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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

#171

Post by nodesocket »

CPLX wrote: post #165
nodesocket wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the finance fundamentals of Uber are truly horrible. Their only explanation for literally lighting billions of dollars in funds on fire to subsidize rides is supposedly to consolidate market share. If they don't have a defensible position and they lose money on every transaction what exactly do they have to show for it?

Sure Uber is losing gobs of money, but that's not the most important metric at this stage for them. Look at Tesla, they lost 330 million in 2017 Q1. You absolutely will find bears against Tesla, but that's mainly because of its current $324 share price, not its fundamental business which is losing money.

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

#172

Post by cycrutchfield »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #145
ma2rten wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 getti…

You have essentially just described distributed learning. Only transmit the gradients back to the central server, not the data.

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

#173

Post by jonthepirate »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #14

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 wonder if when Uber finally craters if it will take the SF real estate market with it.

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

#174

Post by quonn »

CPLX wrote: post #165
nodesocket wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the finance fundamentals of Uber are truly horrible. Their only explanation for literally lighting billions of dollars in funds on fire to subsidize rides is supposedly to consolidate market share. If they don't have a defensible position and they lose money on every transaction what exactly do they have to show for it?

> literally lighting billions of dollars in funds on fire

Figuratively. But even that's not true, since customers have saved real money and spent it elsewhere.

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

#175

Post by bigbugbag »

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 ...

To further suffocate Uber by supporting their direct comptetitor ?

To signal other would be poachers and tech snatchers that you don't mess with the Google ?

To experiment outside of the google brand ?

To test waters before buying Lyft ?

To evaluate if it is better to enter the market providing rides to people or providing technology to companies providing rides to people ?

There are quite a few reasons for google to be a partner for lyft.

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

#176

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

nodesocket wrote: post #150
alistproducer2 wrote: post #14

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…

Uber in Europe stopped expanding and is very different in some places. For instance in Berlin you hail normal cabs with it.

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

#177

Post by riffraff »

nodesocket wrote: post #171
CPLX wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the finance fundamentals of Uber are truly horrible. Their only explanation for literally lighting billions of dollars in funds on fire to subsidize rides is supposedly to consolidate market share. If they don't have a defensible position and they lose money on every transaction what exactly do they have to show for it?

Sure Uber is losing gobs of money, but that's not the most important metric at this stage for them. Look at Tesla, they lost 330 million in 2017 Q1. You absolutely will find bears against Tesla, but that's mainly because of its current $324 share price, not its fundamental business which is losing money.

but then what is the most important metric for Uber?

AFAIR they are not growing as fast as they were, and have been all but outlawed in many places already.

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

#178

Post by dagw »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #52
goobynight wrote: post #46

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.

Tesla has working, autonomous software running on vehicles in the real world gathering real data that can be used to improve.

Tesla has pretty good driver assist software that they claim, without evidence, can be used for self driving. But then again everybody has driver assist software and everybody is currently building self driving cars. The big question is can Tesla learn to build reasonably priced, reliable cars at scale faster than for example Volvo can perfect their self driving technology. Because we already know that Volvo can build cars and meet production goals.

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

#179

Post by praptak »

nodesocket wrote: post #150
alistproducer2 wrote: post #14

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…

Such incidents set the climate for the debate that is perhaps relatively unimportant for United but critical for Uber: regulation.

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

#180

Post by shubhamaggarwal »

helloindia wrote: post #127
rorykoehler wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As a guy from India, what is Grab?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=grab
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