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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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

#181

Post by chris222 »

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…

It’s not trivial at all. Do you work in the space at all?

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

#182

Post by gnicholas »

riskable wrote: post #131
bartwr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawy…

Google has tons of legal resources for their current business. But that doesn’t mean they can spin up the legal docs and relationships needed to run an Uber-like business at the drop of a hat. The type of risk that Google’s lawyers are used to mitigating are simply not the same, and their lawyers are for the most part not the type of lawyers that you’d want to set up a transportation company with international operations. There are some relevant lawyers there, but the vast majority are specialized in software/cloud, not wheels-on-the-ground.

Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.

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

#183

Post by metalspot »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #139
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.

in the typical scenario taxi/ride-share drivers are only driving paid miles for a small fraction of the time they are on the clock.

with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled for situations they can't handle.

this means that you can have a remote driver who is continually switching between driving different vehicles and only driving in the situations where actually needed and profitable.

with driver based transportation when you get into low utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of the street, the drivers who are working spend more time sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick up rides.

in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving with much less mileage waste.

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

#184

Post by mrshadowgoose »

sofixa wrote: post #158
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.

This is false.

It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior.

Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.

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

#185

Post by repsilat »

deegles wrote: post #165
krebby wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins. Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace.…

What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either drive safely or they don't. We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history. Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice). The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).

The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100 vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super important.

Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.

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

#186

Post by r00fus »

wefarrell wrote: post #148
yalogin wrote: post #89

I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In…

It's a signal that ride share apps won't be 100% autonomous anytime soon. If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available. You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, wheth…

This makes so much sense - and why they'd team up with Uber. Google/Waymo don't care about non-coverage human-driver rideshare. However the users definitely do. So this partnership makes a ton of sense - if you're in a Waymo area, you could have a separate app, but having a single app for both types of rides is definitely a win for both.

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

#187

Post by sofixa »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #184
sofixa wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.

This is false. It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior. Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.

Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take into account induced demand?

And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).

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

#188

Post by ra7 »

lhorie wrote: post #172
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…

The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to co…

> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.

Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.

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

#189

Post by smt88 »

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…

> There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's raining heavily >10% of the time.

First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.

It also doesn't need to be "raining heavily". It can also be raining lightly, snowing, foggy, dusty, or smoky.

But even if you're right and it's 10%, the predictability becomes a huge issue. I've spent my whole life on the East Coast, and you never know if it's really going to rain until it does or doesn't. The forecast changes literally minute to minute.

1. https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-pre...

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

#190

Post by EddieEngineers »

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.

Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual, based on precedent - looks at Stadia controller annoyed.
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