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Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

reuters.com

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Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#141

Post by lsc »

bliti wrote: post #125
dsr_ wrote: post #112

I am reminded of Lucent, who built the best hardware for the end-user ISP market in the form of the Ascend MAX TNT, which would terminate a DS3, break it into individual dialup lines, and handle all of them as modem calls. Cool stuff. It's just that they sold all this stuff to ISPs who didn't have any good credit lines, so Lucent extended them credit (bing! interest payments!) using the MAXen as collateral. When the…

The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. Whoever is making this deal should probably stop by the Lexus dealership before they sign any papers.

> The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high.

You are correct, of course, but I think the majority of that would go away if you hired the mechanic yourself and bought parts direct. My theory is that most of the German luxury vehicle surcharge is the "hey, it looks like you've got money, how about you give me some of that" surcharge.

I mean, I've owned a BMW 325is and a Toyota Sienna. Similar vehicles in that the vehicles had similarly sized engines/transmissions and brakes to match.

Sure, my experience agrees with your assertion in that rolling into the mechanic in the 325is is going to cost me north of twice what rolling into the mechanic in my Toyota Sienna will cost me.

But if you are doing the work yourself? the German car isn't any harder to work on. If anything, I think the german mechanical aesthetics agree with me in ways that make working on it easier than working on a Japanese car. Sure, they need a little bit more love in that they're just not as advanced as a Japanese car, or at least not as much effort is put into maintenance free operation, so you need to do more to keep them running, but that difference isn't huge. Parts are also not hugely more expensive than similarly specc'd parts on the toyota (e.g. brake rotors cost about the same on my 325is as they did on my toyota sienna; they were similarly sized, too; it's just the 325is was a much smaller car, so stopped dramatically better.)

I mean, I'm generalizing about German luxury vehicles from my experience with another brand, but yeah, if you hire your own mechanic, I bet most of the maintenance cost differences become much smaller.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#142

Post by smacktoward »

Animats wrote: post #138

Why would Uber want to buy non-self-driving cars? Right now, they have their drivers buying the cars for them. Their current business model shoves all the capital costs down onto the driver. If Uber owns a lot of cars, their business model looks far different, more like Hertz. This will reduce their valuation substantially.

Presumably they believe the savings from being able to stop paying drivers will more than make up for it.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#143

Post by bliti »

desireco42 wrote: post #135
bliti wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. Whoever is making this deal should probably stop by the Lexus dealership before they sign any papers.

Lexus is nowhere near Mercedes

Absolutely. One is headquartered in Germany and the other in Japan/USA. Lexus cars are more reliable, though.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#144

Post by msoad »

TLDR: It's not self driving. It's data collecting cars for now.

I know a little bit about this. It's not "self-driving" car per se. You know with current technology we can't have completely driver-less cars. But to get there we need a lot of data. Uber and Lyft saw all the rides on their systems and thought if we had a lot of sensors in cars and recored all of that we could have the winning factor for self driving cars which is data.

In order to record that data they need customized cars. They also need to own the car to own the data associated with it (this is my assumption).

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#145

Post by bliti »

lsc wrote: post #141
bliti wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. Whoever is making this deal should probably stop by the Lexus dealership before they sign any papers.

> The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. You are correct, of course, but I think the majority of that would go away if you hired the mechanic yourself and bought parts direct. My theory is that most of the German luxury vehicle surcharge is the "hey, it looks like you've got money, how about you give me some of that" surcharge. I mean, I've owned a BMW 325is and a Toyota Sienna. Similar vehicles in tha…

I'm a mechanic and software guy. Your theory is incorrect. German parts and labor generally cost more. Mostly due to complexity. An S-Class has more on-board electronics than the average Boeing. They begin to have issues after the 2 year mark and are not cheap to fix. Even if you have your own shop and parts. The 325 you had is a simpler BWM that did not carry such complexity.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#146

Post by lsc »

bliti wrote: post #145
lsc wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. You are correct, of course, but I think the majority of that would go away if you hired the mechanic yourself and bought parts direct. My theory is that most of the German luxury vehicle surcharge is the "hey, it looks like you've got money, how about you give me some of that" surcharge. I mean, I've owned a BMW 325is and a Toyota Sienna. Similar vehicles in tha…

I'm a mechanic and software guy. Your theory is incorrect. German parts and labor generally cost more. Mostly due to complexity. An S-Class has more on-board electronics than the average Boeing. They begin to have issues after the 2 year mark and are not cheap to fix. Even if you have your own shop and parts. The 325 you had is a simpler BWM that did not carry such complexity.

I'm not saying you are wrong; the new cars might well be way more complex in ways that might cause people to spend more time troubleshooting, I wouldn't know.

I haven't dealt with anything really more complex than the early 'aughts toyota... at least up until that point, the electronics made it way easier for a shadetree mechanic like me to solve problems. There's all sorts of ways to get diagnostic codes out of the thing; on the bmw, you did this dance where you turned it on, then floored the gas a certain number of times, and then the 'check engine' light would tap out a code you could look up in the manual, just like beep codes on a motherboard. On my Toyota, I hook up the OBD thing and it gives me a code I can plug into google and get youtube videos of how to fix it. I've never dealt with an electrical problem more complex than one of the the (what do you call them? the short wire things that go from the coils to the spark plugs on the bmw) going out of spec in terms of resistance, but that was pretty easy to diagnose with the manual and multimeter.

But if it really is the complexity that creates the cost, why was it so expensive to pay someone else to service my simple 325is?

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#147

Post by williamcotton »

username223 wrote: post #130
sirkneeland wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the other function Uber serves is not just an aggregator of supply (of cars and drivers) but of demand (passengers). It is far from a trivial effort to have a sufficient amount of users know of your app/service, download and install it, trust it enough to add payment details and use it. While not quite as insurmountable an obstacle as, say, making a new smartphone platform (sorry Palm/Nokia/BlackBerry/Microso…

> I think the other function Uber serves is not just an aggregator of supply (of cars and drivers) but of demand (passengers). I think you misunderstand Uber. Most of its perceived value is in arbitrage between drivers' perceived and actual costs of car ownership: drivers mostly think in terms of wages minus cost of gas, ignoring all of the other costs. Given that business model, I doubt Uber is actually looking at b…

So do individuals buy or lease self-driving cars in the future? Would they then set up their self-driving car to take instructions from Uber's central dispatch service in exchange for a cut of the profits?

Currently both Uber and Lyft handle the task of vetting drivers and making sure there is a good experience for their customers. They organize and control the labor required for a good experience for the riders.

Think about a rider in a world where Lyft and Uber are both dispatching self-driving cars. What's the difference between the services if they're all using Mercedes S-Class SelfDrivers? The rider knows that all Mercedes S-Class SelfDrivers are the same experience. There's no question of if the driver is trustworthy or competent. Uber and Lyft would be providing the exact same commodity experience of sending a self-driving car to your location to then do your bidding in exchange for money.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#148

Post by jfoutz »

Someone wrote: post #62
mixedbit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if they expect to use them as self driving cars (which the article mentions), the investment can pay out pretty quickly. Say they can make on average 5$ per ride. To make $60k they need 12k rides. A self driving car should be able to easily make 12k rides in one year (only 32 rides per day).

Only 32 rides per day? I would think that's pushing the limit. You will have to buy cars for peak times, so most of them will see only a few hours of use each day. At a guessed 6 hours of busy service a day, that's 5 trips an hour, or 6 minutes to drive to a customer and 6 to drive him where he wants to be. Also, a risk here is that other large parties will make the same calculation, flood the market (anybody with mo…

I don't think they need to tackle peak driving time at the start. They still have all of those regular drivers. Surge pricing should still draw out humans.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#150

Post by dsl »

lsc wrote: post #141
bliti wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. Whoever is making this deal should probably stop by the Lexus dealership before they sign any papers.

> The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. You are correct, of course, but I think the majority of that would go away if you hired the mechanic yourself and bought parts direct. My theory is that most of the German luxury vehicle surcharge is the "hey, it looks like you've got money, how about you give me some of that" surcharge. I mean, I've owned a BMW 325is and a Toyota Sienna. Similar vehicles in tha…

I once asked my father (a lifelong auto mechanic) why servicing high end vehicles is so expensive. Roughly from memory, don't quote me on makes/models/etc:

Most cars require special, often model specific, tools to service them. A specific adapter to take off an oil filter on your Honda Civic, or a set of special ramps that get your super low Ferrari on to the car hoist. The shop then has to amortize the cost of tools over the number of vehicles they service with it. So the special wrench used for the Civic can probably be used for 500 oil changes in a year, but the Ferrari ramps are used on maybe 10 a year. Not to mention the specific training required to do the actual service.

In a computer related example, imagine a receptionist that just needs Microsoft Paint to put text on signs around the office. Now compare that to an industrial designer that needs a $10,000 licence for a CAD application and specific training to do material stress analysis on your new iPhone accessory. Each sign has little to no incremental cost, whereas each iPhone accessory needs to pay for part of that licence and class.

If Uber were to buy thousands of the exact same vehicle, they would have a predictable amortization of a spark plug tension wrench, while a dealer might hope to get enough cars in a year to justify the cost.

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