Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 399 posts

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#131

Post by riskable »

bartwr wrote: post #51
makestuff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.

This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.

Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.

Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.

It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#132

Post by bryanlarsen »

jonas21 wrote: post #60
mbesto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple. For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.

You say the answer is simple, but I can't tell what your answer is. The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of the value. The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value. So which is it?

No contradiction.

The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to partner with, so they could play them against each other, so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#133

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sofixa wrote: post #96
wg0 wrote: post #81

At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't. Isn't it or something has changed lately?

The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly at stake if things go wrong. For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. A…

Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end up cheaper than self owned cars)

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#134

Post by boh »

One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#135

Post by spiderice »

shmatt wrote: post #46

The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside" Now it's going to be a lot more interesting

I’m guessing this is a big city problem? I’ve never once experienced this

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#136

Post by anaganisk »

shmatt wrote: post #46

The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside" Now it's going to be a lot more interesting

BeepbeeepBoop to you too and I'm gonna report you. 10sec later: You are banned from our platform for violation of our safety protocols.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#137

Post by fizwhiz »

makestuff wrote: post #38
SilverBirch wrote: post #2

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, a…

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#138

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #75
smt88 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't be in widespread use for quite a while. Places with weather still aren't great candidates for Waymo.

There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's raining heavily >10% of the time. The vast majority of rides in the US - and even in a place like Florida that's a swamp where it rains literally every day - happen under just fine conditions for Waymo. This is fine for a taxi service. If you make 10x as much profit in the vast majority of cases - you'll let someone else pick up the scraps in the edge cases. It…

Automotive EE here, I could not disagree with you more on the state and expectations of self-driving vehicles.

I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather and it’s a problem “to be solved later”.

It’s all a joke. If we actually wanted this, it would be long haul A to B routes. Turning semi trucks into rail.

Self-driving was already slowing down before the era of free money. So I expect this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else.

The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#139

Post by AndrewDucker »

nerdchum wrote: post #91

Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving? Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?

What's the gain here? Can they pay you less than another driver who will sit in the car? Because dealing with signal being lost sounds like a huge problem to deal with for very little payback.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#140

Post by nashashmi »

SilverBirch wrote: post #2

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, a…

Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a variety of reasons. It’s why local taxi dispatches are still in business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same.

Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take.

Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.

Post reply on HN