151–160 of 213 posts
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.
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Rental cars aren't vandalized because they are inspected before and after every rental by rental company employees. Driverless rental vehicles will very quickly look like the back of public buses. "Dave {hearts} Christina" inscribed on every surface.
Have you heard of Zipcar? There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that we'll see autonomous taxis in less than decades but this doesn't seem like one of the bigger problems.
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 ca…
First, there's this widespread handwaving around getting the very detailed map data that is at least useful for even limited autonomy. At one level, it's a solved problem that that doesn't mean it won't take a huge investment to collect all this data.
The second is the idea that this mapping data may be a source of competitive advantage for individual firms working on improved assistive driving systems followed by autonomy--initially under limited circumstances. On the one hand this makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, it means that a lot of work probably ends up getting duplicated.
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.
Look at what Uber has done:
* Uber buys Nokia Here Maps for their map part and for their street imagery part.
* Uber hires robotics department.
* Uber knows today's business is supposed to be the transition phase to going into a zipcar like car-on-demand service.
There aren't too many data points here, but the only thing I can glean from this is Uber wants to have robotic cars to pick you up and drop you off and will plan that future by storing street imagery, instead of that LiDAR based method the others are doing.
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Think so too. Most likely Daimler will get a stake in Uber - which makes sense for both sides.
Uber is what you need to make an auto-driving automobile acceptable to the general public. With Uber spin, Daimler can push on the driver-less car in many markets.. Sci-fi days ahead methinks.
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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…
I currently still turn wrenches as a hobby and work on higher end Euro cars (Ferrari, Porsche, etc.) and it only gets worse. :)
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Have you heard of Zipcar? There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that we'll see autonomous taxis in less than decades but this doesn't seem like one of the bigger problems.
A car sharing company accused me of leaving a dirty vehicle. Apparently I had picked up smoking and gotten a dog without knowing it. They were quite adamant about charging me a cleaning fee until I got American Express involved.
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.
Because they are going to lease them out to drivers to compete with Lyft, which earlier this week announced a similar program.