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

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

#181

Post by heavyset_go »

manigandham wrote: post #148
plank_time wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away. The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an…

Can you share examples of these things? Isn't training data considered "experience"?

No, training data influences the values of weights and biases in a neural network. An over-fitted NN might encode the training data in its network, but in general, the training data can't be recalled in the same way that a human can recall, learn from, make judgments and adjust their future behavior and perceptions based on their experiences.

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

#182

Post by jogjayr »

joe_the_user wrote: post #80
ecpottinger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alrea…

A human being can drive a million miles without a serious accident. 2018 saw 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven[1]. Human beings are extremely good at driving safely overall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> A human being can drive a million miles without a serious accident

A million miles sounds like a lot, but it isn't. The average American drives 12,000 miles annually. Assuming a driving career of 52 years (from age 18 to 70), the average American will drive 624k miles. So the lifetime chances of getting into a serious accident are not exactly small.

(I don't know how to calculate the probability here, actually. Is 624k/1M the lifetime probability of getting into a serious accident?)

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

#184

Post by rbg246 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #159
mNovak wrote: post #112

In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.

Toyota is the last company I expect to bring something new to market well. The last time they did that it was the Prius and it was kind of a fluke IMO. Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner…

Not sure whether you have factored in lost days of revenue into your back of envelope TCO.

When a cheaper less reliable car is in the garage being repaired it's not just about the cost of repair but also the opportunity cost of lost revenue.

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

#185

Post by repsilat »

ra7 wrote: post #12
gtirloni wrote: post #3

Well... "In December 2020, Lyft announced that it will launch a multi-city U.S. robotaxi service in 2023 with Motional." https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSK...

They also have a partnership with Waymo to provide autonomous rides. Ultimately, I think Lyft, Uber and the likes will just become a provider/maintainer of robotaxi rides, while the actual tech will be done by Waymo et al.

Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber.

If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a robot a third of what you need to pay a human, I wonder whether the negotiation would come out closer to

1. One part Uber, one part driver (so Uber's cut maintains its value) or

2. Still one part Uber, three parts driver, but the values are all lower and the total volumes higher.

I'd think it would need to shake out closer to the latter case than the former to keep Uber in the game, for a few reasons:

- Self-driving car companies are software companies. They can make Uber clones, given enough resources and time.

- There isn't really a two-sided marketplace bootstrapping process. These companies have enough capital to put a lot of cars on the road, and I don't think the economies of scale are actually that big -- there isn't much cross-benefit from scale in disconnected cities, and inside a given city you need 4x as many cars to halve wait times so the scale benefits tail off sharply. And I bet there's little brand-loyalty.

- If there are few self-driving car companies in a market, they'd have relatively large market power, so they could dictate rates more effectively than an atomised driver pool.

Shrugs, it could happen if the rates were low enough, but I suspect it won't. But I'm probably greatly underestimating the benefits of partnership -- dispatching is probably easy, and AV companies will necessarily be savvy with regulators, but customer-interaction and "app surface-area" are likely places where the existing players have a real leg-up. That said, the labour market is pretty porous in the Bay Area...

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

#186

Post by Animats »

Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora.

Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1]

Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020.

No pricing yet, so this is still a demo.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...

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

#187

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #176
rhodozelia wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are Toyota’s more reliable in the long run, they have fewer defects out of the factory, fewer lemons, and because of this reputation they don’t depreciate as quickly. I am going to get a new Tacoma every 2 years because I can sell the old one for nearly the same price as the new one. No more losing 50% of the value as soon as you drive it off the lot.

Aren't the new Tacomas made in Mexico? Do you think that will affect their reliability?

You'd be surprised how many good things come out of "Made in Mexico"... the biggest issues are always out of spec components and starting at a new factory and having people be scared of reporting QC problems.

I'd expect the Toyota methodology to trickle down.

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

#188

Post by okareaman »

tedd4u wrote: post #183

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Prop 22. At least in California there's no risk of losing margin to "employees" anymore. Maybe FSD is not required anymore for long-term viability of transportation network companies.

I keep reading about a shortage of Uber and Lyft drivers in California. I think this is correct because I was a driver and they've been trying hard to get me back. None of this would happen with FSD.

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

#189

Post by quickthrowman »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #15
quickthrowman wrote: post #7

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…

Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim? He definitely uses ambiguity to his benefit (eg "soon", "by fall/winter/spring/summer" (in which year?)), but I haven't heard anything about Tesla being L5 by the end of 2021.

He made the claim during the Q4 2020 earnings call for Tesla in January 2021: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/01/27/te...

An investor asks “Why are you confident in L5 self-driving before the end of 2021?” and Elon goes on to explain why he is confident that Tesla will achieve L5 self-driving by the end of 2021.

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

#190

Post by quickthrowman »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #74
LightG wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if I don't want to, I can't help but keep up with his marketing-claims through the interests I have. My take, being aware of him but not focused, is that beta-FSD has already been released! ... I mean ... what? Maybe I've got it wrong.

It's been released to a small number of people, but... beta-FSD isn't level five. The only specific statement I've read from him is that the basic functionality for level five will be available this year. What's interesting to me is that people seem to attribute what news articles synthesize about his statements as statements made by him. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313

He made the claim in the Q4 2020 Tesla earnings call in Jan 2021, here is a transcript: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/01/27/te...
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