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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

#221

Post by jfoster »

somsak2 wrote: post #170
vasilipupkin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.

with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from 2010. consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.

What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)

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

#222

Post by minwcnt5 »

smt88 wrote: post #8
edgefield wrote: post #4

This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?

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

Why not? It seems to work fine in rain - as evidenced by all the "bomb cyclones" in San Francisco this past rainy season. There are a lot of places they can go that don't have snow.

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

#223

Post by VirusNewbie »

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…

Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars or running their own data centers.

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

#224

Post by minwcnt5 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #138
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather"

Ah, the Internet, where people who know absolutely nothing about a topic make bold assertions about it with 100% confidence.

https://blog.waymo.com/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-weather-re...

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

#225

Post by jonas21 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #132
jonas21 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got it. Maybe I was reading too much into the tone. I read "they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution" as them being desperate to get distribution and therefore willing to take a bad deal.

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

#226

Post by nunez »

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.

They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider; shut down in 2022.

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

#227

Post by ra7 »

notatoad wrote: post #213
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.

Good point. That would also allow them to bring true Level 4 autonomous driving to passenger cars with sufficient miniaturization of their sensor stack.

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

#228

Post by owaislone »

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…

Not sure if that is the case. Imagine all ride hailing and cab services in a few years are based on Waymo tech including Waymo's own fleet. Waymo would be the clear winner.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by sangnoir »

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…

All those things are related.

Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on

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