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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

#71

Post by lern_too_spel »

osigurdson wrote: post #24
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…

To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

Or put it in Google Maps if they had any sense. They should know when to recommend ride hailing with high accuracy to those who enable location history, and they can skip the clunky app switching that other ride hailing services require.

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

#72

Post by krebby »

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.

I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with local governments is at the core of its service. Google has traditionally shied away from businesses that require big operational investments in real-world assets the way that, say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build properly, and is a big piece of the puzzle that I can't see Waymo wanting to take on. It makes sense for them to want to partner, especially now that Uber has spun out Aurora.

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

#73

Post by belter »

amelius wrote: post #67
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…

Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and completely destroy Uber. But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.

And why would this not wake them up?

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

#74

Post by morley »

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…

Interesting thoughts. I was actually going to say that _Uber_ had the advantage in this deal, since it owns the customer relationship and can shape demand toward or away from Waymo.

Google has a distribution channel via Android, but I don't think it's strong enough (otherwise Stadia would still be around). They'd still have to build a destination for consumers to remember, in addition to the interface, matchmaking, billing, etc.

I guess in any deal like this, there's the potential for advantage and disadvantage from both angles. As Clay said, a good compromise is one where both parties are dissatisfied.

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

#75

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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.

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's almost as if Waymo & Uber considered weather...

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

#76

Post by re-thc »

yard2010 wrote: post #53
osigurdson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

They couldn't bang out a social network over the last decade(s), I hardly believe they could bang out anything than keep extracting more money from the dying ad industry

They can and have (Google Plus) but just scrapped it straight after in typical Google style.

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

#79

Post by jefftk »

amelius wrote: post #67
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…

Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and completely destroy Uber. But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.

Google Maps has had this for 6y: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/googlemaps/

In the mobile app it used to be a tab at the top ("rideshare services") but now it's at the bottom of the public transit tab ("also consider").

It used to be a deep integration where you could handle your whole ride without leaving Google Maps, but I think they removed that a few years ago?

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

#80

Post by hardware2win »

boringg wrote: post #27

After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now they are going to go the route they should have always gone since they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off.. partnership.

Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :)

>In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

>He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.

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