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>I imagine a world where you can get anything on demand in minutes, and in that scenario Uber is the taxi, UPS, FedEx, etc. at the same time. And, with that, t

>I imagine a world where you can get anything on demand in minutes, and in that scenario Uber is the taxi, UPS, FedEx, etc. at the same time. And, with that, the feeling that Amazon.com will snap this company up for cash and stock is almost palpable. Forget drones, that's PR stuff for now. Uber is the real PTTH (product to the home) service.

opendais 12y ago
Amazon already has a PTTH service in progress and I'm pretty sure they can produce something that matches Uber for this purpose.
milesskorpen 12y ago
Given that Google has a huge stake in Uber, I think an Amazon acquisition is unlikely. I see Uber as Google's go-to-market plan for driverless cars (along with the trucking industry) ... if they can pull that off, something like this valuation is justified.
- ghaff 12y ago
  >Google's go-to-market plan for driverless cars Robo-Uber as I like to call it is all very exciting and transformative. And I have little doubt that it will happen someday. But we're talking decades according to many people who really know the topic. For example, John Leonard who was on the MIT DARPA Challenge team has said "I don’t expect to have truly driverless taxis in Manhattan in my lifetime." http://digitalcommunity.mit.edu/community/featured_content/blog/2013/09/27/john-leonard-autonomous-vehicles-have-a-long-road-ahead http://digitalcommunity.mit.edu/community/featured_content/b... Next time you drive in a city, think about all the little decisions that you're making constantly. I'd love to have a service like this but it's not going to happen within a time horizon relevant to any current financial investments.
  - ef4 12y ago
    Google has done an end-run around the challenges that make something like the DARPA Challenge difficult. Driving an autonomous vehicle in an unknown environment is still hard. But that's not the problem Google is tackling. They're solving autonomous vehicles for known environments that are mapped down to extremely high resolution. Once you have that solid ground truth, adapting to changing conditions on top of it is far easier. Which is why they've already logged 1.1 million kilometers of autonomous driving, including city streets with high complexity. What the more traditional autonomous vehicle researchers didn't/don't appreciate is that it turns out to be easier to make the whole world[1] into a well-known environment than make a car than can handle unknown environments. [1] more precisely, the parts of it that the average person would actually drive on, which is much smaller and simpler.
    - ghaff 12y ago
      >it turns out to be easier to make the whole world[1] into a well-known environment than make a car than can handle unknown environments. I fully agree. And it's the reason we could probably see fully autonomous operations on designated sections of limited access roads in the relatively near future. The unknowns in that environment--mostly other vehicles--are relatively well-defined. The reason for the skepticism about more general self-driving without even a human backup available is that even if the roads are precisely mapped the environment in a city is still largely "unknown." (Although obviously some cities are more complex than others.)
  - walterbell 12y ago
    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/michigan-is-building-a-model-city-to-test-a-network-of-self-driving-cars http://motherboard.vice.com/read/michigan-is-building-a-mode... "The University of Michigan, along with the local government and major automakers, is building a model town to test a system of self-driving "connected" cars. .. It's laying the groundwork for the real-world system planned for 2021 in Ann Arbor."

opendais 12y ago

Amazon already has a PTTH service in progress and I'm pretty sure they can produce something that matches Uber for this purpose.

milesskorpen 12y ago

Given that Google has a huge stake in Uber, I think an Amazon acquisition is unlikely. I see Uber as Google's go-to-market plan for driverless cars (along with the trucking industry) ... if they can pull that off, something like this valuation is justified.

ghaff 12y ago
>Google's go-to-market plan for driverless cars Robo-Uber as I like to call it is all very exciting and transformative. And I have little doubt that it will happen someday. But we're talking decades according to many people who really know the topic. For example, John Leonard who was on the MIT DARPA Challenge team has said "I don’t expect to have truly driverless taxis in Manhattan in my lifetime." http://digitalcommunity.mit.edu/community/featured_content/blog/2013/09/27/john-leonard-autonomous-vehicles-have-a-long-road-ahead http://digitalcommunity.mit.edu/community/featured_content/b... Next time you drive in a city, think about all the little decisions that you're making constantly. I'd love to have a service like this but it's not going to happen within a time horizon relevant to any current financial investments.
- ef4 12y ago
  Google has done an end-run around the challenges that make something like the DARPA Challenge difficult. Driving an autonomous vehicle in an unknown environment is still hard. But that's not the problem Google is tackling. They're solving autonomous vehicles for known environments that are mapped down to extremely high resolution. Once you have that solid ground truth, adapting to changing conditions on top of it is far easier. Which is why they've already logged 1.1 million kilometers of autonomous driving, including city streets with high complexity. What the more traditional autonomous vehicle researchers didn't/don't appreciate is that it turns out to be easier to make the whole world[1] into a well-known environment than make a car than can handle unknown environments. [1] more precisely, the parts of it that the average person would actually drive on, which is much smaller and simpler.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    >it turns out to be easier to make the whole world[1] into a well-known environment than make a car than can handle unknown environments. I fully agree. And it's the reason we could probably see fully autonomous operations on designated sections of limited access roads in the relatively near future. The unknowns in that environment--mostly other vehicles--are relatively well-defined. The reason for the skepticism about more general self-driving without even a human backup available is that even if the roads are precisely mapped the environment in a city is still largely "unknown." (Although obviously some cities are more complex than others.)
- walterbell 12y ago
  http://motherboard.vice.com/read/michigan-is-building-a-model-city-to-test-a-network-of-self-driving-cars http://motherboard.vice.com/read/michigan-is-building-a-mode... "The University of Michigan, along with the local government and major automakers, is building a model town to test a system of self-driving "connected" cars. .. It's laying the groundwork for the real-world system planned for 2021 in Ann Arbor."