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

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141–150 of 383 posts

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

#141
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft barely exists outside of the US. Uber is still on top if you take a global view.

Yes but other services hurt uber in other markets (didi?).

Didn't Uber get a significant chunk of Didi stock when it agreed to exit china? I have no idea how uber is doing overall abroad but china didn't appear to be a total wash for them at least.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has Tesla positioned itself super well. Didn't they...just recently figure out that factories are more difficult than cars? Or will they be a partner? Please clarify.

Tesla has working, autonomous software running on vehicles in the real world gathering real data that can be used to improve. They're also a car manufacturer. They didn't "just recently figure out factories are more difficult than cars" but even if they did the market is so immature for self driving that they would have several years to build up manufacturing capabilities. It wouldn't matter.

Not true. Tesla has working advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) in the form of their "Autopilot" feature. This is as Level 2 (out of 5) on the autonomy scale. They are still very very far from Level 5. Much more so than Google.

Furthermore, they were getting their software from MobilEye, an Israel-based startup but cut ties with them last year and are developing their own Autopilot 2 program, which so far has not reached parity with MobilEye's Autopilot 1.

Still a long way to go and will be interesting to see whether they catch up to Google with all this crowdsourced data they collect.

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

#143

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 assuming you mean the first ones without human chaperones? Because I've seen plenty of self-driving Uber cars shuttling passengers around the streets of SF over the past year.

I thought Uber stopped that program after the red light thing? I assume they mean the same though because Google have had self driving cars in Mountain View for years - this article claims 2 million miles last October : https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-car-progra... I'm not sure how that stacks against competitors but I imagine they're a long way ahead.

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

#144
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft barely exists outside of the US. Uber is still on top if you take a global view.

Lyft have a deal with Grab here in Southeast Asia. As I understand I can use Grab to book Lyfts in areas where Lyft operates and Grab doesn't (and vice versa).

OK, but that is more of a convenience for American tourists who may not have a local phone number to sign up for Grab than an actual service. People that live outside the US are not going to have the Lyft app in the first place.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You shouldn't need to upload the entire 1gb. The central AI can query the cars to get just the bits it has questions about. Part of the AI's job is learning which data to care about and which data to ignore.

The fact that the trees got new leaves again this year and it's dark at 2am and the sign at the Chinese Restaurant is still red don't to be relayed.

More data isn't automatically better. The hard part isn't getting some magical quantity of data the hard part is asking the right questions of it.

A self driving system needs to solve this problem (the frame problem) anyway. So you get intelligence compression for "free".

In a sense, intelligence is compression.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but other services hurt uber in other markets (didi?).

Didn't Uber get a significant chunk of Didi stock when it agreed to exit china? I have no idea how uber is doing overall abroad but china didn't appear to be a total wash for them at least.

Uber received a 17.5% stake in Didi as part of the deal [1], which is worth ~8.75B given their most recent raise at a ~50B valuation [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-28/china-s-d...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/didi-chinas-uber-raises-5-5-bil...

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd. I'm in the Bay Area and have taken many Lyft's lately both in the south bay and also the peninsula. Usually the drivers I get drive for both even up to this point. Could just be regional, not really sure? I feel like even with Uber's issues many drivers who do ride-sharing as a "job" won't want to just drop Uber as it may mean losing out on income (not sure if they can make up the loss with driving more for Lyft…

I'm in the bay area, and I've chatted about this with many drivers. People USED TO drive for both, but now Lyft has enough network traffic that they're too busy to flip between networks.

I had a couple drivers tell me they'd use Lyft until they had too many hours and we're forced to take a break, then they switch to Uber until the mandatory Lyft break is over. I forget how many hours they said they drive on average, but it was a lot.

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

#148

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.

Volvo / zenuity are also doing well. They'll probably have the first level 4 cars in public hands. It remains to see who can get to level 5. https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-auto...

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I feel like there is no way Uber would be on the brink of bankruptcy and not be able to fundamentally change the problems that have persisted so far. I guess what I'm getting at is that a company valued at 69 billion dollars going out of business in less than 2 years should be a surprise to everyone .

Would they run the coffers dry though? The answer might be yes and I'd go with yes, but if they're for some reason on what they see as a death spiral, they could return some investor money and call it quits.

Agreed. I imagine a more likely scenario is they slam on the breaks by raising prices and firing a bunch of people before they run out of money. This of course would tank the companies valuation and result in a big decline in ride traffic. I'd be really surprised to see uber completely go away. I think the worst case scenario would be for them to go public and have their valuation impload, I.e a groupon like outcome.

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

#150

When I use lyft now, I'm coming across drivers that only drive for lyft. The tide has definitely shifted against Uber. I'm not really sure there's a way back at this point. The one advantage Uber had was network effect, but in my experience that has diminished. Lyfts come just as fast as Ubers now because they have enough drivers on the road to support the response time. I'll never go back to Uber.

I'd say this assessment is clouded by your own judgements of Uber. Uber is vastly larger than Lyft. I've taken Uber's all over the world (Europe, South America), Lyft barely has market penetration in rural areas of the United States.

I recently bet my friend who is supremely confident that United Airlines business will be significantly impacted due to the passenger incident. Thus far, it appears United is doing just fine[1], in fact they may be on pace for a blowout Q2 quarter. Money in the bank.

Moral of the story... These types of negative incidents (In my opinion I call it the constant outrage complex) rarely affects finance fundamentals of solid businesses. If you want to take a moral stand against Uber you are absolutely entitled to that and that is fine with me.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/story/14125827/1/united-reports-7-...

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