Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by jillesvangurp » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

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…

Waymo is a technology provider. Uber has lots of existing users and no ability to do autonomous driving. This way, Waymo gets to enter their cars in Uber's app and make a similar kind of revenue as a driver would. All Uber does is take their cut and supply passengers.

So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.

I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by notatoad » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

ra7 wrote: post #20

From the TechCrunch news story [1]: > The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than be…

i think the main goal of licencing would be less capital costs. buying cars isn't cheap, especially not at scale - licencing their tech to somebody else means every car they put on the road is $150k waymo doesn't have to spend.

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

#214

Post by lopkeny12ko » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective?

* Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.

* Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo.

* Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber.

* And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.

What's going on here?

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

#215

Post by notatoad » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

metadaemon wrote: post #105

mdale wrote: post #59

Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow. It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages…

This also looks slightly bad on Uber as it had its own autonomous driving division that I suspect isn't doing well anymore.

Uber's autonomous driving division is doing so poorly that they completely shut it down a few years ago.

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

#216

Post by sidcool » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

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…

I think you oversimplify what Uber has achieved in terms of tech and customer acquisition.

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

#217

Post by sidcool » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #214

Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective? * Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber. * Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo. * Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber. * And now they are partnering and merging their co…

Pivoting based on whatever works

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

#218

Post by panarky » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #182

riskable wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 operat…

Google's missing piece isn't the app.

And it isn't the lawyers.

It's the network of riders.

Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.

Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.

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

#219

Post by 35997279 » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

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…

>surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber

It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.

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

#220

Post by sidcool » Tue, May 23, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

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 is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web scraper.