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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

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

#121

Post by rdw »

paxys wrote: post #91
howlgarnish wrote: post #31

> Critics question why CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hasn’t held the team accountable. Because Uber's insane valuation is largely predicated on them being able to pivot out of expensive human "driver-partners" into cheap and compliant robots, and any sort of public acknowledgement that this is not going to happen would tank their stock.

There is really nothing to back that claim. There are plenty of other companies in similar sectors (ridesharing, transportation, food delivery) in the US and beyond with similar valuations and no self driving ambitions or technology. Uber's self driving research has been seen from day 1 as an expensive hobby, nothing more. A company which can achieve level 5 automation and has the capability to roll it out worldwide…

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/uber-lyft-are-betting-that-dr... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/19/ubers-sel... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/01/24/ube... https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-uber-ipo-stock-price-... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-... https://www.wired.com/story/bet-uber-bet-self-driving/

I think the broadest interpretation is that autonomous driving was one of a few irons Uber has had in the fire to achieve profitability. The other irons include Uber Eats, Jump, and lately, grocery delivery. The miracle hasn't happened yet!

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

#122

Post by lightgreen »

yholio wrote: post #73
lightgreen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dedicated and physically separated lanes We already have trams.

They can route people from fixed point A to point B, and some locations along a predetermined rute from A to B. Personal rapid transit allows a Many to Many mapping, just like cars.

OK, that many-to-many thing may still use rails, which is 100 times easier to implement (autopilot part) than self-driving cars on dedicated lanes.

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

#123

Post by vsareto »

viburnum wrote: post #39

What I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?

Even if you can identify the hand signal, and identify that a construction worker is giving them (establishing authority that the car should follow this signal), the signal contains a lot of implied information.

If the worker indicates you to go into the opposing lane, how long should the car remain there? How do you tell the construction part is done and you should return to normal self-driving logic? Sometimes there are cones, but sometimes not. American workers do often have Slow / Stop signs, giving a clear indication of when to move at least.

If you are going down a street slowly, and someone is wearing a hi-vis vest for their own safety, and they point at something, is your car going to follow that pedestrian's instructions?

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

#124

Post by xiphias2 »

beisner wrote: post #82
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…

The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.

I vote for China, as they have the political strength to allow it even at a stage when it's not yet safer than an average driver.

I believe that's not good enough for Singapore or U.S.

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

#125

Post by maxlamb »

judge2020 wrote: post #78
beambot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Uber is more of a tech company in that their entire value is based on internet connectivity (while Tesla could take a 99% market cap hit and still put together metal on an assembly line), but Uber is less impressive since it's just an app and an API connecting drivers to people and sometimes throwing a restaurant in the mix.

People forget these days that technology (i.e. “tech companies”) does not equate to the internet, which is a just small subset. Technology is defined as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.”

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

#126

Post by ericmay »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #63
not_a_moth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Tesla is not even considered in the top half of the contenders. They are the best at hyping it up though.

It blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead?

I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else.

It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).

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

#127

Post by aljg »

ethbr0 wrote: post #87
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'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs. Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the endin…

>Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way.

There is nothing ordained about this. If we stopped giving away billions of dollars of the most valuable real estate in the world (in the form of parking mandates and street parking) or stopped ruining neighborhoods with freeways and car-centric development then rail (and transit more generally)_could very well be better by these metrics.

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

#128

Post by maxerickson »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #115
maxerickson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean the green bits there are the part where the car can be relied on to drive by itself (with the blue bits requiring constant attention). Arguing about what to call it is boring. Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention? Or does it just have the bit that can successfully navigate a lot of situations?

Having driven across the US almost 30k miles on Navigate On Autopilot in our Teslas, I’d argue the former (“Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention?”). Attention is given, but intervention is rare, even in construction zones (only done when zones are inactive, not with workers present for obvious reasons). Interstate to in…

If the system/software to safely hand over control isn't present in the vehicle, what does driving 30k miles demonstrate about how close they are to deploying it?

Much of the distinction between level 2 and level 3 is that the vehicle reliably hands over control. Successfully navigating situations doesn't provide much information about how close that capability might be.

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

#129

Post by brianwawok »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #63
not_a_moth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Tesla is not even considered in the top half of the contenders. They are the best at hyping it up though.

Can you buy better on the market today?

Hoping the AP rewrite closes some of the gap... we will see!

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

#130

Post by ghaff »

jml7c5 wrote: post #96
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

Freeway driving would generally be much simpler than city driving, wouldn't it?

It is. And it's a nice feature that at least the luxury car makers are iterating on. The problem is that it isn't very interesting for folks who don't want to own a car and/or want a robo-driver to take them door-to-door all the time. A real freeway autopilot feature is still a nice convenience/safety feature but you still need a licensed sober driver for the endpoints of the trip.
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