most efficient operation in the AV industry. The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.
- simmonmt 5mo ago> When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate I think it's more about detecting changes to the world. You need boots on the ground, so to speak, to see that new speed limit sign or the new lane paint. The Waymo vehicle can no doubt react to changes in the world when it encounters them, relaying them back to the mothership, but it's better to know about them in advance.
- ra7 5mo agoMost AVs, definitely Waymo vehicles, are self mapping. They can detect environment changes and relay it to the entire fleet. That's because they map using the same vehicles as the fleet.
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- durgavisionify 5mo ago[flagged]
- abubakir1997 5mo agoThe world is heading to a very dark place!
- reaperducer 5mo agoUber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for AV companies Seems par for the course. Nintendo turned legions of Pokemon Go players into unpaid sensor grids for delivery robots.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRelated: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415
- whiplash451 5mo agoHow is that related?
- pirates 5mo agoIt’s not, but this guy is in probably 70% of threads posting what he thinks is the same submission. I’ve seen several instances where the posts are different but he just links it and says it’s a duplicate anyway. If he wants to be a mod so bad he should just apply for a job imo.
- vfclists 5mo agoWill they pay the drivers for hosting the sensors? Can the drivers charge a monthly late for hosting the sensors?
- whiplash451 5mo agoIf Waymo is going to license the software, it can be tremendously useful, in particular given the variety of uber vehicles
- Avshalom 5mo agoPreviously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=uber+self+driving https://hn.algolia.com/?q=uber+self+driving
- YVoyiatzis 5mo agoCorrect. Smart move. Had Inhad the option to do the same for my car, I wouldn’t mind doing it (provided that I be compensated for it).
- breppp 5mo agoThere's a company doing this, and I don't think they were super successful https://www.getnexar.com https://www.getnexar.com
- zitterbewegung 5mo agoIsn’t this a pivot I always thought Uber wanted to automate their whole fleet instead of having to pay people ?
- le-mark 5mo agoThis exactly; self driving was a large part of their valuation iirc.
- mrweasel 5mo agoThe part I don't fully understand is what leverage this gives Uber over anyone else? Uber doesn't have the fleet management, mechanics, cleaners or even storage facilities. They do have the most used taxi app, but that seems like a very small edge. There's nothing stopping the car makers from running their own taxi service and they already have networks of mechanics and cleaner as well as some level of storage. They'd need to scale up, but they don't need to start from zero. Ubers success is in large part build on not having to own AND MANAGE their cars. With self-driving cars that advantage disappears, unless they're gaming that "drivers" will buy the cars and lease it to them.
- bastawhiz 5mo agoUber was working on self driving ten years ago. They had cars on the road loaded with cameras and sensors specifically to collect data. Then they negligently killed a woman crossing a street. This isn't a pivot, this is them trying to sheepishly reenter the race they were dramatically ejected from.
- dmix 5mo agoThe main reason Uber sold their self driving R&D unit was because they couldn't afford it. So they sold it to another company taking a 25% stake in Aurora and Uber CEO joined their board, the company is still operating automated trucking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Innovation?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Innovation?wprov=sfti1 They run trucks for Fedex in Texas and wants to offer an "Uber Freight network"
- samagragune 5mo ago"Our goal is not to make money out of this data" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a company that just committed $10B to robotaxis and is taking equity in the same AV companies it would be supplying. The actually interesting part isn't the sensor grid, that's years away and has real consent, compensation, and regulatory problems nobody's talking about. It's shadow mode: letting AV companies sim-run their models against millions of real Uber trips without putting a car on the road. That works today. That's the product. The sensor grid is the press release. Shadow mode is the business. Also completely absent from this article: do the drivers whose cars become "rolling data collection platforms" get anything? A cut? A notification? A commemorative badge? Uber has a rich history of finding creative ways to extract value from its driver network, so I'm sure they've thought carefully about this.
- cheriot 5mo agoInteresting way to encourage competition for its competitor. A single, scaled self-driving company is a massive threat to Uber.
- 33MHz-i486 5mo agoI remember Travis Kalanik spouting the talking points about self-driving in 2017, that after Waymo, Tesla had the advantage because they had the best data, that they were going to crack self-driving soon. Then I remember Dara scuttling Uber’s entire self driving division in 2019. Self-driving is possible but it requires a massive sustained investment in custom hardware on the car, in real and simulation testing, in painstaking software developlment covering tens of thousands of scenarios, realtime remote control failsafes, fleet management capabilities in every city. Waymo is the only company that comes close to the right approach. All these other Elons, GM, Uber CEOs are just jangling shiny objects in front of investors. A moonshot on the financial model for what are otherwise mature stagnant businesses.
- luotuoshangdui 5mo agoWell, if they are making money out of the data, they should pay the drivers extra.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Animats 5mo ago> “The bottleneck is data.” This seems to be wishful thinking on the part of Uber, and also Tesla. Google StreetView data is probably sufficient. Waymo's expansion into new cities does not seem to be delayed much by the need for more data. Most of the reported problems with self-driving come from transient situations. More mapping data will not help with those. China has the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, where traffic cams and other sensors let vehicles see beyond their own sightlines.[1] That's been going on since 2020. That's the ultimate in sensing - full real time road info. The Beijing test area is getting some expansion. The new direction seems to be to focus on airports and railroad stations, so that driverless cars can be aware of congestion in detail. That makes sense. [1] https://sinocities.substack.com/p/inside-chinas-connected-vehicle-road https://sinocities.substack.com/p/inside-chinas-connected-ve...
- chung8123 5mo agoData should help transient situations as well.
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- ieiee 5mo agoContext is super important. Unlike web services that giants like google provide (e.g search), waymo and other AVs essentially cannot fail. Like at all. It is suspectible to ‘randomness’ of nature that can be the difference between life and death. A lot of so called ‘smart’ people are going to find themselves getting humbled by the real world. Humans are able to make sense of the world around them through things like intuition. Machines do not possess this characteristic.
- bitwize 5mo ago(in Homer Simpson voice) Machines do not possess this characteristic SO FAR.
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- giannicmptr1000 5mo agoUber really did a lot of damage to the NYC's energy and personality, i won't miss them when they're gone. Both the delivery app and terrible ride share. The chinatown car services are still close to half the price of uber for those that don't know.