Is Lyft going to follow suit with Lyft L5?
Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
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Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#72Signals the end of the self driving delusion, at least for 10-20 years.
I wish! The self driving delusion is more than alive and kicking. It’s just that the hype is moving from the vertically integrated options (Waymo) to the disaggregated ‘stack’ players (Luminar, Scale, Aurora)
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everytime someone mentioned that idea I thought it made no sense. The Uber strategy is to delegate all the cost to a 3rd party (the driver and their own car). The idea of spending billions of dollar on hundreds of thousands of cars around the world and maintain them hardly seemed like what they were setup to do. They wanted the exact opposite. Externalize all cost, labor, material, etc. and just develop a software th…
So if they invent the first reasonable self-driving car, they can sell those and provide service for them. Ideally TCO would be lower than a human driven car so basically a third party could buy and manage the fleet for Uber and Lyft. Neither company would need to own the cars to reap the benefits of making them.
They could, but that’s a completely different business to building middleware to facilitate unlicensed taxis. It’s like saying “AirB&B will help people rent their spare rooms out until they launch their own hotel chain.”
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#74"Uber sells"
"Uber takes stake"
I....cannot put +/- signs on the balance sheet for this transaction.
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#75Car companies doesn't make their own airbags, they buy them from Autoliv. They don't make their own brakes, they buy them from Brembo. They buy transmissions from ZF, tires from Michelin, ECUs from Bosch, etc. Why should car manufacturers develop their own self driving technology instead of letting others, like Bosch [1] or Veoneer [2], do that and buy it from them? Spread the investment over more cars, it makes sens…
Another angle for car companies to develop their own tech might be (claimed) competitive edge.
Not many car manufacturer would market the airbags, breaks or tires as superior. However, car makers that develop their own engine constantly brag about how efficient or powerful their cars are compared to their competitors (e.g. Mazda and their Skyactiv, Toyota and their Hybrid).
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#76what happens to Uber now when Waymo releases self-driving taxi? Will they lose all competitive advantage?
They won't. Unless that is "self-driving taxi" becomes redefined to mean "on roads with no human drivers and no pedestrians".
Check out this video, it works really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJ0GvsQeak ("Riding in a Self Driving Car - With Nobody Up Front")
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#77Is Lyft going to follow suit with Lyft L5?
If they can get a better deal than Uber did. Almost certainly.
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#78Wasn't Uber's whole money losing strategy based on the vision that one day they'll use their self-driving cars to get the driving done for cheaper?
No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
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Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might not be their internal strategy, but that's pretty much the investment thesis of every Uber bull buying their stock at $100 billion market cap.
I actually poked into this a bit out of curiosity. Without doing deeper research than I have any interest in, indeed Kalanick never seems to have publicly said anything like "We are so f'ed without self-driving" (which would be a truly idiotic thing to do) and even made some references to the length of the transition. But he also made reference to things like Uber's growth being limited until Uber was cheaper than ow…
>And I also don't see a lot of fervent denials from Uber in this regard.
Why would there be? If it's helping their stock price or even neutral to it then why deny it and risk it going down?
Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming that ever happens, they will likely just license it from Waymo. I don't think Waymo intends to run a full stack taxi service, easier to just sell the self driving tech itself and let other's doing the work on real world applications. Uber's competitive advantage now is their mindshare, app experience, and subsidized pricing. With or without self driving doesn't really change that.
Maybe. The amount of work to make a taxi service is much, much smaller than that to make a self driving car. I could see Waymo entering lots of industries like that to capture easy profits.
Technical work is relatively easy to copy. But what Uber has and what the market reliably undervalues is how expensive it is to acquire customers. Furthermore they have an actually competent customer support team to deal with problems encountered while providing the service.