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Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

nytimes.com

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Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#111

Post by Fricken »

puranjay wrote: post #96
keeptrying wrote: post #77

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

Last week Tesla began collecting short sections of video data from those with their new in-house Autopilot hardware. So really, Tesla's just getting started, and they're doing it with underpowered sensors and compute.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-u...

Waymo was ahead of where Tesla is now back in 2012. In a demonstration capacity, Waymo's cars were working 5 years ago, but in the intermittent time Waymo has been validating their software against every possible edge case they might encounter on a real world situation, and Tesla will have to do the same one way or another before their autonomous OS can operate safely without a babysitter.

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#112

Post by xapata »

Theodores wrote: post #89
paulddraper wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Why?

If you are in London and you have got to get that famous child prodigy to the film studio with chaperone and teacher then you will be ordering them an Addison Lee private hire vehicle or better. A regular cab or some unlicenced 'Uber' gig-economy 'cab' isn't going to cut it. I expect that other parts of the world are the same.

That's not really in the spirit of the question. That same famous child prodigy with chaperone might be upset if you brought them a coke without pouring it in a crystal glass. My reading of the "Why?" question was curiosity about more typical clients.

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#113

Post by kyrra »

puranjay wrote: post #96
keeptrying wrote: post #77

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day).

Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0].

So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research.

[0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#114

Post by ma2rten »

puranjay wrote: post #96
keeptrying wrote: post #77

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#115

Post by yalogin »

puranjay wrote: post #96
keeptrying wrote: post #77

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#116

Post by yellow_postit »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #104
mattnewton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, there are nicer touches in the Lyft app- the colored signs, color-accurate picture of the make and model of the car, and generally friendlier driver instructions make getting into the car and riding more pleasant for me.

Not to mention the fact that you can easily tip, knowing how tough things are for drivers with base pricing.

My personal view is that the rates should be set such that tipping is not expected. That remains the main draw of Uber for me.

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#117

Post by neosat »

This could be a longer term death blow for Lyft, ironically. If Google has the self driving tech, the car & car partnerships, the money, maps, access to end consumers, what exactly does it need Lyft for? Lyft will be a vehicle for Google to kickstart and test this out with a current ride sharing network before Lyft is cut off ...

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#119

Post by azernik »

neosat wrote: post #117

This could be a longer term death blow for Lyft, ironically. If Google has the self driving tech, the car & car partnerships, the money, maps, access to end consumers, what exactly does it need Lyft for? Lyft will be a vehicle for Google to kickstart and test this out with a current ride sharing network before Lyft is cut off ...

If Google/Waymo wants to be running the whole business end-to-end, they'll buy up Lyft for its established network. If not, then Lyft will just be the pilot customer, and will probably end up competing with later customers.

Re: Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

#120

Post by azernik »

yellow_postit wrote: post #116
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the fact that you can easily tip, knowing how tough things are for drivers with base pricing.

My personal view is that the rates should be set such that tipping is not expected. That remains the main draw of Uber for me.

Lyft actually has higher rates (for the driver) than Uber.
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