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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

#351

Post by ra7 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #329
ra7 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo driving in rain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbMnLCXXxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiD9l72uFCg Waymo driving in fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgDTCCdL6s

I can tell that you WANT to believe. so, be my guest. Do come back and let me know when you have your reliable fully autonomous vehicle.

There are people taking rides in rain and fog, albeit only in SF and Phoenix. You can claim they haven’t put any effort into weather driving all you want, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

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

#352

Post by shagie »

ghaff wrote: post #335
fairity wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By public accounts, the total hardware costs for one SDC is around $300k. If you amortize that over a 5 year lifespan & 50 rides a day, you get $3.28 of variable costs per ride. $3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should…

An SDC has many of the same operational costs (and maybe more) than a human-driven car. (Also garaging, cleaning, etc. As well as the support staff if a car gets in trouble somehow.) You can admittedly assume electric and assume operational costs may be lower than say a Prius today. But I don't consider it a given that a company which purchases and operates an SDC fleet from Waymo can operate profitably while undercu…

Consumer reports puts the cost per mile at $0.49 for a Prius ( https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/best-cars-blog/20... ).

That includes electrical and maintenance. That's still less than a regular car, but it's still a larger number than most people consider.

It would be possible to say its less, though I'd tend to suggest it would be more than the Prius since there's no human custodian of the car to handle the "pull over, I've gotta puke" situations which can add unexpected expenses.

There's also things like fines when the car doesn't observe the laws (who gets the ticket if it causes a traffic jam, cuts off a bus, running over a fire hose, or fails to give way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2018/03/29/first-a... https://sfist.com/2023/01/31/sf-regulators-have-had-it-with-... )

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

#353

Post by TaylorAlexander »

bertil wrote: post #349
kortilla wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?

They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet…

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

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

#354

Post by fishsticks89 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #327
zodzedzi wrote: post #316

Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch. They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available. This way they can also collect tons of data about how u…

I think my confusion is more about Uber’s incentives here. They’re providing a ramp-up platform for Waymo as you described, but as soon as it hits any scale Waymo can easily part ways.

Waymo maybe could have gone with Lyft (or built their own app) if the deal with Uber fell through, which is probably why Uber accepted it. It's not "help Waymo get to market or not," it's "help Waymo get to market or risk somebody else (or Waymo themselves) passing on Waymo's value to customers and taking the market." Especially with the chance that Uber might get to play gatekeeper in the future, it's a hard deal to turn down.

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

#355

Post by shagie »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #348
shagie wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Google's dominance to expand into other sectors (at a loss) is a perfect example of anticompetitive practices that regulators would likely take a keen interest in investigating.

Using robots to cut costs and thus prices is not anticompetitive.

Using Android's market share to push or encourage the use of a Waymo robot taxi booking application that is in competition with Uber and Lyft might be seen as anticompetitive.

Other comments elsewhere are "No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly." and "All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business."

That sort of approach would very likely be examined by regulators.

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

#356

Post by hanniabu »

bertil wrote: post #298
elromulous wrote: post #280

I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next time. With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is takin…

I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.

If I were Uber I would structure this as "we'll integrate waymo as a trial and if it's successful then we'll acquire waymo after x period of time"

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

#357

Post by londons_explore »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #353
bertil wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet…

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly.

Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor.

And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system.

If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.

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

#358

Post by threeseed »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #353
bertil wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet…

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

> They’ll get there eventually

Debatable.

So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

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

#359

Post by threeseed »

andruby wrote: post #286
lukeschlather wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to make it a 1-sided marketplace. Uber's entire business model is focused around squeezing vendors - now they think they can squeeze Google if Google becomes their vendor instead of a bunch of independent contractors who are legally inhibited from collective bargaining? Uber has no idea how to be successful when the seller side of their marketplace is organized and plays hardball at the negotiating table.

The 1-sided marketplace is a good point. Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close in self-driving technology, so there's already another player. Uber could just buy a bunch of Tesla's once their tech is good enough for autonomous driving.

> Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close

No they aren't. The latest FSD betas have been widely panned.

And the lack of LiDAR sensors means Tesla still fails to accurately define the bounding boxes for scene objects.

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

#360

Post by threeseed »

deepzn wrote: post #270

I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta- one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it, which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets better and is able to prove better dri…

People should underestimate Tesla:

1. Lack of LiDAR sensors. Vision is still not (and IMHO will never be) an adequate replacement.

2. Waymo/Cruise etc. can upgrade their taxis easily with capabilities over time. Tesla is restricted by their promise that FSD will work on previously shipped cars.

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