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Comment by inthewoods | Hacker News Reader

To me, #1 is classic "inside the Valley" thinking - not recognizing that the world outside of the Valley is vastly different. As a simple example, as far as I know, no one is currently attempting autonomous cars in any place with more severe or varied weather conditions (e.g. snow).

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In fact, Uber is. They have a research center in Pittsburgh, which has plenty of weather and terrible roads. Cars are seen regularly dodging students around CMU.

They are, and very aggressively so. They bought up a ton of CMU's research department to do so[1].

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...

That's great to hear. Is the author's contention that Uber "doesn't have the tech" accurate?

The author mentions the CMU acquisition. I think their contention is that it's not enough, because Uber doesn't have access to the kinds of vehicle telemetry data its competitors do that would be necessary to train good self-driving car models. Google, and other companies with existing advanced vehicles on the road, have thousands of cars in the wild now with suits of sensors collecting telemetry and phoning home. Uber contracts drivers who drive their own cars, so it's not benefiting in a vehicle-telemetry sense from the drives it's arranging in the way it could be and its competitors do.

I think this is probably a solvable problem, though.

Valley can start the process by promote the self driving cars only in the silicon valley + SF, similar to how AirBnB and Uber started within a small region.

Valley has better environment, friendly government/regulation support.

The next version Tesla (in 5 years) might allow the car owner to get to work and auto "uber out" the car to "earn $$$" for the own - start with just Bay Area.

Or Google can

Step 1: Build a few thousand self driving "beta" cars to shuttle only their employees to/from work in year N.

Step 2: Uber out (Guber out) those self driving cars to pickup/drop off anyone in Bay Area, in year N+1.

If the model works for Bay Area, I can see other congested cities will clone it immediately to solve their own traffic problem.

I totally agree, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen that fast, or that the public or local governments are not going to be obstacles to these initiatives going forward. Short version: I think the timeline the author has in mind is dramatically faster than it will actually happen. But hey, would love to be wrong.

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