>> "Google could cut Uber down hard by pulling Google Maps API access."
Why would they do that to a company they are invested in?
>> "if they execute on this."
There's the key. They are going to face the same regulatory problems as Uber. Worse if they go the self-driving car route as that going to require huge overalls to legislation worldwide.
I think we should differentiate between a self-driving car (with a full set of controls) and a driverless car. The former is 100x more likely to happen than the latter. You might see driverless buses that go on predefined routes.
I was thinking about this. They don't necessarily have to face the same problems as Uber because they don't have to compete with taxi companies. Uber's model completely relies on direct competition with legacy taxi companies. Google could simply offer their self driving cars to said taxi companies and they'll be able to cut their personnel by 95% over night. You can cut the costs of operating a taxi service while still operating within the confines of the current system.
Not sure the taxi companies would get in bed with Google, or cut rates accordingly, I'm just suggesting that driverless cars have certain advantages.
That said, theres a whole other can of worms of trying to pass regulation allowing pilotless cars, which I'd guess will be just as difficult as duking it out with TLC's around the country.
Hasn't Uber already done a lot of the bush clearing? Sure, there's plenty more to get hashed out, but it might be nice to draft behind Uber, only entering markets once the legal situation stabilizes.
I've always been fond of the expression "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"
I don't think the quote was saying that Uber is providing said fire hose of data, but rather that Google Maps gives Google a fire hose of traffic data which in turn Uber utilizes to create efficient routing.
Not that I don't love OSM - I use it myself for some side projects - but is it really better?
Here in NYC I've found several streets mislabeled as one-way in the wrong direction, and not too long ago at that. If these major errors can be found by some guy just fooling around, in one of the biggest cities in the world, how useful is OSM for navigation?
Google Maps tried to route me down a staircase in San Francisco for several months, told me I could turn left on a major street that you have never been able to turn left on and decided my address was not only in the wrong part of town, but in a completely different zip code at one point because someone had created a "business" at my address and set it to be in a completely different place which made it pretty much impossible to order from any service dependent on them like grubhub or eat24hours.
No one has perfect data. At least when I update OSM, it updates relatively quickly as opposed to Google Maps which took months to get updated after reporting the errors.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Google puts an incredible amount of effort into their GIS/mapping division, and OSM would be hard pressed to compete with those resources.
Bing map data would work just as well. Google might have more coverage out in the sticks but for where Uber operates the coverage density and accuracy difference would be somewhere between negligible to non-existent.
so when any other company does something like this, we cry anti-trust. But when Google does it, it's good business?
I'm not sure where all of this Google love comes from on HN (besides all of the engineers that work there). Google is just as evil as any large corporation.
They may surgar-coat everything with a "do no evil" mantra, but it's just good PR. When you peel back these layers, it's business as usual.
>> Google is just as evil as any large corporation.
Let's not exaggerate. Google might not be perfect; nobody is, but their actions are great magnitudes in distance from the evil some other companies have done. I'd rather work for Google than any of the companies below:
Google's entire business is based on completely taking every single one of our actions, thoughts, connections, and interests and selling it out to advertisers.
Most Android phones push you to put everything into the cloud. Do you know why? Oh yeah, that's right, so they can sell your data to advertisers.
Recently, they stopped putting organic search terms in referral traffic from the Google search engine to a website, effectively making it impossible to use any other applications except Google Adsense. Great company, right?
They have had a monopoly as bad and far reaching as Microsoft..yet I rarely hear the hatred that I used to hear about Microsoft in the late 90s.
It seems like all you need to do is support the developer community by giving out lots of free software/open source and the tech community will forgive you for pretty much anything (employing you at $100,000+/year also helps in this forgiveness).
Considering Google have invested a fair bit of cash into Uber which might be a tax write-off for Google, I would probably say we are going to see Google try and buy Uber out instead. Cutting off their maps access would probably open up a can of worms for Google as Uber would undoubtedly take legal action (and they have the funds to really go for it), there could be a little bit of conflict of interest happening here as Google have access to inner workings of Uber's business model and the business itself.
But having said that, there is probably nothing stopping Google from creating a driverless car Uber rival, it would fall outside of the realm of being a true direct competitor as there are no drivers. But are driverless cars at a point where they can be rolled out on a larger scale? Seems there is a lot of regulation and process to abide by before that starts to happen, maybe a controlled rollout?
I am surprised Google haven't tried launching their own airline yet, it would probably be undeniably easier than a ridesharing network of driverless cars.
"Signature's project includes seven hangars for corporate jets, with five of those hangars to be used by Blue City Holdings, its primary tenant. That company will manage aircraft for Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose private jets are now parked at Moffett Field, where their lease is up next year."
Good god, that'd we way too much power in the hands of a single company. They're awfully close to Googlizing the world. Which I think is theoretically the closest civilization could get to utopia. But I'm not one for utopia.
Google seems unable to have a partner without eventually entering their market and becoming enemies. Apple before Android, Twitter before Google+ - I guess it's inevitable with how many different industries Google tries to tackle.
I think if this service is entirely defined by autonomous vehicles it's really a complete different service than Uber. No more driver ratings or passenger ratings, all the same car type, and it's own vast legal challenges
I'm picturing that you can order the Google autonomous car that has a 42" TV screen, a hot tub, and a magnum of champagne.
Or the stretch limo.
Or a flatbed truck. Maybe one without a passenger compartment.
Picture "PODS." Portable On-Demand Storage. Except the thing just drives to your house.
Picture ordering "Lightning McQueen" for your kid's birthday party. He shows up, and someone is doing the "Talk With Crush" thing, remotely animating Lightning's eyes, etc.
Picture ordering "Herbie The Love Bug" to drive your kid and his date to prom.
Or ordering the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Or the A-Team van. Or KITT.
Or a motor-home / RV.
Or a giant truck filled with Arcade Machines. Again, for corporate parties.
Or a portable kitchen. Stocked with ingredients you pick. Great for outdoor parties at parks, tail-gating, etc.
Or a micro-brew / mini-bar. Whatever bottles you open, you pay for. Stocked blender, ice, brews on tap, etc.
Cripes, if you want to test-drive a car, having one that can autonomously show up at your work, or home... Not that you'd necessarily buy an autonomous one, but the idea of bringing the dealership to you?
Or ordering a snow-plow. No driver. You click a button, pay $10, and your driveway gets plowed.
Or getting a Student Driver car. It sits there watching your kid learn to drive, and saves their ass if they do anything dumb. Gives them a report card. Lets you know how they're doing.
Or ordering a Sleeper car. Shows up at my house at 9 pm, and drives me to Chicago by 8 am. I'd order one every weekend.
I'd love a service where I can rent some storage unit out in the middle of the country somewher (I live in Australia..) for cheap cheap prices, then just call a car/van to my house with an app, load it up with gear, and have it delivered out to my storage unit.
Seems like a great way to handle people in my situation where I can only afford a small place but don't necessarily want to get rid of all my stuff just because my current location doesnt work for it
I noted back in 2008 how this was an interesting side effect of Google's empowerment policy.
The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).
So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.
Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.
What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.
One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.
I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
Google is the only company with a potential edge over Uber right now. The point in time at which self-driving cars are usable by the the public is the only visible inflection point where Uber's hegemony is truly threatened.
(edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
Maybe from a technology point of view. The problem with driverless cars isn't the car, it's the insurance. Google would need to become a large insurance company. Doing business in NYC would kill them.
Huh? No. Anyone with relatively deep pockets could easily disrupt Uber right now. Uber's technology is pretty simple and straightforward, and not meaningfully patent-protected. You can do the same tech given six months or so and a decent engineering team.
And Uber's customer-base is price sensitive. You can easily get into this market if you're willing to price compete with Uber.
Now, Uber is very willing to price-compete ferociously. It will absolutely drive you both deep into unprofitability. And Uber has quite a war-chest, and it can push around its smaller competitors this way. But as rich as Uber is, there are plenty of companies that are richer. Way richer. Orders of magnitude richer.
I think that so far, the really big boys have said, "Why do we want to get into a price war with Uber? They'll fight until the last breath, I don't see why we should launch a deeply unprofitable ride-sharing service."
Amazon might do it eventually. They have expertise in operating at high scale, low-margin, and they're big enough to destroy Uber. They also might want to use a ride-sharing service to deliver goods. I think that right now, they've mostly said, "We're unconvinced that there's a real logistics business here, and so we aren't going to get involved."
Google might do it for the data.
I can't see Apple bothering -- it's pretty far outside of their corporate comfort zone. But if, I don't know, Tim Cook gets hit by a bus and their new CEO wants to make major changes, they absolutely COULD do it.
Microsoft could maybe do it in an attempt to create a compelling entry-point to their ecosystem, but it's not very Microsofty.
I don't see that any non-computer companies currently have a reason to try it.
The hard part of Uber isn't the tech, it's building up the network. Two-sided marketplaces are really hard to build from scratch, when there are no competitors. They're virtually impossible once both your customers and your drivers are like "I've already had good experiences with Uber. Why would I take a chance on you?"
That's why Google has an advantage over everyone else - for them it's a one-sided marketplace, they don't need to worry about the driver. And that gives them a big cost advantage over Uber.
not necessarily. a lot of Uber's drivers use cars that are financed through Uber and are effectively locked into Uber for 5 years (unless they step out of ridesharing). This is how Uber has been able to maintain a huge supply with great cars (vs. you don't know what you'll get with Lyft).
Interesting - I didn't know that. I don't see how it would affect Google, though. Presumably Google would offer the service with self-driving cars, and get rid of the drivers entirely. They'd have to step out of ridesharing, because there would be no more market for ridesharing drivers.
The answer to "Why would I take a chance on you?" is simple: "I'm cheaper."
Neither Uber's passengers nor their drivers are deeply loyal. They are for the most part brought to the service by the value prop. Uber is of course an established brand, and that brand has some value, but the value is hardly infinite. A deep pocketed competitor could establish themselves.
I assume by "it's cheaper", you mean that an Uber competitor would charge their customers $X, pay out $Y (> $X) to their drivers, and subsidize $Y - $X by pouring in cash from their other products.
This sort of cross-subsidy has a poor track record when used against well-capitalized opponents. (In many situations, it's also illegal: see "dumping".) Unless you can complete wipe out the competition and force them out of business, you're pouring money down the drain, and building nothing of value with it. Bing Cashback resulted in most people doing their searching on Google, identifying what they wanted to buy, and then buying it on Bing so that Microsoft would pay them.
You get very odd arbitrage situations that basically result in funneling money straight from the corporation that's being idiotic to a savvy consumer. If a company did what you suggest, I would immediately sign up with them, along with my fiancee. We would then use the app every time we took a trip together or picked each other up. Since one of us is the driver and one is the passenger and the driver earns more than the passenger pays, we'd be making money at this company's expense every time we drove somewhere. Now imagine every carpool, group of friends, or just random strangers who setup a business to exploit this arbitrage opportunity doing that.
And, just to be clear, that's what Uber does. Not in as simple and straightforward a way as you're suggesting, but at least large fractions of the time, it pays its drivers more than its passengers pay it (for example: it's constantly giving me $10 coupons. It has sign-up bonuses and income guarantees for drivers. Etc.) Of course, it's spending investment money, not money from its other non-existent businesses.
So if you and your fiancee want to try this business, you can do it right now with Uber. Or Lyft. I suspect you will find that despite the fact that there is theoretically a fair amount of money on the table here, they've made it obnoxious enough to get that you won't bother with it.
If Google competes directly with a company they are invested in via GV they're going to really damage the reputation of GV. Why would you accept investment from them if they're going to get access to your private info and then turn around and screw you.
trillions, probably, because anything that eats up uber with autonomous driving likely soon eats up UPS, FedEx, all the large trucking companies that move goods, etc, etc.
I don't have insider knowledge, but I believe Google claims that there's a wall between Google and GV, and they act completely independently. This makes sense to me -- otherwise, no one would pitch ideas to GV that Google might one day implement (i.e. basically all ideas that have a software angle).
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
I don't think Google Ventures's role is particularly relevant. Companies should be aware of what data they are providing Google when making use of Google services. Google doesn't need to have insider information to have a wealth of information about Uber trips: the number of trips, when they most frequently occur, duration and miles covered, what cities are most popular, what are the popular starting and ending points. All of these data can be mined from just watching Uber's use of the Google Maps API. It may not be contractually permitted, but the data are there for Google to use.
Through a paranoid lens, Google APIs are corporate espionage you sign up for. Since Google is a valuable and entrenched service provider, they can get away with it. What I could see companies doing in return is attempting to obscure their API usage by fabricating requests. For example, Uber could break the correspondence between API requests and trips by sending requests that look authentic but don't correspond to any actual trips. This kind of corporate information warfare sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, but it certainly feels present and real when you look at Google's relationships.
Despite the "wall" between the two organizations from a knowledge-standpoint, there isn't one from a financial standpoint. If you had ambitions to be a $100+ billion company (see: Uber), and think Google might eventually want to compete with you, why would you want to fuel your competitor via your own success?
When the wall is made of people, its hardly a wall. Even if Google doesn't use insider knowledge to copy Uber, unless Uber had no other possible investors it would later wish it had an investor who was out to kill the competition rather than an investor who is the competition. Thus the problem with VC arms of major tech companies.
The amount of secret sauce that's being shared with VCs is really up to the company. If the company is doing well, request for anything beyond the financials and strategy docs would be suspicious.
Its at least mildly surprising -- lots of people assumed Google would try to get in this market, sure, but most of the speculation, given Google's investment in Uber, has focused around Google acquiring Uber, not competing with them.
My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private.
Can't book a flight (ITA), order a taxi (this), book a hotel or chat with a friend (Gmail), or pay for dinner (Wallet) without generating an activity log with a single company.
Even if (and perhaps even probably) Google weren't doing this intentionally, they've already demonstrated through failing to encrypt their inter-DC connections how they're becoming a massive single point of failure (remember Snowden showed us the NSA were tapping Google's internal network already). Whether the end result is an intelligence service tap, or some legislative measure affecting the company done in the open, I'll simply never be comfortable with one company concentrating so much personal data affecting so many people.
More seriously though (HN can't take a joke), what is the real concern here? NSA can't 100% trust the data they collect and it certainly can't be used in any court because plausible deniability (and past, known-fabrications/parallel-construction) will always trump whatever records or logs are produced.
I wonder if eventually NSA will get massive layoffs because much of what they'd do would be redundant, and for 80 percent of the stuff they want they could just ask/hack Google. The other 20 percent employees will remain for users of Google competitors and more targeted spying. So essentially 80 percent of NSA's "intelligence" would be outsourced to Google (for free).
Nope. The fact that they have to be a bit fuzzy with their accounting to cover up the interesting programs means it is near impossible to tell who is sitting idle and useless, and who is super critical but on a project that intentionally is described as idle and useless.
> This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
Google's core business is keeping personal data and using it to target ads that advertisers pay Google to show, not providing that personal data to paying customers. Selling the data would be giving away the prime competitive edge Google has, which lies in selling services (primarily advertising) where Google has a competitive edge because of its unique access to the data.
So, unless the NSA wants Google to show you ads rather than wanting detailed information on you, what they would be looking for would not be what Google's core business involves selling.
Certainly. It is up to the people that allow the government to persist to surveil the activities of that government to ensure that it is operating within the bounds they have permitted.
Oh those silly North Koreans. When will they decide to stop permitting their own torture?
Their benevolent overlords have been torturing them in droves for half a fucking century, but apparently they like it that way, because otherwise they wouldn't PERMIT it, right?
i assume you've read the recent article by nafeez ahmed from vice, etc, about how google's search algorithms were funded via the NSF/CIA/NSA for 2 years before google ever existed and that sergey reported to someone working for the CIA's ORD for that period.
Excessive. You can call an airline, hotel or taxi company directly, text your friends or pay for dinner with cash. Your inner paranoid is drawn to the convenience of the services that google offers. If you don't want one company to have a lot of information about you, then don't use that company for everything.
Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely creepy of any kind from google advertising. "Hey karmacondon, we saw that you recently booked a trip to las vegas, took a self-driving cab to the Bunny Ranch and used your Google Wallet to pay for two hours with someone named 'Bubbles'. Can we interest you in some anti-itch creme?". That kind of personal intrusion just doesn't match anything I've seen from Google, and until that day comes I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will. You can't book a flight or check into a hotel without using a credit card, which is directly attached to your name and is trivially subpoenable. If you're really worried, there are ways to live a cash only existence, but it isn't easy. Some level of trust is required to live in modern society. It's good to be skeptical, but it always comes down to the level of inconvenience you're willing to trade for privacy.
>MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will
Google has knowledge of routes which you take to work everyday. Friends you are close with. Online services you are using. And you want them to have it. You don't want (atleast intentionally) MC/Visa to have that kind of knowledge about you.
Am I the only one thinking a targeted convergence with driverless cars down the road (no pun intended)? Once you remove the largest cost factor (the human), does pricing reduce to $.56/mi (or whatever the Standard Mileage Rate, or derivative thereof, is at the time).
Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)
Electric vehicles cost about 1-3 cents/mile for the electricity. They also require so little service, I would assume the cost would be closer to 10-20 cents/mile for a self-driving electric vehicle.
That $0.56 number includes depreciation. There are other costs like insurance which are non-trivial. Initially at least, it's not going to be much less.
Eventually it might, but that assumes that all cars will be driverless. Even if driverless cars have a 0 error rate, human driven cars will run into them at at least the same rate as they run into static objects.
At any rate, this eventual reduction in insurance is why I started by saying "Initially at least". With time, the cost of manufacturing self driving cars will also go down.
That's like saying "software should become bug-free over time." I'm not sure it's actually getting worse over time, but it sure isn't getting better. Have you ever had to find a bug in a Wordpress plugin written in PHP by a part-time developer, that generates JavaScript, that in turn generates buggy HTML? I doubt wonky driverless cars trying to optimize a bunch of conflicting metrics (operation cost, utilization, revenue (from fares/ads/analytics), security, etc.), plugged into a constantly updating global mapping system, will have a decreasing number of bugs over time.
Google has an insane level of motivation to wring out any and all bugs from a driverless car. Even a single deadly accident in one of their cars could potentially destroy their entire business. Comparing that type of software to a Wordpress plugin makes no sense. The potential cost of a bug is huge in this case thus you will get very good software with any driverless car.
Electric vehicles would depreciate at a much slower rate than ICE vehicles, as the only components that wear would be moving parts (electric motor, fans for cabin comfort) and any degradation to the battery pack (Tesla has packs at 500K miles that still have 80% capacity).
Consider the car has the opportunity to get checked and cleaned every time it refuels/recharges, I'd imagine the vehicles would be in decent shape. Until robots take over <grin>, I'd suspect that human labor would be involved at these stations.
Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down.
There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.
This is very spot on. Savvy advertisers are already rubbing their hands, waiting for the day when they can get access to Uber data. Imagine if one can send a message/notification to the people heading towards certain restaurants in Uber cars, asking "How about visiting my place instead, first drink and dessert is on the house :)"
Uber is already doing/testing this in a better way. They had free Uber week in Perth not long ago, with discounts & freebies offered at a number of restaurants if you made them your final Uber destination.
I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...
Facebook was viewed as a threat to Google for two primary reasons:
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
I doubt they will be that bad. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't be surprised if google offers free rides, you just have to watch advertisements, login with your google account, and allow them to store all the data on the ride, potentially even microphone/video data. This could be invaluable (think eye-tracking, reaction detection, mood detection, common phrases, it's a data miners heaven) for not only reactions to advertisements (and then subtly tweaking the algorithm on a person-person basis) but detection of your mood to decide how to advertise.
Going out to the bar? Show the user a drink you know is slightly higher than you know what your user would normally buy.
Coming come from the bar? Show them late night snacking, you can drive them through wherever or they can order right from the interface and it will be delivered to your house.
It could use your spoken conversations to better do search result targeting on a geographical and user level. CGI + TTS can personalize a number of ads just for you "Hey Josh, I saw you bought a domain earlier today, would you like to spin up an instance on Google cloud?". The possibilities are near limitless.
I'm not saying Google wouldn't stumble and fall on something like this. I'm sure in the early days before advertisers craft ads for this medium it will be rough with repetitive ads that are more of an annoyance but advertisers will like having your credit card on file. Soon the advertisers will catch on and provide "rich ads" that allow for ordering/buying/subscribing/+1-ing through the ad (tap on screen to interact or through your phone/tablet/laptop, did I mention? Free WIFI of course, there is even a chromebook you can use if you need).
Maybe it's such that you owe $W for the ride but you can take off X% if you allow Y "permission" or complete Z assignment and there exists enough of Z's / Y's such that the ride can be free. I'm sure it won't be presented that way, it will sneakier, maybe they can even offer users to give them $X if they allow it all. I can see pollers loving be able to target specific areas with questions (and maybe get unique poll results, of course unique impressions does cost more, a lot more). Local businesses running ads during business hours to offer to give users no ads for the rest of the ride if they let the Google car bring them by to buy something, it's on the way to their destination and the next item on their schedule isn't until $X and they have time. Advertise a restaurant and let the user make a reservation right there, don't worry, we put it on your calendar.
There is lot that sounds terrible about that world but I'm conflicted. If it leads to extinction of (over a span of a reasonable number of years for the complete transition) car accidents/deaths (through the removal of both the impaired and just plain bad drivers) due to it's "free" price tag. If it leads to an increased mobility for the lower class now that they have access to transportation. If it push highly fuel efficient or ideally electric cars (even further ideally charged by a solar recharging station). If it does even one of these things then I'm not sure how terrible it would really be...
I'm sure that there will exist, for a time, a netjets-esque "netrides" that either Google or another player will offer that uses nicer/better-kept cars. I'd hope there were online exchanges (or smaller groups running software off github that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 B :)) where owners of such cars could put their car in a pool of other cars that could be used for rides. You find a way to even out total milage over all cars and users can block out time (daily commutes, special events, vacations, etc). I do worry that Google could eventually choke out these groups due to convenience, cost, and apathy but I have hope. And frankly the car manufacturers only seem to care about driverless cars (no I d...
I only take cabs 5-10 times a year anymore, and never in Boston, but I've never been in a cab that pestered me with advertisements. If I found myself in one, it'd be the last ride I took with that company.
On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.
> I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world.
This is a great point that may not be getting enough play in this conversation. You could easily imagine Larry being nervous that Uber won't not be evil (pardon the double negative). I know people can probably point to examples where Google has lost their way on the 'Don't Be Evil' front, but I'm sure it's still a big part of their decision-making process. I use Uber and love the experience, but you have to think there's some truth to the horrible reputation they're earning themselves; Uber doesn't scream 'Don't Be Evil' to me.
Google proved that it can do logistic-heavy business with it's Google Express. I'm sure if they do something like Uber, it would be as good as Google Express.
> David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, joined the Uber board of directors in 2013, and has served on it ever since.
Not super related to this story, but I always have to wonder: why do powerful people join boards? What's in it for them? It seems like an awful lot of work, responsibility, and potential for conflict of interest. What do board members get out of it?
in this case, David Drummond was presumably the steward of Google's 250M+ investment. The reason investors join the board is so they can help the company succeed and make sure their interests are being protected
If Drummond got 0.1% Equity as a Director, it would've been worth $3.4M the day he joined and if he wasn't diluted, it would be worth $40M today. (I realize that both of those assumptions are unlikely, but it's still interesting as an example)
>Directors of Fortune 500 companies received median pay of $234,000 in 2011. Directorship is a part-time job. A recent National Association of Corporate Directors study found directors averaging just 4.3 hours a week on board work.
This is not at all a surprise, and I fully expect Amazon to also ultimately enter this space. (I have no insider knowledge of either company.) It's amazing to me how many people think that Uber is somehow building a deep moat when these other companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) have a much deeper connection with their customers -- to say nothing of the data that have collected. Given perfect rider competition and (especially) perfect driver competition, how does the advantage not lie with the established company and brand? Given Uber's nose-bleed valuation, I suspect that they may become the Webvan-esque poster child of this bubble: visionary, but ultimately a ludicrous valuation and absurd misallocation of capital that was obvious to all only in retrospect.
Forget Google, Lyft and Sidecar are basically already the same thing as Uber. Plus local cab companies are developing their own apps. The barrier to entry in ride-dispatching is absurdly low. I wish somebody (city government? craigslist?) would just make a free clearing-house for it.
On the one hand, this is great. Competition and I couldn't wish Google's infinite pockets on a more terrible group of people.
On the other hand, Google has only been successful with search and advertising and are known for terrible customer service. I mean, who are you going to call when your driver rapes you? You'll never be able to talk to a human.
What would a non-robot such as yourself hope to accomplish by calling the company that hires a rapist? Seems like the police would be a much more effective option for walking meat.
> I mean, who are you going to call when your driver rapes you?
I would presume, whether the driver was a personal acquaintance, a traditional taxi driver, an Uber/Lyft driver, or a "Google Rides" driver, the answer to that question would be ... the police and a personal injury attorney, and whatever physical and mental health professionals you thought were appropriate.
Of course, since the reports of Google developing a ride hailing service are that it is in conjunction with their autonomous car project, it seems at least plausible that that wouldn't even be physically possible with the Google service.
I also don't understand how this is news to anyone. The fact that Google wasn't planning on selling its driverless cars but instead provide a service was discussed months ago, including the fact that the way this service would be purchased via a phone. I am especially doubtful Uber's board wouldn't notice this...
I don't understand why this remark deserves a downvote, don't you think that this "news" from some internal source on the board simply doesn't add up? Have I wrote something incorrect?
I'm glad that the article highlighted how valuable the mapping information is that Google collects. While Uber probably could still run its current operations without Google map data, there is a much smaller probability that they would be able to run a self-driving car service without a highly accurate mapping product. And to build a mapping product is really difficult and expensive. I was surprised when Google starting putting money into mapping the streets because it's a giant effort with major barriers to entry. Nokia bought a company called Navteq that was the clear leader (and basically a monopolist) in driving the streets and collecting the data (they originally supplied data to Google Maps). Navteq supplemented the data with satellite images and other sources, but the roads change often enough that you need people driving on the streets.
So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
Drivers have basically zero power here, so I'm guessing Uber would just update the driver side of the app to always report location. No need to add incentives when you can just make it mandatory with minimum pushback (from Uber's PoV). Assuming they don't already.
I assumed the parent comment meant user-provided data, not raw GPS data, since presumably the driver app is always reporting their location (how else would they know which drivers to dispatch?)
I'm not sure what user-provided data would even be beneficial? Stuff that's likely already collected encompasses where the user is picked up, dropped off, route taken, time of departure and arrival .etc
Reasons for why drivers always take route X between streets A and B, for example (e.g. street C has been changed to one way only so route Y isn't actually legal/possible).
I think the self driving car is a tougher problem to solve than the maps. If uber can buy self driving cars, they can make maps on a city by city basis. If you have a pile of money, you can get maps. If you have a pile of money, it's not really clear you can get an autonomous car. I'm the first to shout they're coming - but they aren't here yet.
And you have to get enough of those self driving cars for it to be effective. If uber is buying the cars then they cease to be a driver/car to passenger matching service and become a full on cab company, complete with the liability and maintenance costs that go with owning cars.
And Uber may still wind up on the losing end of a lawsuit about pushing drivers to take on vehicles based on false pretenses ( Uber telling the drivers that there would be enough work to justify them financing a vehicle for Uber usage).
Uber's efforts to shed itself of all liability and risk in terms of employees and assets is legendary; but they could still find themselves going up against the IRS on the question of whether drivers are employees or freelancers. Most especially with drivers that they referred to auto-financing. The theory being that having a requirement for a minimum standard of car and providing finance referrals would be similar to requiring "independent contractors" to wear uniforms.
> Uber telling the drivers that there would be enough work to justify them financing a vehicle for Uber usage
It seems incredibly unwise to finance a $20,000 USD vehicle hedging on some third party (of which you have zero control over) to provide enough for you to pay it through.
Generally, if you tell someone that taking on a debt obligation is a condition of doing business with you and make representations to the effect that they will be able to earn enough to meet that obligation based on their projected earnings from your contractual agreement with them that would be considered an implied contract.
If you then manipulate things such that they are effectively unable to meet their obligations because you are jerking them around they are certainly going to be able to find a lawyer who will take their case. Particularly if you were referring them to the auto-dealership and pre-qualifying them for financing.
And you can find examples from almost every car company. They all have projects going back decades looking at autonomous technologies. Some you see today e.g. parallel park assist, crash avoidance, lane/stop sign detection etc.
I understand what you're saying, and i agree there are a ton in testing. But it's not like i can go to the volvo website and check the box for the "no steering wheel" option at any price. Furthermore if i'm say, WalMart, I can't call up any truck manufacturers and get a self driving option for my next fleet purchases. That's in spite of having a huge infrastructure for supporting and maintaining my trucks.
Today, unless your title is "Director of self driving car research" you can't just go take one for a spin. Again, they're coming, they are the future. Uber wouldn't have cleaned out Carnage Mellon robotics department if it didn't still require original research.
Sure. But the point is that these will be available in the short to medium term by companies with experience in scaling out. A world of difference between someone like Volvo showing something and Google/Uber doing it.
Uber could easily approach Volvo but then again there is no competitive advantage to. The car companies are interested in volume sales not building cars to niche specifications.
There's also a lot of unknowns and serious challenges and difficult problems to solve before driver-less vehicles can become "mainstream".
Majority (all?) of the road testing has been on fairly controlled roads with "normal" circumstances, ie. not a blizzard with iced roads, hydroplaning, debris falling in front of the vehicle at speed, etc.
Longevity of the vehicle - it's doubtful a driverless vehicle purchased today will still be on the road (and safe!) 10-15 years from now (there's an awful lot of computing and sensors in place, but would a computer that old still perform safely -- ie. would you use your computer from 15 years ago as your daily-use work machine? no - so why trust your life to it?), whereas majority of vehicles on the road today are 10-15+ years old. Sensors are expensive and prone to natural wear, etc.
What about sensors frizzing out and providing false-readings? Similar circumstances have destroyed $100 million spacecraft missions, let alone some $20K vehicle that's several years old and neglected by the owner. Even military-grade electronics and sensor arrays are not "fool proof" and totally "failsafe" -- and you know the quality, robustness, redundantness, etc.. of the electronics going into self-driving vehicles are not on par.
The moment the first human casualty occurs do to some software/hardware failure, there will be serious ramifications for the self-driving world.
> The moment the first human casualty occurs do to some software/hardware failure, there will be serious ramifications for the self-driving world.
Just want to add to the discussion a reminder that this is said about literally every new piece of technology that has ever happened- the first human casuality from riding a horse, first human casualty from driving a car, etc.
It's interesting to note that we're expected to lose our minds over the first human death with New Technology Y, when Old Technology X is typically killing humans all the time.
Also out of curiosity– re: longevity, why would a driverless car have to be on the road for 15 years? Why not just update/retrofit/repair/replace every year or so?
Spacecraft and military equipment are used in really extreme settings! Also can't driverless cars update themselves, go for repairs themselves, etc?
Also I'm guessing it wouldn't make a lot of sense for regular folks to own their own driverless car. They'll just use one at the touch of a button whenever they need to. When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
>It's interesting to note that we're expected to lose our minds over the first human death with New Technology Y, when Old Technology X is typically killing humans all the time.
Exactly, call me when they're killing 1.2 million people a year[1].
The number of people killed by automobiles is completely fucking insane and the only reason we're cool with it is it mostly doesn't happen to someone a large number of people care about and if it does we can hum, haw and then lay blame on someone (who is probably dead).
> The number of people killed by automobiles is completely fucking insane
We're largely talking about only the US market here -- in which only (and I say that word relatively) 32,000 people died in any sort of automobile related accident last year (including siting in their driveway idling and somehow died).
To put this in perspective, the common Flu (a totally vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable illness) killed more than 52,000 people in the US last year alone.
In reality, automobiles in the US are the safest they have ever been since 1949, and automobile related deaths have dropped more than 26% since 2005 alone.
According to the CDC, automobile related deaths are not even in the top 10 leading causes of death in the US.
Last year, heart disease was responsible for 596,577 US deaths last year alone. Stroke claimed 128,932 US lives. Diabetes took 73,831 american lives. Suicide robbed 39,518 people their life last year -- in excess of 7,000 more than died by automobile related accidents.
In 2009, approximately a grand total of 2,436,652 died in the US of all causes (including natural causes). Of that number, automobile related deaths only accounts for 1%. Of the entire US population, we're talking about 0.0096%...
According to the CDC, in 2012, 10,322 people (or 31%) of all automobile related deaths were alcohol-related deaths. Another 18% of automobile related deaths are attributed to drugs other than alcohol in the same year. That accounts for just about 50% of all vehicle related deaths, leaving the true automobile related deaths due to accident at a shockingly low number (relatively) of about 15,000 people per year.
All of this is to say, relatively speaking, automobile related deaths are not a significant concern anymore. It does not make logical nor financial sense to do anything significant in this sector while ignoring or not increasing efforts in these other much more significant areas.
So, to counter your original assertion -- no, it's not "completely fucking insane"... the amount of people dying from the common Flu is.
I'm reminded of this single story on Twitter where a woman unknowingly livetweeted her husband's death in a road accident- and then later found out it was him. I went to find her Twitter account, and saw that she basically spent everyday comforting other people who lost loved ones to road accidents... and it seemed like this was happening every day. Crazy, terrible shit.
I'm reminded of this single story on Twitter where a woman unknowingly livetweeted her husband's death in a road accident- and then later found out it was him. I went to find her Twitter account, and saw that she basically spent everyday comforting other people who lost loved ones to road accidents... and it seemed like this was happening every day. Crazy, terrible shit.
Sure, but the reality is, the serious ramifications happen for these new pieces of technology. Ridiculous as it seems now, the launch of the automobile was accompanied by "red flag laws" mandating that cars were lead by a flag-waving pedestrian, and even today there are product recalls involving millions of cars for alleged "unintended acceleration" induced by a basic mechanical lever.
Throw in the fact that Uber, whose relationship with lawmakers is best described as "it's complicated", is about the last company you'd want to be leading lobbying efforts to allow unmanned self-driving cars on city streets, and it's a fair bet they're not expecting their self-driving cars to be anything more than valuable IP at the time they exit.
> Also out of curiosity– re: longevity, why would a driverless car have to be on the road for 15 years?
There would become a significant cost burden to the owner if this was what was necessary. Most people can't afford to do multiple thousand dollar repairs to their vehicles every few years. Currently replacing the ECU in most modern vehicles will run you close to $1,000 after parts and labor, and these are the very "dumb" kind of car computers (comparatively).
> When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
This may make sense to someone living in a big city, but when you shift to the suburbs or a more rural area, renting would become a significant inconvenience. In my experience, people living in big cities are the ones who often do not own vehicles and/or rent and/or use things like Uber/Lyft and/or Zip cars. Suburbians (which is where majority of our population lives in the US) would not be able to take advantage of this type of service for a number of logistical reasons.
Longevity might be a problem, but it's reducible to an investment decision, the vehicles don't necessarily have to last 15 years unmodified to be practical.
> Longevity might be a problem, but it's reducible to an investment decision
Vehicles are not "investments" as they diminish in value rapidly after the initial purchase. A 6 month old vehicle is not worth what a brand new one is. The reason we have so many older vehicles on the road (>10-15+ years of age) is simply because majority of citizens cannot afford new vehicles.
Replacing parts in modern-day "dumb" cars is incredibly expensive. If you radio goes out, you're looking at close to $1,000 just in parts and labor. There's few repairs that eat less than $500.
Most vehicle owners neglect their current "dumb" car, let alone a rolling piece of computer equipment.
Vehicles will last fewer years. They will be more expensive (in both initial cost and maintenance). Aged vehicles won't be reliable nor safe to operate.
These are the realities driverless vehicle proponents are simply not considering.
The first iterations will not be consumer cars. I would have put my money on trucking before taxis, but it looks like i'm wrong.
The first iterations will be expensive, triple the cost of a normal car perhaps? that's ok if they get 10x the use. When you put in that kind of investment, it's ok to have dedicated staff for maintenance. You also get to learn a lot about failure modes, when and how to do upgrades, there's lots of good stuff that can happen there.
Google is in a pretty unique place. They have the data to make them work. They can afford a large staff to maintain the cars. They can afford flight data recorders for the cars. They can afford to create an insurance subsidiary. Insurance is cheap if you can prove robot cars never cause accidents. They can afford these things in dollars, technical talent, legal talent, and international reach.
Uber is lucky because it's not google's core business. They've got a lot of cash, but they don't (afaict) have the depth of resources to throw at the zillion problems that will inevitably come up. The only piece google lacks is the focus. It's google's game to lose.
Uber is already pretty much limited to major metropolitan areas, so maybe Uber would really only need map data in these consolidated areas. At least to start.
That's a major benefit to rolling this out as a cab company rather than as a car manufacturer - you can enforce limits like that and people won't complain because they won't even know about the 98% of roads you haven't automated yet. Assuming you can get regulators to accept it:
Map area by area - send out human driven cars if a customer requests a journey you can't cover with driverless cars yet..
Assuming they collect GPS traces, they know exactly what areas will cover the most of their business with the least amount of mapping.
They know the start and end points of the trip and can make a decision whether it can be handled with an autonomous car or a human driver at the outset. They could serve major routes like airports to hotels via autonomous vehicle to begin with and handle everything else with people. That could still represent a massive cost saving.
The TIGER data is a starting point. But it's outdated the day it is complete, and rapidly diverges. For many purposes that's perfectly fine, but as stated above, you need someone driving the street. Even something as major as postcodes changes multiple times in between TIGER updates, and tons of streets are changed or added or removed.
The TIGER dataset is fantastic, and certainly helps levelling the playing field by giving people somewhere to start from, but it's the cheap 80%, except in this case the last 20% doesn't take the other 80% of the time, but more like 800%.
Have you looked at the last couple years of updates? It's way more accurate and complete than it used to be, and for getting names on that last 1%, they have drivers and the ability for the app to say "I don't know that street name, is it new?".
I do some work for a company that does mapping, so yes, I've looked at it regularly. It may be way more accurate and complete, but it is still updated too rarely to ever be up to date. Cover any reasonable area, and road situations change daily, especially when you're doing things like driving which also needs to account for temporary road closures and the like.
As I say, it's a good starting point, but it's not in any way sufficient, and keeping it up to date is a huge amount of work, which has been reflected in the value of companies that have set themselves up to be able to keep up to date data sets of this.
That said, as I've commented elsewhere I do agree that Uber is in a good position, but mostly because they don't need full coverage. They need thorough and up to date information, but they need it in very tiny areas to begin with, and as you say they can rely on drivers to cover areas they don't currently know how to deal with. They can apply GPS traces to analyse exactly what areas are most profitable to improve map information for to make self driving viable first, and roll it out area by area.
You're emphatically emphasizing something I conceded in the second sentence of my initial comment.
I was definitely more focused on the 'current operations' aspect of things though, not the autonomous vehicles. If there's a human driver, the little disruptions to the road system aren't a disaster.
Uber can simply license their maps from various third parties the same way every car company does today for their GPS.
Google has added some decent additions to Google Maps but really 95% of what they had they purchased. For example Whereis/Yellow Pages data here in Australia.
There are too many sources and too many processes in world wide Maps data (Apple learnt hard way).
I doubt Uber has the capability to have decent maps solution in short term (1-2 years).
Licensed maps are great for GPS units telling a human where to go, but a self driving car needs much more detailed information that most likely only google has.
If Google is the only company with this information how come all the car manufacturers have active projects that don't rely on their data. It's because Google has nothing that other companies don't have/need. It's not like Google magically acquired all their data. They bought most of it.
Map data from third parties requires manual verification, as we learned from the Apple Maps debacle.
Google does this [1]:
> Google employs a small army of human operators (they won’t say exactly how many) to manually check and correct the maps using an in-house program called Atlas.
A Maps app isn't just another app. Nobody gets killed if the Stocks app shows an incorrect price, but someone could die if the Maps app uses incorrect mapping information.
> So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
Most likely they would either start having drivers drive Uber cars with steetview-esq data collection gear on it, or pay a premium to drivers who mounted a tray on the roof of their vehicle that contained high resolution cameras, a laser scanner, and a controller to process and forward that data back.
I would not be surprised if Uber was looking at acquiring https://www.mapillary.com for this functionality.
One possibility, is that if they can get good enough inital mapping data, and good enough self-driving cars, the cars could update the mapping data while they're working.
That's a lot of trust on the self-driving cars, though.
Self driving cars will be available to purchase from multiple manufacturers, and those manufacturers will have to deal with the mapping issues. Accordingly, while Google will be a formidable and perhaps dominant competitor in this space, I don't see mapping as the deciding factor here. The fact that Android, with its massive install base, will likely come with Google's service built in seems much more likely to help them destroy competitors.
The issue with OSM is that the information level is uneven.
Dense urban center, you have every bench and bin mapped. Go into the countryside, there is not even the buildings. It might not be an issue for a taxi company that is mainly operating in urban center though.
It's in the taxi company's interests to improve the maps for everyone: popular routes will be refined to a T, and gaps will quickly become obvious. These days the most common mapping gap is new developments, and they're faster to appear on OSM than the commercials.
I look at this with great anticipation. This will be an enormous reducer of congestion. Driverless cars will remove many of the headaches and hassles of high-density commutes. Imagine being able to pop a beer in the backseat as an automated car drives you home.
Your very own government sponsored taxi, less city and state control and now with improved tracking and information awareness! Red or blue pill, they'll choke 'em both down with a few sips of progress.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadWhy would they do that to a company they are invested in?
>> "if they execute on this."
There's the key. They are going to face the same regulatory problems as Uber. Worse if they go the self-driving car route as that going to require huge overalls to legislation worldwide.
Not sure the taxi companies would get in bed with Google, or cut rates accordingly, I'm just suggesting that driverless cars have certain advantages.
That said, theres a whole other can of worms of trying to pass regulation allowing pilotless cars, which I'd guess will be just as difficult as duking it out with TLC's around the country.
which gives Google a fire hose of data about transportation patterns within cities
It seems that their investment in Uber was about getting someone to gather the data for them, perhaps it was cheaper than doing it themselves!
Here in NYC I've found several streets mislabeled as one-way in the wrong direction, and not too long ago at that. If these major errors can be found by some guy just fooling around, in one of the biggest cities in the world, how useful is OSM for navigation?
No one has perfect data. At least when I update OSM, it updates relatively quickly as opposed to Google Maps which took months to get updated after reporting the errors.
I'm not sure where all of this Google love comes from on HN (besides all of the engineers that work there). Google is just as evil as any large corporation.
They may surgar-coat everything with a "do no evil" mantra, but it's just good PR. When you peel back these layers, it's business as usual.
Let's not exaggerate. Google might not be perfect; nobody is, but their actions are great magnitudes in distance from the evil some other companies have done. I'd rather work for Google than any of the companies below:
- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/10/1141724/-Walmart-fu...
- http://www.alternet.org/story/52526/rural_communities_exploi...
- http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/02/3466915/chiquita-c...
- http://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-metivier/module-2-why-doe...
- https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/private-prisons
- ...just about any oil company.
- ...The diamond industry.
- ...and I'm highly suspicious of what goes on in insurance & credit card companies.
Most Android phones push you to put everything into the cloud. Do you know why? Oh yeah, that's right, so they can sell your data to advertisers.
Recently, they stopped putting organic search terms in referral traffic from the Google search engine to a website, effectively making it impossible to use any other applications except Google Adsense. Great company, right?
They have had a monopoly as bad and far reaching as Microsoft..yet I rarely hear the hatred that I used to hear about Microsoft in the late 90s.
It seems like all you need to do is support the developer community by giving out lots of free software/open source and the tech community will forgive you for pretty much anything (employing you at $100,000+/year also helps in this forgiveness).
Google hasn't done this. So let's not get worked up about a hypothetical.
But having said that, there is probably nothing stopping Google from creating a driverless car Uber rival, it would fall outside of the realm of being a true direct competitor as there are no drivers. But are driverless cars at a point where they can be rolled out on a larger scale? Seems there is a lot of regulation and process to abide by before that starts to happen, maybe a controlled rollout?
I am surprised Google haven't tried launching their own airline yet, it would probably be undeniably easier than a ridesharing network of driverless cars.
1. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23041939/san-jose-city-council...
"Signature's project includes seven hangars for corporate jets, with five of those hangars to be used by Blue City Holdings, its primary tenant. That company will manage aircraft for Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose private jets are now parked at Moffett Field, where their lease is up next year."
You're right though, it would absolutely destroy the business, requiring them to redevelop their apps. Would be a huge service disruption.
I can't imagine why you think this.
I'm picturing that you can order the Google autonomous car that has a 42" TV screen, a hot tub, and a magnum of champagne.
Or the stretch limo.
Or a flatbed truck. Maybe one without a passenger compartment.
Picture "PODS." Portable On-Demand Storage. Except the thing just drives to your house.
Picture ordering "Lightning McQueen" for your kid's birthday party. He shows up, and someone is doing the "Talk With Crush" thing, remotely animating Lightning's eyes, etc.
Picture ordering "Herbie The Love Bug" to drive your kid and his date to prom.
Or ordering the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Or the A-Team van. Or KITT.
Or a motor-home / RV.
Or a giant truck filled with Arcade Machines. Again, for corporate parties.
Or a portable kitchen. Stocked with ingredients you pick. Great for outdoor parties at parks, tail-gating, etc.
Or a micro-brew / mini-bar. Whatever bottles you open, you pay for. Stocked blender, ice, brews on tap, etc.
Cripes, if you want to test-drive a car, having one that can autonomously show up at your work, or home... Not that you'd necessarily buy an autonomous one, but the idea of bringing the dealership to you?
Or ordering a snow-plow. No driver. You click a button, pay $10, and your driveway gets plowed.
Or getting a Student Driver car. It sits there watching your kid learn to drive, and saves their ass if they do anything dumb. Gives them a report card. Lets you know how they're doing.
Or ordering a Sleeper car. Shows up at my house at 9 pm, and drives me to Chicago by 8 am. I'd order one every weekend.
Seems like a great way to handle people in my situation where I can only afford a small place but don't necessarily want to get rid of all my stuff just because my current location doesnt work for it
https://www.makespace.com/
http://www.taxiboxmobileselfstorage.com.au/
The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).
So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.
Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.
What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.
One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.
I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
(edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
And Uber's customer-base is price sensitive. You can easily get into this market if you're willing to price compete with Uber.
Now, Uber is very willing to price-compete ferociously. It will absolutely drive you both deep into unprofitability. And Uber has quite a war-chest, and it can push around its smaller competitors this way. But as rich as Uber is, there are plenty of companies that are richer. Way richer. Orders of magnitude richer.
I think that so far, the really big boys have said, "Why do we want to get into a price war with Uber? They'll fight until the last breath, I don't see why we should launch a deeply unprofitable ride-sharing service."
Amazon might do it eventually. They have expertise in operating at high scale, low-margin, and they're big enough to destroy Uber. They also might want to use a ride-sharing service to deliver goods. I think that right now, they've mostly said, "We're unconvinced that there's a real logistics business here, and so we aren't going to get involved."
Google might do it for the data.
I can't see Apple bothering -- it's pretty far outside of their corporate comfort zone. But if, I don't know, Tim Cook gets hit by a bus and their new CEO wants to make major changes, they absolutely COULD do it.
Microsoft could maybe do it in an attempt to create a compelling entry-point to their ecosystem, but it's not very Microsofty.
I don't see that any non-computer companies currently have a reason to try it.
That's why Google has an advantage over everyone else - for them it's a one-sided marketplace, they don't need to worry about the driver. And that gives them a big cost advantage over Uber.
Neither Uber's passengers nor their drivers are deeply loyal. They are for the most part brought to the service by the value prop. Uber is of course an established brand, and that brand has some value, but the value is hardly infinite. A deep pocketed competitor could establish themselves.
This sort of cross-subsidy has a poor track record when used against well-capitalized opponents. (In many situations, it's also illegal: see "dumping".) Unless you can complete wipe out the competition and force them out of business, you're pouring money down the drain, and building nothing of value with it. Bing Cashback resulted in most people doing their searching on Google, identifying what they wanted to buy, and then buying it on Bing so that Microsoft would pay them.
You get very odd arbitrage situations that basically result in funneling money straight from the corporation that's being idiotic to a savvy consumer. If a company did what you suggest, I would immediately sign up with them, along with my fiancee. We would then use the app every time we took a trip together or picked each other up. Since one of us is the driver and one is the passenger and the driver earns more than the passenger pays, we'd be making money at this company's expense every time we drove somewhere. Now imagine every carpool, group of friends, or just random strangers who setup a business to exploit this arbitrage opportunity doing that.
And, just to be clear, that's what Uber does. Not in as simple and straightforward a way as you're suggesting, but at least large fractions of the time, it pays its drivers more than its passengers pay it (for example: it's constantly giving me $10 coupons. It has sign-up bonuses and income guarantees for drivers. Etc.) Of course, it's spending investment money, not money from its other non-existent businesses.
So if you and your fiancee want to try this business, you can do it right now with Uber. Or Lyft. I suspect you will find that despite the fact that there is theoretically a fair amount of money on the table here, they've made it obnoxious enough to get that you won't bother with it.
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
Through a paranoid lens, Google APIs are corporate espionage you sign up for. Since Google is a valuable and entrenched service provider, they can get away with it. What I could see companies doing in return is attempting to obscure their API usage by fabricating requests. For example, Uber could break the correspondence between API requests and trips by sending requests that look authentic but don't correspond to any actual trips. This kind of corporate information warfare sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, but it certainly feels present and real when you look at Google's relationships.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/books/money-and-power-abou...
Anyone game to take longbets on Google building a successful product internally and scaling it with their traditional approach?
I'm always doubtful.
Can't book a flight (ITA), order a taxi (this), book a hotel or chat with a friend (Gmail), or pay for dinner (Wallet) without generating an activity log with a single company.
Even if (and perhaps even probably) Google weren't doing this intentionally, they've already demonstrated through failing to encrypt their inter-DC connections how they're becoming a massive single point of failure (remember Snowden showed us the NSA were tapping Google's internal network already). Whether the end result is an intelligence service tap, or some legislative measure affecting the company done in the open, I'll simply never be comfortable with one company concentrating so much personal data affecting so many people.
So, I suppose I have.
More seriously though (HN can't take a joke), what is the real concern here? NSA can't 100% trust the data they collect and it certainly can't be used in any court because plausible deniability (and past, known-fabrications/parallel-construction) will always trump whatever records or logs are produced.
But that is the point of Scientific knowlege, is it not? Falsability...
https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/3529204?hl=en
You mean "buy from".
This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
> This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
Google's core business is keeping personal data and using it to target ads that advertisers pay Google to show, not providing that personal data to paying customers. Selling the data would be giving away the prime competitive edge Google has, which lies in selling services (primarily advertising) where Google has a competitive edge because of its unique access to the data.
So, unless the NSA wants Google to show you ads rather than wanting detailed information on you, what they would be looking for would not be what Google's core business involves selling.
If those 80% were redundant, why not repurpose them to dig a little deeper into other activities?
1) Government programs have been temporarily and/or permanently shutdown by minority parties in the past.
2) US Government exists at the leisure of the people within its borders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
Their benevolent overlords have been torturing them in droves for half a fucking century, but apparently they like it that way, because otherwise they wouldn't PERMIT it, right?
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836...
if you haven't read this, it's a long but great read.
the best thing google ever did was create go (golang). huge props to robert griesemer, rob pike and ken thompson for getting it all going.
Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely creepy of any kind from google advertising. "Hey karmacondon, we saw that you recently booked a trip to las vegas, took a self-driving cab to the Bunny Ranch and used your Google Wallet to pay for two hours with someone named 'Bubbles'. Can we interest you in some anti-itch creme?". That kind of personal intrusion just doesn't match anything I've seen from Google, and until that day comes I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will. You can't book a flight or check into a hotel without using a credit card, which is directly attached to your name and is trivially subpoenable. If you're really worried, there are ways to live a cash only existence, but it isn't easy. Some level of trust is required to live in modern society. It's good to be skeptical, but it always comes down to the level of inconvenience you're willing to trade for privacy.
Google has knowledge of routes which you take to work everyday. Friends you are close with. Online services you are using. And you want them to have it. You don't want (atleast intentionally) MC/Visa to have that kind of knowledge about you.
Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)
but, sure, it would most likely be less.
At any rate, this eventual reduction in insurance is why I started by saying "Initially at least". With time, the cost of manufacturing self driving cars will also go down.
Electric vehicles would depreciate at a much slower rate than ICE vehicles, as the only components that wear would be moving parts (electric motor, fans for cabin comfort) and any degradation to the battery pack (Tesla has packs at 500K miles that still have 80% capacity).
There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.
I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
I like what they're doing with React though.
If that's their end game here, I'd be disappointed.
Going out to the bar? Show the user a drink you know is slightly higher than you know what your user would normally buy.
Coming come from the bar? Show them late night snacking, you can drive them through wherever or they can order right from the interface and it will be delivered to your house.
It could use your spoken conversations to better do search result targeting on a geographical and user level. CGI + TTS can personalize a number of ads just for you "Hey Josh, I saw you bought a domain earlier today, would you like to spin up an instance on Google cloud?". The possibilities are near limitless.
I'm not saying Google wouldn't stumble and fall on something like this. I'm sure in the early days before advertisers craft ads for this medium it will be rough with repetitive ads that are more of an annoyance but advertisers will like having your credit card on file. Soon the advertisers will catch on and provide "rich ads" that allow for ordering/buying/subscribing/+1-ing through the ad (tap on screen to interact or through your phone/tablet/laptop, did I mention? Free WIFI of course, there is even a chromebook you can use if you need).
Maybe it's such that you owe $W for the ride but you can take off X% if you allow Y "permission" or complete Z assignment and there exists enough of Z's / Y's such that the ride can be free. I'm sure it won't be presented that way, it will sneakier, maybe they can even offer users to give them $X if they allow it all. I can see pollers loving be able to target specific areas with questions (and maybe get unique poll results, of course unique impressions does cost more, a lot more). Local businesses running ads during business hours to offer to give users no ads for the rest of the ride if they let the Google car bring them by to buy something, it's on the way to their destination and the next item on their schedule isn't until $X and they have time. Advertise a restaurant and let the user make a reservation right there, don't worry, we put it on your calendar.
There is lot that sounds terrible about that world but I'm conflicted. If it leads to extinction of (over a span of a reasonable number of years for the complete transition) car accidents/deaths (through the removal of both the impaired and just plain bad drivers) due to it's "free" price tag. If it leads to an increased mobility for the lower class now that they have access to transportation. If it push highly fuel efficient or ideally electric cars (even further ideally charged by a solar recharging station). If it does even one of these things then I'm not sure how terrible it would really be...
I'm sure that there will exist, for a time, a netjets-esque "netrides" that either Google or another player will offer that uses nicer/better-kept cars. I'd hope there were online exchanges (or smaller groups running software off github that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 B :)) where owners of such cars could put their car in a pool of other cars that could be used for rides. You find a way to even out total milage over all cars and users can block out time (daily commutes, special events, vacations, etc). I do worry that Google could eventually choke out these groups due to convenience, cost, and apathy but I have hope. And frankly the car manufacturers only seem to care about driverless cars (no I d...
On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.
This is a great point that may not be getting enough play in this conversation. You could easily imagine Larry being nervous that Uber won't not be evil (pardon the double negative). I know people can probably point to examples where Google has lost their way on the 'Don't Be Evil' front, but I'm sure it's still a big part of their decision-making process. I use Uber and love the experience, but you have to think there's some truth to the horrible reputation they're earning themselves; Uber doesn't scream 'Don't Be Evil' to me.
"We also walk dogs."
Not super related to this story, but I always have to wonder: why do powerful people join boards? What's in it for them? It seems like an awful lot of work, responsibility, and potential for conflict of interest. What do board members get out of it?
>Directors of Fortune 500 companies received median pay of $234,000 in 2011. Directorship is a part-time job. A recent National Association of Corporate Directors study found directors averaging just 4.3 hours a week on board work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors
On the other hand, Google has only been successful with search and advertising and are known for terrible customer service. I mean, who are you going to call when your driver rapes you? You'll never be able to talk to a human.
If the self-driving car rapes you, you are probably a character in a scifi-horror movie.
I would presume, whether the driver was a personal acquaintance, a traditional taxi driver, an Uber/Lyft driver, or a "Google Rides" driver, the answer to that question would be ... the police and a personal injury attorney, and whatever physical and mental health professionals you thought were appropriate.
Of course, since the reports of Google developing a ride hailing service are that it is in conjunction with their autonomous car project, it seems at least plausible that that wouldn't even be physically possible with the Google service.
Are there any young sexy hipster actuarial startups? The bidding war starts now.
So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
Uber's efforts to shed itself of all liability and risk in terms of employees and assets is legendary; but they could still find themselves going up against the IRS on the question of whether drivers are employees or freelancers. Most especially with drivers that they referred to auto-financing. The theory being that having a requirement for a minimum standard of car and providing finance referrals would be similar to requiring "independent contractors" to wear uniforms.
It seems incredibly unwise to finance a $20,000 USD vehicle hedging on some third party (of which you have zero control over) to provide enough for you to pay it through.
If you then manipulate things such that they are effectively unable to meet their obligations because you are jerking them around they are certainly going to be able to find a lawyer who will take their case. Particularly if you were referring them to the auto-dealership and pre-qualifying them for financing.
https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
And you can find examples from almost every car company. They all have projects going back decades looking at autonomous technologies. Some you see today e.g. parallel park assist, crash avoidance, lane/stop sign detection etc.
Today, unless your title is "Director of self driving car research" you can't just go take one for a spin. Again, they're coming, they are the future. Uber wouldn't have cleaned out Carnage Mellon robotics department if it didn't still require original research.
Uber could easily approach Volvo but then again there is no competitive advantage to. The car companies are interested in volume sales not building cars to niche specifications.
Majority (all?) of the road testing has been on fairly controlled roads with "normal" circumstances, ie. not a blizzard with iced roads, hydroplaning, debris falling in front of the vehicle at speed, etc.
Longevity of the vehicle - it's doubtful a driverless vehicle purchased today will still be on the road (and safe!) 10-15 years from now (there's an awful lot of computing and sensors in place, but would a computer that old still perform safely -- ie. would you use your computer from 15 years ago as your daily-use work machine? no - so why trust your life to it?), whereas majority of vehicles on the road today are 10-15+ years old. Sensors are expensive and prone to natural wear, etc.
What about sensors frizzing out and providing false-readings? Similar circumstances have destroyed $100 million spacecraft missions, let alone some $20K vehicle that's several years old and neglected by the owner. Even military-grade electronics and sensor arrays are not "fool proof" and totally "failsafe" -- and you know the quality, robustness, redundantness, etc.. of the electronics going into self-driving vehicles are not on par.
The moment the first human casualty occurs do to some software/hardware failure, there will be serious ramifications for the self-driving world.
Just want to add to the discussion a reminder that this is said about literally every new piece of technology that has ever happened- the first human casuality from riding a horse, first human casualty from driving a car, etc.
It's interesting to note that we're expected to lose our minds over the first human death with New Technology Y, when Old Technology X is typically killing humans all the time.
Also out of curiosity– re: longevity, why would a driverless car have to be on the road for 15 years? Why not just update/retrofit/repair/replace every year or so?
Spacecraft and military equipment are used in really extreme settings! Also can't driverless cars update themselves, go for repairs themselves, etc?
Also I'm guessing it wouldn't make a lot of sense for regular folks to own their own driverless car. They'll just use one at the touch of a button whenever they need to. When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
My $0.02
Exactly, call me when they're killing 1.2 million people a year[1].
The number of people killed by automobiles is completely fucking insane and the only reason we're cool with it is it mostly doesn't happen to someone a large number of people care about and if it does we can hum, haw and then lay blame on someone (who is probably dead).
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
We're largely talking about only the US market here -- in which only (and I say that word relatively) 32,000 people died in any sort of automobile related accident last year (including siting in their driveway idling and somehow died).
To put this in perspective, the common Flu (a totally vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable illness) killed more than 52,000 people in the US last year alone.
In reality, automobiles in the US are the safest they have ever been since 1949, and automobile related deaths have dropped more than 26% since 2005 alone.
According to the CDC, automobile related deaths are not even in the top 10 leading causes of death in the US.
Last year, heart disease was responsible for 596,577 US deaths last year alone. Stroke claimed 128,932 US lives. Diabetes took 73,831 american lives. Suicide robbed 39,518 people their life last year -- in excess of 7,000 more than died by automobile related accidents.
In 2009, approximately a grand total of 2,436,652 died in the US of all causes (including natural causes). Of that number, automobile related deaths only accounts for 1%. Of the entire US population, we're talking about 0.0096%...
According to the CDC, in 2012, 10,322 people (or 31%) of all automobile related deaths were alcohol-related deaths. Another 18% of automobile related deaths are attributed to drugs other than alcohol in the same year. That accounts for just about 50% of all vehicle related deaths, leaving the true automobile related deaths due to accident at a shockingly low number (relatively) of about 15,000 people per year.
All of this is to say, relatively speaking, automobile related deaths are not a significant concern anymore. It does not make logical nor financial sense to do anything significant in this sector while ignoring or not increasing efforts in these other much more significant areas.
So, to counter your original assertion -- no, it's not "completely fucking insane"... the amount of people dying from the common Flu is.
Sources:
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/09/guns-tr...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/top-causes-of-death-united-st...
[5] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
[6] http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...
Throw in the fact that Uber, whose relationship with lawmakers is best described as "it's complicated", is about the last company you'd want to be leading lobbying efforts to allow unmanned self-driving cars on city streets, and it's a fair bet they're not expecting their self-driving cars to be anything more than valuable IP at the time they exit.
There would become a significant cost burden to the owner if this was what was necessary. Most people can't afford to do multiple thousand dollar repairs to their vehicles every few years. Currently replacing the ECU in most modern vehicles will run you close to $1,000 after parts and labor, and these are the very "dumb" kind of car computers (comparatively).
> When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
This may make sense to someone living in a big city, but when you shift to the suburbs or a more rural area, renting would become a significant inconvenience. In my experience, people living in big cities are the ones who often do not own vehicles and/or rent and/or use things like Uber/Lyft and/or Zip cars. Suburbians (which is where majority of our population lives in the US) would not be able to take advantage of this type of service for a number of logistical reasons.
Longevity might be a problem, but it's reducible to an investment decision, the vehicles don't necessarily have to last 15 years unmodified to be practical.
Vehicles are not "investments" as they diminish in value rapidly after the initial purchase. A 6 month old vehicle is not worth what a brand new one is. The reason we have so many older vehicles on the road (>10-15+ years of age) is simply because majority of citizens cannot afford new vehicles.
Replacing parts in modern-day "dumb" cars is incredibly expensive. If you radio goes out, you're looking at close to $1,000 just in parts and labor. There's few repairs that eat less than $500.
Most vehicle owners neglect their current "dumb" car, let alone a rolling piece of computer equipment.
Vehicles will last fewer years. They will be more expensive (in both initial cost and maintenance). Aged vehicles won't be reliable nor safe to operate.
These are the realities driverless vehicle proponents are simply not considering.
The first iterations will be expensive, triple the cost of a normal car perhaps? that's ok if they get 10x the use. When you put in that kind of investment, it's ok to have dedicated staff for maintenance. You also get to learn a lot about failure modes, when and how to do upgrades, there's lots of good stuff that can happen there.
Google is in a pretty unique place. They have the data to make them work. They can afford a large staff to maintain the cars. They can afford flight data recorders for the cars. They can afford to create an insurance subsidiary. Insurance is cheap if you can prove robot cars never cause accidents. They can afford these things in dollars, technical talent, legal talent, and international reach.
Uber is lucky because it's not google's core business. They've got a lot of cash, but they don't (afaict) have the depth of resources to throw at the zillion problems that will inevitably come up. The only piece google lacks is the focus. It's google's game to lose.
Map area by area - send out human driven cars if a customer requests a journey you can't cover with driverless cars yet..
Assuming they collect GPS traces, they know exactly what areas will cover the most of their business with the least amount of mapping.
Waze demonstrated how well a crowd sourcing effort can work.
It's also apparently possible for a small team to start doing sign recognition:
http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/01/27/traffic-signs.ht...
The TIGER dataset is fantastic, and certainly helps levelling the playing field by giving people somewhere to start from, but it's the cheap 80%, except in this case the last 20% doesn't take the other 80% of the time, but more like 800%.
As I say, it's a good starting point, but it's not in any way sufficient, and keeping it up to date is a huge amount of work, which has been reflected in the value of companies that have set themselves up to be able to keep up to date data sets of this.
That said, as I've commented elsewhere I do agree that Uber is in a good position, but mostly because they don't need full coverage. They need thorough and up to date information, but they need it in very tiny areas to begin with, and as you say they can rely on drivers to cover areas they don't currently know how to deal with. They can apply GPS traces to analyse exactly what areas are most profitable to improve map information for to make self driving viable first, and roll it out area by area.
I was definitely more focused on the 'current operations' aspect of things though, not the autonomous vehicles. If there's a human driver, the little disruptions to the road system aren't a disaster.
Google has added some decent additions to Google Maps but really 95% of what they had they purchased. For example Whereis/Yellow Pages data here in Australia.
Google does this [1]:
> Google employs a small army of human operators (they won’t say exactly how many) to manually check and correct the maps using an in-house program called Atlas.
A Maps app isn't just another app. Nobody gets killed if the Stocks app shows an incorrect price, but someone could die if the Maps app uses incorrect mapping information.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/
Most likely they would either start having drivers drive Uber cars with steetview-esq data collection gear on it, or pay a premium to drivers who mounted a tray on the roof of their vehicle that contained high resolution cameras, a laser scanner, and a controller to process and forward that data back.
I would not be surprised if Uber was looking at acquiring https://www.mapillary.com for this functionality.
That's a lot of trust on the self-driving cars, though.
There is of course still the routing part.
Dense urban center, you have every bench and bin mapped. Go into the countryside, there is not even the buildings. It might not be an issue for a taxi company that is mainly operating in urban center though.