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

131–140 of 231 posts

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

#131

Post by jfoutz »

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?

much higher stakes and much less response time. There are plenty of city drivers that get confused and, well, pull over or even just stop. it's irritating, but a sensible thing to do.

On a freeway, that's terrifying.

It _seems_ like lots of parallel systems, each with the capability to reduce speed or stop could cope with city traffic about as well as a tourist. but, uh, I guess $2.5B says otherwise.

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

#132

Post by ip26 »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
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…

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.

At this point I'm starting to be willing to consider it fairly safe when the driver is paying attention. Every press article about an autopilot crash seems to involve somebody who is completely inattentive. I can't recall any published incidents involving a driver using it as an assist, while continuing to pay attention.

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

#133

Post by grzm »

moralestapia wrote: post #71
paxys wrote: post #18

No one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.

I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the HN algo where some keywords rank higher than others. "Uber" "Billion" "Self-Driving" are hot topics by themselves and this one is all of them in one.

> "the HN algo"

In terms of keyword ranking, from what I've observed the only think taking into account things such as keywords with respect to ranking is the readers voting and flagging.

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

#134

Post by jimmydorry »

taf2 wrote: post #101
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.

I bought an iRobot and I really think if they incorporated a camera it could be significantly better. There are obvious things it picks up and gets stuck in like shoelaces and power cables. Obviously a vacuum is not self driving but it’s a similar problem and at least my casual observation is that proximity sensors along won’t solve real world navigation because we need some kind of inference to understand what the i…

The iRobot is actually not really a similar problem in scope at all.

I can appreciate why the lay person may believe them to be similar, but it's hard to express just how much more challenging even the most basic form of driver assistance technology is in comparison to an autonomous vacuum.

The biggest challenge is speed. Just look at the napkin math of detection range of sensors versus stopping distance of a car. The higher the speed, the more range you need... and lidar, radar, etc. all have a fixed maximum detection range.

The rule of thumb is 50m for radar/lidar depending on how much you are willing to pay for the sensor. To stop the car safely, will take 56m at 100km/h.

Then ofcourse, the rest of the struggle is all in exception handling (getting from 70% to 99%).

Comparatively, the iRobot can use the dumbest and cheapest sensors and still be fully aware of everything around it in its relatively slow path of travel. It also does not need to predict the paths of travel of everything around it. It's enough for it to slow down or stop, especially at such low speed. If it hits something or fails to recognise an obstacle, it's not really a big deal. In comparison, lives can be lost in the car and there will be enquiries and legal battles.

I would put good money on the camera based automation delivering the best product at the end of the day, but requiring an order of magnitude more research and development than a comparitively "dumb" lidar setup. The lidar setup will have better immediate results, but probably will never reach the 99.999% effectiveness that everyone is chasing, and will probably never be safe at higher speeds.

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

#135

Post by paxys »

rdw wrote: post #121
paxys wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Okay, so in the extreme case Uber's self driving division is estimated to be worth ~$7 billion? That proves my point more than it refutes it. Their stock has fluctuated more than that this past month.

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

#136

Post by jcranmer »

jimrandomh wrote: post #76
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…

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

Alon Levy has put together a database on transit costs: https://transitcosts.com/

The important metric isn't the cost of the project, it's the cost per km (or mile, if you prefer). The construction costs for NYC in particularly are unjustifiably obscene--it's really on the level of "fire everyone involved and make the new hires go on a world tour of transit system agencies to learn how they do cost control before they do anything."

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

#137

Post by jimmydorry »

jariel wrote: post #72
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…

The relative safety and performance of autonomous anything is very, very hard to measure - there are so many variables. Even on identical systems, different parameters will create totally different outcomes. Maybe it has 'sudden movements' because it's actually a lot after and designed to react to things that Waymo would just plow right through. Maybe they're using crappy non-production sensors. Maybe they are entire…

Absolutely. Great comment, however it's probably worth pointing out that the research and trial sensors are going to be high end, while the finished product will use the cheapest available or commericial sensors.

This is a scary prospect.

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

#138

Post by typon »

ericmay wrote: post #126
rainyMammoth wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.

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

#139

Post by ip26 »

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…

From a mile high view, does it matter what the problem is? Early laptops got us the lithium battery. ICBM's got us integrated circuits. Calculators got us microprocessors. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back and say self driving cars got us human-level computer vision- to be applied to anything you please.

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

#140

Post by jcranmer »

xvilka wrote: post #97
jimrandomh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

China and Japan aren't exactly low-cost construction countries. Actually, they're among the highest-cost non-Anglosphere countries (which are perhaps best labeled "stratospheric-cost" countries). Instead, you want to look to places like Spain, Italy, Sweden, or South Korea as low-cost countries.
Post reply on HN