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, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.
Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house. The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a heat shield.
Uber have always wanting to go autonomous cars. They poured a lot of money to try to develop them in-house and I think that they were too optimistic on how easy and quick that would be.
But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
That is not surprising, or in question. The claim I am questioning is:
> Alphabet has a large stake in Uber.
Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.
I just want to chime in to say that it is ridiculous that such information is not so easy to come by. Billion-dollar corporations should not be allowed to keep their external investments so opaque! Especially businesses that are publicly-traded.
Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.
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.
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.
Seems like but then why the interest from Waymo in an Uber partnership? They already have the Waymo One app. I think it’s because getting users to switch or use multiple apps proves difficult.
>Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.
Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there.
With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.
Maybe not, but a human at Uber responded within 15 minutes when a ride I had booked drove away from me just before pickup. They canceled the original booking with no fee, then sent another car to pick me up and gave me some Uber credits.
That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect from big G. Google would probably charge me a cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my account for having the temerity to complain I'd been stranded, and then followed up with automated email confirming they made the right decision after review.
According to Linkedin 54% of Uber employees (48,000) are in operations roles.[0]
I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't scale operations in the same way you can scale development.
Google would have to do something similar to launch their own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense to just keep Uber in the middle.
Agreed. I’m not sure an acquisition makes sense for Waymo/Alphabet. Operating a robotaxi is technologically quite different from an Uber vehicle — mapping is different, routing is different, customer service is different (a Waymo is stuck and needs remote assistance), maintenance is different (charging, cleaning in depots). Uber’s platform wouldn’t help with any of that.
This seems like a play to attract users from the most popular ridehail platform and eventually funnel them to the Waymo app. I don’t believe users are loyal to ridehail apps like they are to social networks (I don’t use Uber because my friends use it) and would jump to a service that is cost competitive and autonomous. Or, as I said another comment, maybe they are setting the stage to be just a technology provider to ridehail companies and let them deal with all the operational overhead.
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
Very different. Social networks value derives from network effect - every additional user adds additional value to the ecosystem. Google simply started too late.
Taxis compete on price, safety, quality of service. Virtually all of this value derives from the quality of the FSD implementation. Of course, this will extend to all forms of road transportation eventually. It is going to very much be a winner takes all situation for a number of years (perhaps a decade). The next phase will be a period of high fragmentation as the technology becomes commoditized and a race to the bottom will ensue. The final phase will be consolidation with a few players being best at execution, cost control and finance operations.
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.
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.
Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial.
Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.
And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
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.
> you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.
yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool.
part of the problem is Google is too successful.
If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs.
Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.
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)
That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber.
Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service
another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.
Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the drivers' vehicles.
If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.
I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
It's not like Waymo/Uber can roll in with autonomous taxis in every city just because Uber figured out the local regulation - many cities would have explicit regulation for anything driverless. I think it's the later point - they want to stay in the shadows until they are super confident. I wonder what will happen to Uber eventually though.
It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits
Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.
This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.
Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.
Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.
It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
> Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to.
Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
Sure, technically that's correct. But it's google we're talking about. The company with a tremendous list of failures that should have been easy slam dunks.
Google has tons of legal resources for their current business. But that doesn’t mean they can spin up the legal docs and relationships needed to run an Uber-like business at the drop of a hat. The type of risk that Google’s lawyers are used to mitigating are simply not the same, and their lawyers are for the most part not the type of lawyers that you’d want to set up a transportation company with international operations. There are some relevant lawyers there, but the vast majority are specialized in software/cloud, not wheels-on-the-ground.
Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.
As others have pointed out, Google could scoop up tons of riders in a heartbeat, by announcing a ride share platform publicly (which would get tons of news coverage) and by advertising the feature within Google Maps, Waze, etc.
Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions) of potential riders.
It would also need to invest in the vehicles and the technology and the maintenance and the garage to store them in and pay the insurance on the vehicles.
All this to try to compete with Uber (which isn't profitable) in a few areas where the legal, political and climate ("we have cars in Chicago but they only run from March 1st to November 1st") options are favorable.
The marketplace is not the biggest issue that Google would need to overcome.
I don't know a lot of people who love Uber, but I know a lot of people who are only ever going to use one ride sharing app. If Waymo's app is limited to a 180 sq. mile territory and only half of their trips are in that territory, they won't bother. The first time the Waymo app tells them they're going outside their territory, it will be back to Uber forever.
> This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this.
I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).
Google has enough resources to in theory thrive in any business they attempt. Yet, they fail in so many businesses they attempt to get into. https://killedbygoogle.com/
Evidence suggests that none of this is true. Just look at how Google Fiber wasn't able to navigate the myriad regional regulatory roadblocks thrown up by local governments when lobbied by incumbent ISPs. It's reasonable to expect exactly the same scenario to play out if Google tries to make a competitive ride sharing service from scratch.
That's a pretty good example. But in the case of Fiber, part of the problem was that other ISPs own/control infrastructure (like poles) to which they're legally obligated to give competitors access...and they would just not comply, or drag their feet on it. Fiber physically couldn't execute because of this. Of course there was corruption involved, as you pointed out, but in the case of ride share apps I can't immediately think of anything analogous, where Uber could physically prevent Waymo from competing with them.
> figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore!
Hm. This is like --
It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.
The original regulatory capture.
Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.
Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.
Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work.
On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
Realistically though they don’t have to figure out the legal problems immediately, they could and likely would start in their own backyards and expand from there
> Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial.
as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics
... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area.
... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).
Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful?
Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the other existing apps in this space.
Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.
Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market - you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's not a problem for Waymo because they control the driving side. They simply need to get users to sign up.
When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.
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.
The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app,
Google famously has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know how many times it's failed.
Then comes Google+, Google's attempt to get into social networking.
Unless Google came up with something novel or something different from incumbents it never ever succeeded.
Any SWE worth his salt can build a ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and confidence in using that app both by riders and drivers is what drives its success.
I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
Name recognition and installed user base in a 2-sided marketplace. That's huuuge.
Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber".
Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C.
Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.
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 car companies will do everything to prevent Google from having that monopoly. E.g. Google could be forced to license their software. Then, Uber gets their 2-sided marketplace back.
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.
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.
Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app?
Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.
Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of Uber and boom instant market share.
Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a 50% paycut.
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 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.
Followed by a slap on the wrist of a fine? How many tens of millions of dollars do you think the TAM of NYC taxi service is, vs a single digit million dollar fine from regulators?
Most days, fines are just the cost of doing business. They cut into your profits, sure, but as long as profits >> fine, just pay the fine and keep doing it.
You're pretty wrong. No organization can just spin up large international companies. I don't know where you'd get such an idea from. Even the technical parts of Uber alone would take years to replicate. The app frontend? Sure, with manpower you can get that out in a few months. The backend, supporting infra, legal systems, customer support, relationships with users, restaurants, etc? Years to decades. Google could never do it, they are too big to move fast. Think, when is the last time Google successfully launched a project of even a fraction of the scale of Uber?
There's no network effect from having the Uber app. 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.
I mean, I use mostly Lyft in the US. And if there were another app or two that had a reputation for being cheaper or better service even if they didn't service everywhere, I'd be installing that in a minute. Brand has some value and I don't want to be installing one or more apps for every city I visit. But it mostly works when someone is as good or better for most purposes.
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.
The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully.
There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.
Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual, based on precedent - looks at Stadia controller annoyed.
That's what they thought about Google Video, but then Google decided to buy Youtube. Technical advantage (which Google has in strides) does not always translate to business advantage (which Uber has done remarkably well for itself).
I think you’re right here. You can recreate the technical aspects of YouTube relatively easily. You can’t recreate the brand.
Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.
YT was relatively cheap and much stronger network effects. Uber does not.
Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago.
Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately.
What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app
Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.
Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.
Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a variety of reasons. It’s why local taxi dispatches are still in business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same.
Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take.
Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins.
Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100 vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super important.
Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
If another company solves self driving after Waymo, they can still enter the market. I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't?
Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.
> I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't?
Just want to point out that the failure case of self driving (if this product fails I crash into another car while going 80 mph) makes the race to the bottom slightly less plausible.
The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.
Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.
The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.
Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.
I think the more likely here is that Uber sold self-driving group (alongside other "big bets" like flying taxi research group) because of existential threat to the business during the start of COVID-19 which made them focusing on the main business (+eats) and sell parts that have no profitability in sight.
That's exactly right. Uber self driving was burning through the tune of billions of dollars a year when covid reduced revenue by the tune of 70%. Not exactly sustainable w/ only a few billion dollars of cash on hand.
As terrible as a pedestrian death is, the reality is there's news about Tesla accidents and near-accidents on the news all the time and people still love the brand. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Uber/Amazon/M$/etc hating is not as widespread in the general population as it is among tech bros.
As for Otto, my understanding is Uber pivoted similarly on the freight side, with a partnership w/ Volvo Autonomous Solutions.
The self-driving division was done to attract investment because investors thought it sounded cool. It would have been bad for Uber's business to have them - Uber relies on not owning cars, which moves all the maintenance to the driver-owners. If you own a self-driving car you still have to maintain it.
> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor.
They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow.
Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than trying to persuade the markets Google hasn’t spanked millions on a dead end.
I wouldn't even get in a self driving taxi if it was free because of how cheap human drivers are. For me, to use a self driving taxi it would have to be so safe that we would be moving towards banning human driving anyway.
Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.
This is America. When a "self driving" car kills someone, we blame the someone for daring to not pay due respect to the magic machine. They shouldn't have crossed the road in the dark! They should have been more visible! They should have been in their own big self driving box!
>surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber
It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value
I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.
This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to work as operators, let alone to design something like System X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D on an ongoing basis. The girls married, or got less boring jobs, or just left work, each time you must recruit and train replacements - but you design System X once and use it for forty years no problem.
There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
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 decrease over time.
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 undercutting rideshare as it exists today.
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 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...
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 this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else.
The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.
Mercedes got flack for it, but ultimately they had the right answer.
When a sort of pitch was made to an exec where the car has to crash into a tree or a cyclist, he said the bike. Because you aren’t going to pay $80,000 for your car to choose your death.
If you look at car ownership as owning a weapon, it does only make sense that you’ll have to prioritize for the owner.
But really, we aren’t even remotely to trolley problem. The systems BARELY detect and react properly to single issues, let alone detecting multiple and selecting between them.
I honestly think it’s a scam that was popular in the era of Free Money, and I’m so glad that is temporarily on pause.
The trolley problem is functionally irrelevant to AVs, but even if it wasn't, it's still prohibited if you ever plan to pursue type certification in Europe per 2022/1426, section 2.1.1.
There's no need because 1. cars have brakes 2. programming this into a car would make it more dangerous, because it might decide to trolley-program-sacrifice a grandmother when nobody was actually in danger.
That blog is a great example about how they have no solution to the weather problem. Their heading image is a light drizzle, and they talk about "predicting" the weather, as if their cars being unable to manage an unpredictable situation is an okay product.
Ah, the internet where people who know absolutely nothing cite a PR blog directly from a company providing bold assertions that then give them 100% confidence.
I’ve been in at least four fully self-driving dev / S0 / drivable buck vehicles and they are absolute garbage imo. We had one planned demo that was delayed because of fog in 2020, not road fog, but crap on the LiDAR glass. How many have you directly worked with?
You’ll be happy to know it isn’t just weather that makes this all fake though.
Road crown, even minor, but especially major in the northwest. Reflections, refractions. Lights and electronic billboards. Potholes. Missing road paint. ANY sort of road work at all. “Unhomed” people washing windshields. Squirrels (day) and mice/rats (night). Other bad drivers. Just plain dirty vehicles, self and others. Dust.
It’s all garbage. If we were serious it would be long haul, V2V V2I (vehicle to infra/vehicle). But yea yea, Waygo says they solved weather so just post their claim and you win! Reality can’t compete with marketing, except it always does.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I've ridden inside probably dozens of AVs at this point (and my work product is in hundreds). I can't relate to your experiences at all. That's weird, because if you're an EE at one of the major AV companies, we're likely within 1 degree of separation.
Every serious company has put significant effort into testing with weather (note: not all weather conditions and not the same testing as traditional automotive). They've also put effort into handling all the other scenarios you've mentioned. Waymo does pose estimation to better handle construction workers and traffic cops, for example.
Also the TAM numbers should make it clear why long distance freight isn't getting as much attention. Surely your employer has shared their outlook internally?
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.
Even more so, if they "have not really put effort into weather" then apparently they didn't need to, there are videos of Waymo drives through SF at night in rain for example, it seems to work fine whether it took "real" effort or not
> There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's raining heavily >10% of the time.
First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.
It also doesn't need to be "raining heavily". It can also be raining lightly, snowing, foggy, dusty, or smoky.
But even if you're right and it's 10%, the predictability becomes a huge issue. I've spent my whole life on the East Coast, and you never know if it's really going to rain until it does or doesn't. The forecast changes literally minute to minute.
> First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.
First, you are utterly wrong with your facts.
100 rainy days per year does not equal 2400 hours of rain per year.
It's closer to 500 hours of rain per year = 5.7% of the time.
Realistically, you're looking at the VAST majority of cities Uber being able to operate in 99% of the time.
Additionally - "rain" does not equal downpour. Waymo can drive in light rain.
And guess what - when it's downpouring, people crash MUCH MORE (fun fact - my father almost killed my hyrdoplaning in a downpour to get to my brother's basketball game).
Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if people aren't on the roads nearly dying in the middle of The Perfect Storm (<1% of the time) to get places they probably don't really need to get to in the first place...
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.
Can you get a taxi to show up? The last two times I tried to rebel against the rideshare duopoly was the morning before international flights. Trips to the airport are the only use case I have for rideshare. Both times I scheduled the pick up by calling the phone number the day before, both times the driver just… didn’t show up. I panicked and downloaded Lyft.
I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I’m going that route, I don’t see the point of not using Lyft.
Same. Every time we tried to call taxis pre-rideshare apps, we always got a "between 30 minutes and 2 hours" estimate if they ever showed up at all. Their CC machine was always conveniently broken unless you didn't have cash and the ATM was real far away. Good riddance.
The “sorry the credit card machine is broken” scam is about as ludicrous as the homeless people asking me for $1. Buddy, I haven’t carried cash since the Obama administration. Half the time I don’t even carry a credit card.
Sadly they have been squeezed out of many locations, and I can not always find one. I know where I can usually get them and try it as my first option. It depends on where you are.
This doesn't work in my city, taxis will literally just not show up. I know that sounds weird but you'll call, request a time and place and then be at the time and place and... nothing
To be fair my only experience of Uber was a friend calls an Uber for us, the Uber eventually cancels, she requested another one, they cancelled too, and then magically there are no Uber drivers in my city.
Conventional "radio controlled" taxi was the eventual solution I used to get us out of there.
I’m glad that works for you. But I’ve learned over years of discussing this stuff that there are so many different transportation situations experienced by different people that any universal rule is destined to become wrong.
I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles. Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious approach seems to be the last real contender standing.
> 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 being the owner-operator of that technology.
Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.
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.
but if uber spend a couple billion on cars, and lyft spend a couple billion, and didi spends a couple billion, etc, that's a lot more spend than if only waymo spends it.
From Waymo's perspective it is certainly desirable to have someone else paying for the cars.
The problem is that when others spend on it, Waymo has more leverage over them if the cars are only going to work with the Waymo driver. Perfect vendor lock-in on assets worth $150k each.
What's in it for Uber? Perhaps just a more favorable & longer term deal, but if so, they're essentially handing over the future of their business to Waymo.
Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game. Interesting times.
I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.
> proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate
Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
> a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...)
They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.
I think it also helps Waymo fill in the gaps between markets that they support. Customers get an app that works pretty much anywhere, and Waymo can drop into any given market with 10k self driving cars pretty much overnight.
This. Spinning up an Uber app clone is easy, actually running the service and having it available everywhere is hard and not something Google is likely to be good at.
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.
>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.
I know - its the brashness, level of ease and amount of pardons by the Trump presidency that makes it different. Not that it isn't done by other parties.
What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.
Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
To clarify: they have remote assistance teams, but they cannot “take over” and control the car at all. All they can do is things like plotting a path to go around if the vehicle gets stuck. They have no ability to do safety critical interventions, the vehicle is capable of reaching a ‘minimum risk condition’ all on its own.
Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don’t believe this is likely.
Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.
The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad
"please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside"
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 as well.
But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.
Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.
For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.
All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.
I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
Yes, but I think amelius is suggesting that Google could put a button in Google Maps that called a Waymo (and just a Waymo). That's what could run afoul of antitrust laws.
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.
Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about them considering selling their stake [2]
At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't.
The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly at stake if things go wrong.
For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis).
Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end up cheaper than self owned cars)
If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.
It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior.
Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.
Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take into account induced demand?
And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).
You're more than capable of doing this research yourself.
> with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient
Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
How would they eliminate congestion when they're so space inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at traffic flow, there's only so much physical capacity on the roads that people want to travel on.
> you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part of transportation needs.
> A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car
And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
> "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Mindless? There's only so much physical space available in the places where people live and work. American cities are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply because most people are forced to commute by car. Give them another option and many (of course not all) would prefer it, which would also make driving much more pleasant for the remaining drivers.
> How would they eliminate congestion when they're so space inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at traffic flow, there's only so much physical capacity on the roads that people want to travel on.
Sure, but that's not the limiting factor at all, which you'd understand if you bothered to do the slightest bit of research outside of your comfort zone.
> And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
That's very true, but it's not one-or-the-other. I am a strong supporter for intensive funding of mass transit systems....for those who want to use them. But that doesn't preclude continued usage of cars.
> massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use
"better" is in the eye of beholder. Car users are generally okay with how space is currently allocated.
If you want change towards increased mass transit, I highly recommend not being hostile about it. There is no need for mass transit to be positioned as a replacement for car use. When you threaten peoples' way of life, that's how you get people actively working against you.
It should come as no surprise that I'm a huge fan of getting around by car, but I would still happily have my tax money go towards bolstering mass transit systems and walkable/cyclable infrastructure for the portion of the population that wants to commute that way.
Would this not lead to induced demand where more people decide to start traveling more frequently once they perceive the roads as having cleared up? An additional consideration would be people incapable of driving would now have greater access to freely take rides.
The notion of shutting down all improvements due to fear of induced demand is ridiculous. Let's also stop building sewage systems because of induced demand and all defecate on the ground. It will reduce water use and be good for the environment by enriching the soil.
That’s not what I meant to imply. I was simply asking if removing humans from the driver’s seat and replacing them with autonomous vehicles that are hypothetically more convenient to take would actually increase the effective road capacity.
I’m not so sure it would actually solve the problem. I think a more effective and easier solution would be to design cities to be more accessible without cars. That way, traffic would likely be reduced due to fewer humans in the driver’s seats even if they continued commuting. To summarize, in order to achieve a greater road capacity, I think we should focus on replacing the method of commuting that requires taking the road altogether. Subbing it for another method that still uses the road will invoke induced demand.
People in America mostly view cars as a status symbol and a part of their identity, which is why everyone buys giant trucks and SUVs. Why would a better taxi change that? Only "the poors" use taxis
That's not actually a blocking problem, as you have the same issues with human drivers today. At the end of the day, just like literally everything else in life, self-driving tech is a statistical process with corresponding costs.
The bar for success here isn't perfection. Rather, it's whether or not self-driving vehicles are cheaper than human-driven vehicles. Part of the cost of a self-driving vehicle hinges on how often the vehicles end up in failure states necessitating remote human intervention and/or insurance payouts. It's fine if they sometimes fail, they just have to do so infrequently enough to be cheaper. And if Waymo is to be trusted, they already appear to be safer.
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 fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.
I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily, but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which already exists that has the technology supplied by Google/Waymo.
Google doesn't even want to have human interaction, and Google's reputation for sure didn't help it in chat and social network spaces either.
And I'm sure Google doesn't even want to work it with restaurants and drivers, because you can't just put an AI algorithm to deal with their issues.
Small businesses go through a lot to just edit their own listings on local businesses, I wouldn't wish Google to be the middle man for my deliveries.
It's a signal that ride share apps won't be 100% autonomous anytime soon.
If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.
You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.
Google had this with Google Maps showing the fare for your route on both Uber and Lyft, but I guess Google was getting some sort of kickback because Uber stopped [paying] to be on there perhaps over a year ago.
This makes so much sense - and why they'd team up with Uber. Google/Waymo don't care about non-coverage human-driver rideshare. However the users definitely do. So this partnership makes a ton of sense - if you're in a Waymo area, you could have a separate app, but having a single app for both types of rides is definitely a win for both.
getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.
> app that is easily replicable
Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.
business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.
> What does Uber bring to the table at all?
demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.
With Google's reputation, I'd expect them to provide terrible customer support and then also just let the whole thing stagnate after the initial splashy rollout and it had to be maintained.
Waymo is a technology provider. Uber has lots of existing users and no ability to do autonomous driving. This way, Waymo gets to enter their cars in Uber's app and make a similar kind of revenue as a driver would. All Uber does is take their cut and supply passengers.
So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.
I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
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.
>What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable
What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)
Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table
Remote driving would likely result in worse safety with very little gained by a commercial transportation company. They still have to pay for a driver but now that driver is staring at a screen 12 hours a day. Humans are already mediocre drivers when physically present and that would get so much worse if they were doing everything remotely instead
At this point even multiplayer driving games haven't figured out how to not kill half the field every time there is a single late packet. You cannot drive in a concrete jungle and get stable, reliable, verifiably usable internet.
Drone planes are good for the military because they move all the risk from the pilot to the vehicle. Drone cars are bad for civilians because they move all the risk from the driver to the vehicle. What you’re suggesting would quickly replace America’s mass shooting problem with a VBIED problem. And it wouldn’t even save any time or effort! You’d still need to concentrate on driving the car.
Somehow this seems scarier to me than self driving cars.
1. Driving without the physical feedback that comes from acceleration, braking, taking a turn too fast, etc.. is really hard. Maybe they could overcome this with simulators of some sort, but I expect that would be too cost prohibitive.
2. I want the driver that can think to have skin in the game. I don’t want them to be able to drive off a cliff, or in to a crowd, from the comfort of their couch.
You could probably overcome this with some sort of hybrid model that simply doesn’t allow stuff like this. But at that point you’re still having to develop some pretty sophisticated self driving technology, and you still have to pay a driver. Not sure who is motivated to do this.
3. What’s the point? You still have to pay a driver either way. Sure you get some cost savings by being able to switch out tired drivers instantly. But in the end, the most expensive cost is paying someone to sit there and drive.
Yeah ultimately it could be a sort of hybrid where the AI drives until it encounters a situation it is high risk to handle, like crowded street, then a human is alerted to take over. A pool of humans could then manage exponentially far more than one to one vehicles depending on how good the AI is.
That's a huge money saver.
Additionally recruiting truck drivers is difficult to do so maybe having a work from home job would make it easier.
It's not that it's point less it's that some people just don't see the point.
I don't know just seems like an idea worth pursuing for a million reasons, including being able to outsource driving or find the best drivers in the world. Also.mikitary reasons. Save lives with a remote controlled tank.
But that doesn't create any profit, it's only a convenience for some random number on a sheet.
Also managers probably don't like remote work in that industry :p
What's the gain here? Can they pay you less than another driver who will sit in the car?
Because dealing with signal being lost sounds like a huge problem to deal with for very little payback.
in the typical scenario taxi/ride-share drivers are only driving paid miles for a small fraction of the time they are on the clock.
with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled for situations they can't handle.
this means that you can have a remote driver who is continually switching between driving different vehicles and only driving in the situations where actually needed and profitable.
with driver based transportation when you get into low utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of the street, the drivers who are working spend more time sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick up rides.
in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving with much less mileage waste.
There isn't that much of a difference between the taxi driver sitting in the physical car or at home.
Only when you Location A is in low demand, you could "hop" into a car at Location B.
But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which increases efficiency a lot.
"autonomous" vehicles are remotely monitored and controlled. that is just not part of the marketing.
the big blocker, and why autonomous/remote vehicles are not being rolled out more widely, is that remote requires lots of very reliable low latency bandwidth.
5G (mmWave 5G in particular) is a key enabling technology. until you get mmWave 5G or some comparable technology the bandwidth for remote at scale doesn't exist.
The Waymo vehicles being discussed in the article are not remote controlled like the GP is talking about. Remote assistance isn't controlling the vehicle, the autonomy stack remains in control throughout. They're just giving it additional information that it can't determine for itself. They're also not a part of the typical operation, but rather for infrequent, exceptional circumstances.
I had interviewed with Uber's ATG years ago and their pitch, even then, was that they were building a platform for whoever won the autonomous game to be available on uber, not just their own cars.
Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.
One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.
I imagine autonomous taxis will be significantly cheaper than driver taxis. From a quick search it looks like in general Uber drivers earn somewhere around $9 for a 30 minute ride [1].
And out of that $9, the driver has to pay for their gas (or electricity) and upkeep of the car. Uber apparently earns about $3-4 for their service. If Uber is now covering the costs of an expensive for now autonomous vehicle, it's not clear to me the fare drops at all.
This is very true, but it sounds to me like a classic case of design iterations: find patterns, develop them among users, learn ways to introduce new users… A search engine, an email, chat… non of that was natural, and the first iterations where clunky, but you know can’t imagine they’d be any simpler or that anyone would want anything else.
So if we look exclusively at only successful software products for our comparison, we'll see success for a completely different product category with high capital costs--got it.
So they're going to make the cars they're already running in Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then expand into other areas without having to spend money on advertising/operations? What's the game plan?
395 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 557 ms ] threadBut if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/
Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.
https://www.gv.com/portfolio
> Alphabet has a large stake in Uber.
Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.
I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.
Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple.
For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.
If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame Uber.
Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people will think twice about Uber taking the blame.
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?
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.
says who?
Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there.
With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.
That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect from big G. Google would probably charge me a cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my account for having the temerity to complain I'd been stranded, and then followed up with automated email confirming they made the right decision after review.
I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't scale operations in the same way you can scale development.
Google would have to do something similar to launch their own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense to just keep Uber in the middle.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/uber-com/insights/
This seems like a play to attract users from the most popular ridehail platform and eventually funnel them to the Waymo app. I don’t believe users are loyal to ridehail apps like they are to social networks (I don’t use Uber because my friends use it) and would jump to a service that is cost competitive and autonomous. Or, as I said another comment, maybe they are setting the stage to be just a technology provider to ridehail companies and let them deal with all the operational overhead.
Taxis compete on price, safety, quality of service. Virtually all of this value derives from the quality of the FSD implementation. Of course, this will extend to all forms of road transportation eventually. It is going to very much be a winner takes all situation for a number of years (perhaps a decade). The next phase will be a period of high fragmentation as the technology becomes commoditized and a race to the bottom will ensue. The final phase will be consolidation with a few players being best at execution, cost control and finance operations.
And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
Counterexample, Google Brain didn't make much money, but they still invested in it and spit out Transformers.
consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.
Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.
I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
LOLOLOL
It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.
Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.
Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.
It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.
And it isn't the lawyers.
It's the network of riders.
Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.
Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.
Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions) of potential riders.
All this to try to compete with Uber (which isn't profitable) in a few areas where the legal, political and climate ("we have cars in Chicago but they only run from March 1st to November 1st") options are favorable.
The marketplace is not the biggest issue that Google would need to overcome.
I may have an unusually lazy social circle.
I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).
At least we got FOSS chromium + FOSS android.
That said, things like Google Play Music -> Youtube Music was poorly handled and has permanently shook me. Have been leaving Google since.
Hm. This is like --
It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.
The original regulatory capture.
Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.
Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.
Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work.
On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
[0] https://blackwolfapp.com/
But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.
Nonsense
It would be a huge job. Even for Google
as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics
... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area.
... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).
Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.
When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.
Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for dozens of places and handle customer service for rideshare, etc, at scale?
Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is
I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber".
Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C.
Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.
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.
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.
Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app?
Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.
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.
Most days, fines are just the cost of doing business. They cut into your profits, sure, but as long as profits >> fine, just pay the fine and keep doing it.
The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully.
There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.
Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.
Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately.
What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.
Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.
Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.
Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take.
Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history.
Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice).
The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).
Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.
Just want to point out that the failure case of self driving (if this product fails I crash into another car while going 80 mph) makes the race to the bottom slightly less plausible.
Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.
The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.
As terrible as a pedestrian death is, the reality is there's news about Tesla accidents and near-accidents on the news all the time and people still love the brand. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Uber/Amazon/M$/etc hating is not as widespread in the general population as it is among tech bros.
As for Otto, my understanding is Uber pivoted similarly on the freight side, with a partnership w/ Volvo Autonomous Solutions.
They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow.
Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than trying to persuade the markets Google hasn’t spanked millions on a dead end.
Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.
It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone
I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.
There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
$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 decrease over time.
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-... )
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...
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 this is just PR to set expectations for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is eventually swallowed by someone else.
The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that “Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish program forward”.
When a sort of pitch was made to an exec where the car has to crash into a tree or a cyclist, he said the bike. Because you aren’t going to pay $80,000 for your car to choose your death.
If you look at car ownership as owning a weapon, it does only make sense that you’ll have to prioritize for the owner.
But really, we aren’t even remotely to trolley problem. The systems BARELY detect and react properly to single issues, let alone detecting multiple and selecting between them.
I honestly think it’s a scam that was popular in the era of Free Money, and I’m so glad that is temporarily on pause.
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...
I’ve been in at least four fully self-driving dev / S0 / drivable buck vehicles and they are absolute garbage imo. We had one planned demo that was delayed because of fog in 2020, not road fog, but crap on the LiDAR glass. How many have you directly worked with?
You’ll be happy to know it isn’t just weather that makes this all fake though.
Road crown, even minor, but especially major in the northwest. Reflections, refractions. Lights and electronic billboards. Potholes. Missing road paint. ANY sort of road work at all. “Unhomed” people washing windshields. Squirrels (day) and mice/rats (night). Other bad drivers. Just plain dirty vehicles, self and others. Dust.
It’s all garbage. If we were serious it would be long haul, V2V V2I (vehicle to infra/vehicle). But yea yea, Waygo says they solved weather so just post their claim and you win! Reality can’t compete with marketing, except it always does.
Every serious company has put significant effort into testing with weather (note: not all weather conditions and not the same testing as traditional automotive). They've also put effort into handling all the other scenarios you've mentioned. Waymo does pose estimation to better handle construction workers and traffic cops, for example.
Also the TAM numbers should make it clear why long distance freight isn't getting as much attention. Surely your employer has shared their outlook internally?
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
First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.
It also doesn't need to be "raining heavily". It can also be raining lightly, snowing, foggy, dusty, or smoky.
But even if you're right and it's 10%, the predictability becomes a huge issue. I've spent my whole life on the East Coast, and you never know if it's really going to rain until it does or doesn't. The forecast changes literally minute to minute.
1. https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-pre...
First, you are utterly wrong with your facts.
100 rainy days per year does not equal 2400 hours of rain per year.
It's closer to 500 hours of rain per year = 5.7% of the time.
Realistically, you're looking at the VAST majority of cities Uber being able to operate in 99% of the time.
Additionally - "rain" does not equal downpour. Waymo can drive in light rain.
And guess what - when it's downpouring, people crash MUCH MORE (fun fact - my father almost killed my hyrdoplaning in a downpour to get to my brother's basketball game).
Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if people aren't on the roads nearly dying in the middle of The Perfect Storm (<1% of the time) to get places they probably don't really need to get to in the first place...
Suggests a natural partnership with Cruise.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...
I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I’m going that route, I don’t see the point of not using Lyft.
Unless it’s shift change or you’re in the wrong neighbourhood or have the wrong skin colour.
Conventional "radio controlled" taxi was the eventual solution I used to get us out of there.
> 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 being the owner-operator of that technology.
Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...
The problem is that when others spend on it, Waymo has more leverage over them if the cars are only going to work with the Waymo driver. Perfect vendor lock-in on assets worth $150k each.
What's in it for Uber? Perhaps just a more favorable & longer term deal, but if so, they're essentially handing over the future of their business to Waymo.
I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.
Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.
>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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers... especially Marc Rich
But a federal pardon is for federal crimes. So if a state such as New York convicted you then a presidential pardon won't save you.
What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.
Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don’t believe this is likely.
Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.
"please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside"
Now it's going to be a lot more interesting
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 as well.
But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.
Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.
For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.
All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.
I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
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?
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.
Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about them considering selling their stake [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043796
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36044335
Isn't it or something has changed lately?
For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis).
Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior.
Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.
And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).
You're more than capable of doing this research yourself.
> with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient
Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
> you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part of transportation needs.
> A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car
And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
> "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
Mindless? There's only so much physical space available in the places where people live and work. American cities are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply because most people are forced to commute by car. Give them another option and many (of course not all) would prefer it, which would also make driving much more pleasant for the remaining drivers.
Sure, but that's not the limiting factor at all, which you'd understand if you bothered to do the slightest bit of research outside of your comfort zone.
> And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
That's very true, but it's not one-or-the-other. I am a strong supporter for intensive funding of mass transit systems....for those who want to use them. But that doesn't preclude continued usage of cars.
> massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use
"better" is in the eye of beholder. Car users are generally okay with how space is currently allocated.
If you want change towards increased mass transit, I highly recommend not being hostile about it. There is no need for mass transit to be positioned as a replacement for car use. When you threaten peoples' way of life, that's how you get people actively working against you.
It should come as no surprise that I'm a huge fan of getting around by car, but I would still happily have my tax money go towards bolstering mass transit systems and walkable/cyclable infrastructure for the portion of the population that wants to commute that way.
I’m not so sure it would actually solve the problem. I think a more effective and easier solution would be to design cities to be more accessible without cars. That way, traffic would likely be reduced due to fewer humans in the driver’s seats even if they continued commuting. To summarize, in order to achieve a greater road capacity, I think we should focus on replacing the method of commuting that requires taking the road altogether. Subbing it for another method that still uses the road will invoke induced demand.
The bar for success here isn't perfection. Rather, it's whether or not self-driving vehicles are cheaper than human-driven vehicles. Part of the cost of a self-driving vehicle hinges on how often the vehicles end up in failure states necessitating remote human intervention and/or insurance payouts. It's fine if they sometimes fail, they just have to do so infrequently enough to be cheaper. And if Waymo is to be trusted, they already appear to be safer.
Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.
If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.
You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.
getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.
> app that is easily replicable
Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.
business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.
> What does Uber bring to the table at all?
demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.
So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.
I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)
Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table
Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?
1. Driving without the physical feedback that comes from acceleration, braking, taking a turn too fast, etc.. is really hard. Maybe they could overcome this with simulators of some sort, but I expect that would be too cost prohibitive.
2. I want the driver that can think to have skin in the game. I don’t want them to be able to drive off a cliff, or in to a crowd, from the comfort of their couch.
You could probably overcome this with some sort of hybrid model that simply doesn’t allow stuff like this. But at that point you’re still having to develop some pretty sophisticated self driving technology, and you still have to pay a driver. Not sure who is motivated to do this.
3. What’s the point? You still have to pay a driver either way. Sure you get some cost savings by being able to switch out tired drivers instantly. But in the end, the most expensive cost is paying someone to sit there and drive.
That's a huge money saver.
Additionally recruiting truck drivers is difficult to do so maybe having a work from home job would make it easier.
It's not that it's point less it's that some people just don't see the point.
I don't know just seems like an idea worth pursuing for a million reasons, including being able to outsource driving or find the best drivers in the world. Also.mikitary reasons. Save lives with a remote controlled tank.
with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled for situations they can't handle.
this means that you can have a remote driver who is continually switching between driving different vehicles and only driving in the situations where actually needed and profitable.
with driver based transportation when you get into low utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of the street, the drivers who are working spend more time sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick up rides.
in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving with much less mileage waste.
But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which increases efficiency a lot.
the big blocker, and why autonomous/remote vehicles are not being rolled out more widely, is that remote requires lots of very reliable low latency bandwidth.
5G (mmWave 5G in particular) is a key enabling technology. until you get mmWave 5G or some comparable technology the bandwidth for remote at scale doesn't exist.
I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized you meant a vertical bar.
Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.
[1] https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-fi....