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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

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Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#91

Post by paxys »

howlgarnish wrote: post #31

> Critics question why CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hasn’t held the team accountable. Because Uber's insane valuation is largely predicated on them being able to pivot out of expensive human "driver-partners" into cheap and compliant robots, and any sort of public acknowledgement that this is not going to happen would tank their stock.

There is really nothing to back that claim. There are plenty of other companies in similar sectors (ridesharing, transportation, food delivery) in the US and beyond with similar valuations and no self driving ambitions or technology. Uber's self driving research has been seen from day 1 as an expensive hobby, nothing more.

A company which can achieve level 5 automation and has the capability to roll it out worldwide is worth a hell of a lot more than $60 billion.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#92

Post by nemothekid »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #53
enlyth wrote: post #25

Any way to read the article without paying $40 for a news website that I've never heard of?

The Information is a fairly reputable source, but I understand your frustration. I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. To answer your question, Outline.com doesn't seem to work here.

>I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed.

Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#93

Post by phire »

wongarsu wrote: post #37
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #4

This article is behind a subscribe wall, which isn't very conductive to sharing. But upon reading, it seems to be that the technology is just not capable of performing the task. The assumption that deep learning is sufficient to be able to drive a car may be a faulty one.

Waymo seems to be doing much better than Uber, so it can't be just about what's possible. Waymo are also doing much more than just deep learning. For example a deep learning algorithm might be good for predicting possible paths of tracked pedestrians, but figuring out whether you will intersect any of those paths is better solved by a different non-learning algorithm.

Waymo almost predates the current deep learning fad.

While I'm sure they have deep learning somewhere in the stack, the core of their algorithm appears to be based on more traditional techniques, with kalman filters being the core.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#94

Post by foota »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I'm uncertain, something like 20 billion dollars (maybe on par with the amount of funding for self driving cars?). wouldn't really go all that far unfortunately for American transport prices.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#95

Post by enlyth »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #53
enlyth wrote: post #25

Any way to read the article without paying $40 for a news website that I've never heard of?

The Information is a fairly reputable source, but I understand your frustration. I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. To answer your question, Outline.com doesn't seem to work here.

I wouldn't mind paying something like $2 to read the single article, but $40 for a subscription that I have to cancel is just asking for too much, for a site that I will likely never come back to.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#96

Post by jml7c5 »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

Freeway driving would generally be much simpler than city driving, wouldn't it?

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#97

Post by xvilka »

jimrandomh wrote: post #76
djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#98

Post by a_t48 »

dylan604 wrote: post #70
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I got from the two paragraphs it's possible to read. It suggest Uber "is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway" which sounds like it is doable, just not by them

Won't it be great if Waymo has to end up licensing the driving tech from Google/Alphabet/WhicheverCoTheyStoleFrom? Edit: Of course I meant Uber. Doh!

I think you've mixed up some names, given Waymo is an Alphabet company.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#100

Post by FreakyT »

ethbr0 wrote: post #87
djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs. Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the endin…

> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving.

The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.

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