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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

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

#161

Post by bostonpete »

xdavidliu wrote: post #119
nemothekid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.

This argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed co…

So we should down-weight WSJ, NYT, and all the other sites that have paywalls?

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

#162

Post by whakim »

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.

I'm not sure that self-driving cars would make the difference to Uber's profits that everyone assumes. Uber would probably have to own all the vehicles and pay all the costs associated with owning a huge fleet. Has anyone actually done the math on how much money that saves over paying drivers?

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

#163

Post by odux »

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.

But a substantially improved autonomous car driving experience - with cars communicating with each other (actively or passively) to avoid congestion, avoiding parking needs by being on the move always and increasing "bandwidth" by driving close to there other cars and still being safe - may look like railroads on all our roads. Bringing both these worlds closer to each other.

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

#164

Post by nemothekid »

xdavidliu wrote: post #119
nemothekid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.

This argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed co…

The argument doesn't make sense to you because you assume every other person on the site isn't willing to pay for news. However, there is a 3rd option: you could just not participate. There is nothing in the HN rules that dictate you must participate in everything posted here.

By HN design, if such sites aren't useful to the HN community, they wouldn't be regularly upvoted. However counter to that, every week you see an article from wsj.com, theinformation.com or bloomberg.com hit the front page, precisely because despite having paywalls they continue to produce good content. Given the amount of engineers sucking six figure salaries on this site, I'd say a good percentage of them who might value actual news may pay for a subscription, which is why these sites continue to be posted here. I wouldn't want to see wsj.com downweighted below buzzfeed.com just because buzzfeed is free.

The ones who choose to complain, rather than just abstaining, are the problem. They could simply decide to not participate and HN wouldn't be any worse off. However the complaining that news organizations must (1) offer all news for free (2) don't use ad networks and (3) not be mouthpieces corporate PR is not going to accomplish anything.

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

#165

Post by smachiz »

ghaff wrote: post #142
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…

Everyone has made disappointingly little progress on full self-driving in the sense of driving little Johnny from the house to soccer practice by himself. There are possibly opportunities on freeways but anyone who expects to be able to get robo-Ubers door-to-door for decades is likely to be disappointed.

lol.

You're VASTLY underestimating how much progress is being made by companies that aren't Uber.

3-10 years is a more realistic timetable than decades.

"People overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10".

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

#166

Post by Cactus2018 »

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.

>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.

Google/Waymo did a pilot - letting employees commute - and canceled because the system was too good and staff stopped paying attention.

This is a clip, there was a longer clip and description in a Waymo CEO speech in the past year or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ePWBBrWSzo

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

#167

Post by justapassenger »

revscat wrote: post #160
justapassenger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It maybe competition between Tesla and Google, one day in far away future. But so far, Tesla is dead last in self-driving cars. They some cool driver-aid systems, but their self-driving tech is still being written and rewritten, and didn't even begin any tests on the roads.

And yet there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of drivers who use Tesla’s Autopilot every day, myself included, without incident and to great benefit.

Which is great. But it doesn't change the fact, that it's not self driving car.

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

#168

Post by revscat »

justapassenger wrote: post #167
revscat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of drivers who use Tesla’s Autopilot every day, myself included, without incident and to great benefit.

Which is great. But it doesn't change the fact, that it's not self driving car.

Your assertion that they are “dead last” remains ridiculous given the millions of self-driving miles their cars have driven.

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

#169

Post by jcranmer »

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…

When you pack people into a train, you fit about 1 person per m². Pack people into a single-occupancy cars, you get about 1 person per 10 m², or 0.1 person per m². That's a 10× capacity loss that has to be made up somehow if you want to move people as efficiently as possible.

Autonomous cars don't solve the problem of inefficient use of land for transportation (actually, they probably make it worse since there will be a decent fraction of cars moving absolutely no one). Space is at an absolute premium in cities, and people really underestimate just how much space cars take up, particularly since that space is incredibly subsidized.

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

#170

Post by sidibe »

Hypx wrote: post #148
ericmay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m more willing to believe that Tesla is just committing fraud here before believing they have any kind of lead.

This seems pretty accurate, $8k for something that was called "Full self driving" that was supposed to be close to ready years ago and instead won't be ready for the lifetime of the car. This would have been a class-action lawsuit if Tesla customers weren't so spectacularly loyal.
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