Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 231 posts

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#51

Post by beambot »

ajkjk wrote: post #21
DevKoala wrote: post #17

I am not surprised. This is a competition between Tesla and Google, technology companies. I never saw Uber, a services company, as being part of this race.

That's a weird take. How come Tesla gets to be a technology company but Uber is a services company?

One company builds a ride hailing app while the other builds one of the premier, high-performance EVs in the world with significant levels of driver assistance, over the air updates, and world-class onboard perception that industry incumbents readily admit is "years" ahead of their own development.

How exactly would you characterize the comparison?

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

justapassenger wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber has yet to show a vehicle with any semblance of reliable autonomy. Tesla has billions of experience miles at Level 2 autonomy (Navigate on Autopilot is close to, but not quite, level 3 autonomy).

Level 2 has 0 semblance of reliable autonomy. Those are completely different problems.

It is a defined level of vehicle autonomy by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).

https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#53

Post by CamelCaseName »

enlyth wrote: post #25

Any way to read the article without paying $40 for a news website that I've never heard of?

The Information is a fairly reputable source, but I understand your frustration.

I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed.

To answer your question, Outline.com doesn't seem to work here.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#54

Post by judge2020 »

closeparen wrote: post #24
judge2020 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more real money (hint: lobbying money) backing electric cars right now than there is backing autonomy since everyone in the industry knows it's at least 5 years before we get borderline level 4/99.99% reliable level 3 driving and a good 30 years before we get the 8+ nines that are needed to truly go to level 5 autonomy; most local laws are already well equipped to handle people using level 4 autonomy, so it i…

Commuting 10k miles/year is nothing special. Only four nines is still an accident every year.

I'm talking about four nines in terms of reliability (not crashes) and on level 3, where the car still has all the regular driving controls - so if there is a problem or the system has high uncertainty about certain road situations it can force/return control to the driver and have them navigate the unknown situation. I'm also probably being too optimistic predicting four nines in 5 years, it'll probably be 10 years or more for people to be able to reliably take their hands off the wheel for extended periods of time on interstates.

Edit: I realize that level 4 doesn't ask you to take over, so I've edited my comments to reflect that.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#55

Post by lallysingh »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

It isn't the money that stops rail.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#56

Post by jayd16 »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#57

Post by asdasfasdfasdf »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #19
stephc_int13 wrote: post #15

The real question should be: does driving a car requires human-level cognition?

Not on a static road without people, animals, weather, geological events, etc.

So replace roads with tubes containing a fixed track that prevents animals, weather, and people from interfering. Then add tube outlets to areas that are frequented by most travelers. You could even put these tubes underground to save space, and instead of large individual cars you could optimize the vehicles for many passengers in a small amount of space.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#58

Post by lightgreen »

yholio wrote: post #30

Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…

> dedicated and physically separated lanes

We already have trams.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#59

Post by yholio »

paxys wrote: post #46
yholio wrote: post #30

Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…

I don't see how setting up an entire new parallel road network all over the world is "less ambitious". Some of the best funded cities in this country aren't even able to lay a few miles of fiber for broadband internet.

Well, it would be the same network, with some road space dedicated to cars being repurposed for public transit. Cities do this all the time for buses.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#60

Post by ummonk »

not_a_moth wrote: post #35
necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

> my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.

No, Tesla is nowhere near self-driving capability. Collecting a bunch of unsupervised data on its own is not that useful.
Post reply on HN