Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by throwaway0a5e » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 11:14 AM UTC

Zhenya wrote: post #238

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towi…

This is patently false. Check Australia and Africa where Land Cruisers rule and survive like roaches (as do old Mercedes). It's because they are well engineered.

So why don't they dominate in Russia and South America then?

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

#312

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #146

andyxor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s

The world is already largely running on AI, just not the version of it that is in people's heads by watching sci-fi movies.

The sci-fi version being as the term was defined by Alan Turing and the marketing version being as s/ML/AI

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

#313

Post by ericmay » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

jy1 wrote: post #253

ericmay wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the only path to self-driving cars is through full-stack integration of hardware and software. Waymo doesn’t fit the bill and is progressing far too slowly, in my opinion. It’s more of a proof of concept than a serious effort. It’s great, but I don’t see a viable path forward for them that doesn’t involve their software and sensors on another manufacturer’s cars. Fine, but Google is allergic to anything not…

I think Waymo is valued 4x Chrysler right now. More likely Waymo acquires a car company.

That’ll never happen. Google won’t buy a car manufacturer. It’s possible they’ll try and license tech or something or integrate Waymo into cars as a subscription service but the click is ticking for them and I think they’ll lose the race to do so before Google pulls the plug.

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

#314

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 11:40 AM UTC

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…

I can buy a Toyota here but not an Altima, Tahoe or a Pacifica. So Toyota's market is a little bigger than that.

Regardless, there is no other car company doing anything like the Mirai.

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

#315

Post by leoedin » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #240

XorNot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Subways the world over do without just fine.

Every train in London, even the fully automated ones, have at least one person onboard. Maybe at some point that will change, but there's a lot of pressure against it.

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

#316

Post by detaro » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #252

detaro wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is explicitly asked by the person feeding him question why he is confident that they will reach level five this year. He is confirming that he is confident they will reach level five this year. Not confident that they will improve, confident they will reach level five.

He was asked that question, but he didn't say he was confident they would reach level five this year. He did refer to the current FSD beta, which is a level two system, and expressed confidence in the technical roadmap and progress they are making between each beta iteration. Then he talked about the level of reliability they would need, capabilities of the system, and challenges they have. I guess, I'm confident bas…

If your response to "why are you confident about X" is "I am confident because...", you can't claim you didn't say you were confident about it.

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

#317

Post by nradov » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #298

hellbannedguy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this way too. I've noticed over the years that the morning commute is a symphony of madness. Drivers going over the speed limit. Drivers doing illegial things in order to get to work, and keep the traffic moving. Cops seem to let a lot of infractions go during the morning commute. (The rest of the time they let nothing go, but in the morning commute they just seem to know it's a symphony of driving?) I picture…

If the 25mph speed limit doesn't make sense on that road it needs to change. If it makes sense, then the self driving car going at speed limit is the right thing to do and human drivers should do the same. It's as simple as that.

That's the kind of overly simplistic programmer thinking that doesn't work in the real world.

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

#318

Post by perlgeek » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

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...

My kids are now 7 and 10 years old, respectively.

I wonder if they'll have to learn to drive, and make a driver's license?

It could be that by the time they come of age, there are self-driving cars, but they're much more expensive than making their license (which in Germany costs around 2k Euro, including lessons).

Or maybe there'll be no viable self-driving, fully autonomous cars by then? Who knows?

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

#319

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #299

wpietri wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the curses of software projects is "premature convergence", where people to a ton of extra work for an overoptimistic launch date. I have to wonder how much wasted effort went in to trying to be seen as a leader in what turned out to be a hype bubble. Steve McConnell also talks about a common estimation pattern: managers keep asking if something can be sooner, and are only stopped when some engineer proves tha…

I dunno, I remember that many of the commenters here were equally optimistic in 2015-16. It took a lot of arguments and discussion before people realised that it was much harder than it seemed.

Then that raises another interesting possibility: that absolutely nobody at the deranged-optimism companies knew what they were doing. Because there were definitely experts who knew those dates were impossible. Less 18 months after that Lyft prediction, roboticist and AI expert Rodney Brooks said that free-roaming auto-taxis wouldn't be running before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

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

#320

Post by plank_time » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

aparsons wrote: post #277

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 chuckled! I spoke to Anthony at the Udacity office in Mountain View around 2018 (he’d already left Uber to found his trucking company). He seemed like he’d given up on city streets being autonomously drivable any time soon, but highways were still on the table in the next five years. One idea he floated was to employ drivers only from the exit ramp for the last mile journey. For trucking, this made sense.

Do you mean after he left Google? He left Google to form Otto which Uber bought. Frankly it’s the biggest mistake of TK’s career and caused the downfall in my opinion. He went against the advice of Emil and Salle, which was a huge mistake, and there were totally right.