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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

investor.lyft.com

31–40 of 350 posts

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#31
post #4

Did not know Lyft had a self-driving car initiative. Was that well known? Did they, like Uber, sink tons of money into it before bailing?

Of course, yes and yes. The business model is complete nonsense otherwise.

The business model isn't nonsense. It justifies a company existing to do what Lyft does, just at a much smaller scale and valuation.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#32
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

It is mostly a hardware problem. Tesla's can't do FSD with current hardware because there aren't redundant cameras in each direction. One camera gets mud on it and your car runs itself into oncoming traffic. (It does that anyway right now, but even if software bugs are fixed this is still intractable). A real solution has to be capable of cleaning all cameras (probably faster than a windshield wiper would), because t…

Tesla would be lucky if the extent of its challenges were having enough cameras pointing in the right direction. Tesla handicapped itself by only developing its driving systems with cameras and not lidar.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#33
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train.

The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off.

Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#34
post #29
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

"Blinded by the sun" is an understandable failure-state when you design a driving system that's reliant on cameras. From https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-acti...: "Theoretically, it should be possible to detect the side of a truck using cameras. But it's not always easy. In some lighting conditions, for example, the side of a trailer might be hard to distinguish from the sky behind it."

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#35

100m a year, 0 roi expense gone. Also no more shared rides due to COVID (which I expect will never come back to Uber or Lyft since they were gigantic money sinks). Assuming ridership is bouncing back from COVID I wouldn't be surprised if their first profitable quarter was this year.

Why we're shared rides such gigantic money sinks ?

In theory at least, it can just be some algorithm and some screen space on the app.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like reliability SLAs, I suspect every extra nine requires an exponential increase in investment. My armchair-know-nothing assessment is we're maybe at 90% coverage* right now, with maybe 10x all investment up until this point needed to reach 99%; then 10x that to reach 99.9%. Even at 99.9%, though, a failure scenario still threatens injuring or killing 0.1% of drivers (350,000 motorists for US alone). * Coverag…

Would not they detect the gates where down ? or are there still that many crossings without gates in the USA

The place I talked about had no gates, after the accident they added gates.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is mostly a hardware problem. Tesla's can't do FSD with current hardware because there aren't redundant cameras in each direction. One camera gets mud on it and your car runs itself into oncoming traffic. (It does that anyway right now, but even if software bugs are fixed this is still intractable). A real solution has to be capable of cleaning all cameras (probably faster than a windshield wiper would), because t…

Tesla would be lucky if the extent of its challenges were having enough cameras pointing in the right direction. Tesla handicapped itself by only developing its driving systems with cameras and not lidar.

Right, because people have LIDAR installed already.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#38
post #9

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

The edge case that I always go to on why truly autonomous vehicles are decades+ away is winter driving. Lane markers and road signs disappear. Slush and salt spray constantly obscure sensors.

Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert where there is basically never any inclement weather.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#39

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

I loathe to think about more complicated regulation, but I think Elon is pushing the boundaries of disclosure. That, and that we have a lot of new populism in stocks, makes me think the SEC maybe needs an update.

I kind of like Elon being able to say 'whatever', but on the other hand, it's not his money now, it's crossed the threshold into public financing, so statements like L2 v. L5 are 'material' and saying the wrong thing is a 'lie' and 'bad'.

Again with the paradox is that he's going to be hosting SNL which is kind of fun to see, on the other hand, it's going to be another occasion to hustle a stock or some kind of crypto which is distasteful.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

This seems like the edgiest of all possible edge case arguments against self-driving cars, considering that a meat-driven car crashed through a working barrier and into a perfectly obvious train in the Bay Area just this morning.

Obviously meat-based drivers have flaws. The question is if the FSD robots at least retain all the existing capabilities of meat-based drivers. Trading one set of deficiencies for another raises the question of which set is preferable.

The reality is that for a long time we will combine both sets of capabilities and use "self driving" tech to enhance human driver capabilities.

In that case self-driving first needs to be able to avoid the relatively simple case of not of smashing through a barrier and the human driver can use their wetware to figure out how to handle railroad crossings which are diverse and complicated.

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