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

investor.lyft.com

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

#221

Post by ghaff »

wombatpm wrote: post #196
ghaff wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbanites have self-driving. They just need to pay a sub-minimum wage driver to do it. Oh, real self-driving you say. That's going to be on a subset of highways in a subset of weather conditions.

And it will happen with trucks first. Either a lead truck running a convoy or remote piloting via drone technology. Why? Because a truck does 500 miles per day. A self driving truck can do 1000. Amazon cannot exist without long haul trucking

Perhaps. A lot of "long-haul" trucking is called trains.

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

#222

Post by throwaway0a5e »

argonaut wrote: post #179
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The average age of a car on the road today is 11 years. Toyota's reliability really makes a difference for secondhand owners, and therefore used Toyotas command a premium, and you get more for your car when you sell it or trade it in. Otherwise, it's true that new cars from many different brands are reliable enough nowadays, even brands that used to be bad like Hyundai (unless you want to buy a car and keep it foreve…

Used Toyotas command a premium because relatively none of them find their hands in the "oil changes, lol I can barely afford gas" crowd that wears stuff out and doesn't maintain stuff.

You never see a Sienna getting loaded with bags of concrete at Home Depot. Can't say that about a Town and Country. You never see a family of 5 pile out of a (newish) Corrla. Can't say that about an Altima. You never see a 4Runner towing something way too big. Can't say that about a Tahoe.

Toyotas sell for a premium used because they get sold to "premium" customers who keep them nice.

If Toyota financed the people Chryler and Nissan would finance (insert neggity joke) then in 20yr you would see all the upper middle class HN types shitting all over Toyota because Toyota would be the poor people car. You'd see them in all sorts of states of disrepair and neglect and they would be stereotypes as unreliable, after all why else would they be driving around on 3/4cyl?

I can't believe I'm defending Chrysler and Nissan but the blind Toyota worship is just that, blind worship. Most of their niceness comes from people keeping them nice. The real world edge between manufacturers is very, very slim.

In end of life they are no better or worse than anything else that's been treated the way they have (VW's regularly scheduled electrical fires notwithstanding)

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

#223

Post by Fricken »

theluketaylor wrote: post #38
rkalla wrote: 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.

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.

Simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) was solved a while back. Autonomous vehicles can locate themselves using any detectable landmark, not just lane markings and road signs.

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

#224

Post by mannykannot »

dmix wrote: post #133
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…

I think at a minimum all the cars need to be taking to each other over a protocol.

I don't disagree (and nor am I certain you are right), but if that is so, then there are some follow-on issues:

1) The system still has to react safely to pedestrians, cyclists and other entities outside of the network.

1.1) During the transition period, that is going to include vehicles driven by people (I do not think it will be feasible to ban the latter before self-driving vehicles are commonplace, except possibly in city centers and on some major highways.)

2) We do not want systems to learn how to take advantage of the protocol to drive aggressively and antisocially.

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

#225

Post by mNovak »

ghaff wrote: post #221
wombatpm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it will happen with trucks first. Either a lead truck running a convoy or remote piloting via drone technology. Why? Because a truck does 500 miles per day. A self driving truck can do 1000. Amazon cannot exist without long haul trucking

Perhaps. A lot of "long-haul" trucking is called trains.

In the US at least, trucks are by far the dominant means of transport, at 5x more freight than trains

(slightly out of date, and by value): [1] https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num...

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

#226

Post by ramraj07 »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #192
gher-shyu3i wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will happen afterward? They'll get acquired by Uber or something?

I think Lyft's core ridesharing business will continue to become more profitable in a duopoly setting with Uber. Ridesharing is a network effect business, if the riders are there, the drivers will come, the more drivers you have, the more availability so you get more riders. The US has proven that it is capable of supporting two overlapping players (not all markets can support this and meet regulatory rules)

You’re assuming ridesharing in the way Lyft and Uber do it will last for long.. not a single place I’ve seen anyone confirm that it’s profitable or break even for the drivers. Almost no one drives for years with them, and they’re bound to run out of drivers who haven’t learned the lessons. Or their prices jack up to more than regular cab prices like in nyc. One way or another it’s a non zero possibility these companies won’t survive in the same shape.

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

#227

Post by XorNot »

azinman2 wrote: post #211
jtolmar wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A city bus carrying 20 people has 5% the drivers-per-person that an individual vehicle has. The driverless system only would save 5% the human effort that it would for a solo vehicle, so it needs to be 20x as good before it's worthwhile. Put another way, the bus with 20 riders is already equivalent to automating 19 cars. Roughly the same idea with freight - a single truck driver serves the needs of many people.

Human drivers still do meaningfully cost money to employ, and they do annoying things like needing to sleep or take rest room breaks. Autonomous trucking would completely revolutionize the industry.

Sure, but when you load 20 people onto a vehicle, if you don't have a driver you still need a security guard.

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

#229

Post by nradov »

plank_time wrote: post #130
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...

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…

Beyond experience and fear, I think an autonomous vehicle will need a reasonably accurate mental model of how other human drivers on the road are likely to react.

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

#230

Post by netrus »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #174
rhodozelia wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is pretty much impossible if you let people have the physical cars. They will report their speed to other cars, they will measure their speed from pulses generated by something rotating on the vehicle, replace rotating thing with your function generator and then you can tell other cars you are going any speed you want. Turn up your reported speed and watch all the other cars get out of your way!

Well, you can take the input as a data point, but make the final decision based on sensor data. Thus the shared data can make the flow smoother. But I'm also waiting for fake street signs to troll/manipulate self driving vehicles :)

It's easy to put up fake street signs to troll/manipulate human drivers, yet that hardly ever happens. I have read stories of people putting up fake speed cameras in their front yard to slow down traffic, but no one dares to fake speed limit signs.
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