Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.
When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame.
Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.
I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030
Computer vision actually started out in the 60's because how hard could it be to classify objects in images? Well, decades later and it's still a hugely unsolved problem.
Robotics can be broken into 3 main categories: perception, planning, and controls. Perception is always the weak point. Robots just cannot see and understand their environments like people can. When you put a robot in a dynamic environment, they fail spectacularly. To give some idea of this, look at videos of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge - and keep in mind those were made by teams of top roboticists with millions of dollars in a highly constrained environment (it's hard to say that obstacle course was "real").
I really, really doubt it's going to happen in a few years. I would love to be wrong though.
AFAIK Google's cars rely on radar to identify the position of objects, which I would think is vastly easier.
Of course, there's still the interesting challenge of classifying objects into traffic partipicants and obstacles.
When there are billions of $'s to be made. Generally there is way.
I understand from where you are coming. But if the trend grows, and one companies sees the billions coming. Others are forced to innovate. Also a whole new ecosystem is born.
See pre iPhone and post iPhone mobile industry. Sometimes you need one company to do something insane to drive others down the same path.
Wheel less driving, first show me it drives in the pouring rain at night when the roads aren't lit. Show it having the ability to obey posted speed limits, adjust to construction, and the like.
I am still surprised at how much current systems love to tail gate let alone don't suggest obeying posted limits.
The hype right now is so great that even if the reality is amazing it will be disappointing.
For example, a train of self driving trucks can be led by 1 in the front. Yes, I know, REAL trains exist, but they don't go everywhere. A train of self driving trucks could save a lot of money.
If self driving Taxis don't work in the rain, then Uber can just NOT drive them when it is raining! For example, Maybe the penetration rate will be very low in Seattle, but very high in Texas. Disrupting 20% of the Taxi market by eliminating drivers is still a very big deal.
And for trucks, will you let supermarkets go dry once it starts raining? Otherwise you need to keep drivers on retainer. And then you might as well just have them drive for minimum wage.
When it is sunny, the self driving cars are out and about, and the price is low.
When it is raining, the self driving cars stop taking passengers, and the price goes up, with surge pricing, which is handled by human drivers.
You don't keep drivers on retainer. You simply publish the price, and if the drivers like the price, then they can accept the job. If not, then they don't. If there is a shortage, then you use surge pricing until the shortage no longer exists at the given price point.
For trucks and supermarkets, if it is raining then you pay human drivers. If not, then self driving. BAM, labor costs have gone down by 50%.
Think about what you're saying here. If manual driving is still required 60% of the time there will still be mass-unemployment of taxi and truck drivers. These guys are not paid well enough that they can afford half the amount of income that they currently have.
Uber doesn't have any interest in self driving cars succeeding. It's a PR distraction to justify the exploitation of drivers ("you shouldn't complain because you are lucky to have a job at all when self driving cars are coming any day now").
Self driving cars that don't have drivers would completely destroy Uber's actual business model which is based on undercutting current taxi companies by shifting the capital, maintenance and insurance costs onto the drivers.
Now, interpreting the words I say is a different matter, but as far as transcription I'd say we are at basically 100% right now and have been for a while.
Google Voice to Text, from my experiences, is bloody amazing for Chinese. My Chinese is abysmal (think "never gets the tone right") and for short phrases/sentences I've never had Google fail on me. Maybe it fails on larger sentences but it would be difficult for me to believe.
Japanese is another language it does very well in. I can only count on one hand how many times it has made a mistake - and usually repeating myself a tad slower and with less slurring and it will pick it up just fine.
So it might not work for everyone in the world but at some point soon it will properly be there for most national languages.
What? Sometimes I use Google's speech to text and a majority of the time it's a waste of my time. "Food near me" is not "fool's errand" (the irony isn't lost on me) and "gyms nearby" is not "Jim Dougherty", both are search terms I used last night.
Amazon Echo is far from perfect, but it's the perfect example of the rapid improvements in technology + building an interface that "just works"
State of the art offline CNNs have been doing classification quite well recently, arguably better than humans. See the Inception-v3 paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.00567v3.pdf
Practical, reliable ML stems from enormous data sets. And I can't see a way of obtaining the necessary data volume other than sitting in Level 3 for a product cycle...
It's Level 2 ("adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering") that's the problem. Therein lies the deadly valley - good enough that the driver can tune out, but not good enough to handle trouble. That's where Tesla is. Level 2 with strongly enforced hands-on-wheel seems to be OK, but don't let the driver take their hands off for long periods.
And with current approaches to self driving cars you need lots of data, sensors, fast and reliable internet connection, accurate maps and so forth, all of which are not at the level needed to have autonomy on all roads. So even if the algorithms would be good enough you'll need much more than that to get to self driving cars.
On the other hand a human only needs one working eye and a way to steer the car to be able do drive pretty much anywhere.
Consider that we used to let horses do most of the steering and low-level control of our road-based vehicles.
I envision future photos-videos of driver and driver less "vehicles" at a busy intersection just like horses and early cars.
Personally, I expect that this evolution will be roughly as significant as what was catalysed by the horseless carriage.
Government has to get involved. Sometime and somewhere. Public safety is one aspect
I suggested to one town councilman that our town introduces a bill (ordinance) banning driver less vehicles. Just like we can ban oversized vehicles and parking in the winter. Our government should ban then now while it is not yet happening.
He thought it would be a good idea not to ban them but to capture a licensing fee.
Hopefully this will get introduced at the next meeting
PS: I don't necessarily agree w/ bans or taxes, just don't like the up/down culture of 'popularity'. The sooner the texters & PMGo players are relegated to child seats, the better for all drivers/passengers/riders, IMO.
Horseless carriages drive on roads that were minimally modified from what the horses used (in some parts of Pittsburgh, for example, they never swapped out the Belgian block).
Seems like it would basically be a two-step process. First, you need autonomous vehicles which work on roads as we have them now. Once they're common, they can start adding features which can take advantage of more sophisticated infrastructure when it comes. Sort of like how early cars had to work on paths built for horse carriages, but once they were common we could start building things like freeways.
Surely the pay is far less for the passive driver? If not I assume it will be soon.
First, Uber drivers are already not making much. Drivers I've talked to here in SF say they are near $15/hour (though they can more in the form of bonuses if they hit certain hours-driven targets).
Second, the job of a passive driver will actually be both more boring and harder -- you have to pay attention while doing nothing, but be ready to take over in a second. It's like being a passenger, except you can't distract yourself in anyway. I'd much rather just drive.
Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to lectures on the radio (assuming they're actually trying to do their job) for $8/hr? I can. And I can see the next student saying "I'll do it for $7.50".
Seems like a perfect situation for an accident.
Would I devote hours being behind the wheel? No. I would try to find a job UNIXing for food because that's what I know. But we're not talking about me. We're talking about folks who have a driver's license, a clean driving record and can pass a background check. If they don't have to supply the vehicle the financial barrier to entry is much lower.
So yes I honestly think there will be downward pressure on wages for what is essentially a passive job. Sure you have to pay attention to prevent accidents, but that's it. Time to get out dragon dictate and start verbally writing the next Great American Novel.
While shifting the costs of vehicle purchase and maintenance from the driver to Uber is a factor, it's not enough to make driver wages "far less," and Uber has already been offering various assistances to drivers towards vehicle ownership, so nothing very dramatic is happening there -- and in any case, none of that savings will make it to the passenger, who ultimately is paying for the vehicle.
Making "far less" money than a typical Uber driver means around minimum-wage job or below. Let me suggest that there is no large pool of people who are interested in a roughly minimum-wage job with no security or prospect for advancement, who can plausibly save you from dying in a car crash.
(PS: There is no way that Uber would allow its drivers to dictate a novel while a passenger is in the car).
I've rented a car before where the only thing they verified is that I presented a credit card with the same name as the one on my driver's license, which they never asked to see because I had already put in the number online. I guess it's possible they were able to look up my photo from DMV records and were matching my face to it, but I'm guessing not.
Looks like the bigger problem might be people suing over accidents where they were distracted and forced to make a split second decision, when they 'reasonably' expected the car to be able to handle the conditions. (Not trying to shift the goal posts, just sharing a separate concern).
It would seem full driverless with nobody in the car is the big deal here. It doesn't really matter is someone will be behind the wheel later, you already had the thing driving around with no human to intervene in case it does something crazy. Don't see how that's an intermediary step.
It's really difficult to keep track of pedestrians and cyclists when driving, whereas a driverless car has 360° nightvision.
I'm arguing for the case where the human as NO information.
Let's say, there's a bicycle/motorbike somewhat behind your cars.
For a human driver, it can be seen in only one of the 3 rear mirrors at any point in time. Unless it's slightly behind-left or behind-right (e.g. to take over) in which case it's in the dead angle and can't be seen at all.
By turning his head and using the mirrors, a human cannot see most of the 360° around a car. There are obstructed angles, not to mention that the human can only look toward one direction at once.
The self driving cars with 360° vision can see things that a human couldn't. It has a chance to react where the human didn't.
But I don't think that we're cool with the idea that because the number of humans threatened by an accident is reduced by somewhere between 50 and 20%, it's okay for flagrantly unsafe cars to be on the road.
If I am engaged with my phone, I am not supervising/shadowing the car.
You don't consider a car that can drive itself to the pickup location empty to be "completely driverless"?
Never mind the fact that now you have to worry about drunks, making sure insurance is cleared and people have perfect records (and know how to drive), want to drive at all (I don't -- isn't that what I'm paying for?), etc.
Major destinations with big parking lots could be on the system. Convention centers, sports stadiums, major hotels. Again, the driver gets out at a convenient unloading point and the car drives and parks itself.
All autonomous driving would be around 15-20mph. At that speed, slamming on the brakes is an adequate solution to almost all problems.
But airport security was too touchy an issue a decade ago. What if one of the self-driving cars had a bomb in it? Might be worth another look now.
But Uber need the press more than ever after losing China and having to have a growth story for their large valuation.
I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and collect data, figure out where the failure points are, etc.
But for sure they're building a fully-autonomous no-driver-needed car, and it's not ready yet so someone has to be there to take over when it fails.
I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.
Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate..
Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.
[0] This, of course, assumes that driver-less cars will be ready for prime time in three years.
I used my "training" - a very expensive CS degree - to drive a cab. I developed a nerve condition in college, so really I just suffered through the program without becoming competent as a programmer. Also, I dance to the beat of my own drum, and do not take orders well. My kuro5hin.org (RIP) story "Humanity's Second-best Hope" [1] is about the seasonal job I had at Amazon, just before I started taxi driving.
[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/p/humanitys-second-best-hope.html
Cab driving offered me freedom to be my own boss. The cab company's rules were reasonable, and easy enough to comply with. As long as I paid my lease, I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted with my time. No one in the company's administration cared if I took a short break, or a long break, or spent the night in bed.
Something more important came up, and ridesharing ruined the economics of the business (Arizona makes it easy and cheap for anyone to start their own transportation company. The upstarts couldn't be bothered with playing fair), so I don't drive around in a taxi anymore.
I think these money-losing "ride sharing" companies were founded by people with delusions of grandeur and venture capitalists' money to burn. When they run out of their investors' money, the realities of transporting people from place to place will reassert themselves.
Change is inevitable. And for many people, painful. If the automation revolution occurs too fast, it will be a pretty economically painful transition period for a large chunk of humanity. On the other hand, if the transition is really really fast, the painful period may not last too long. Most things will become so cheap and abundant that most people won't have to work, or we will transition society to a 10-hour work week or something.
Most historical evidence suggests the opposite.
You're way overestimating the value our civilization places on an individual human life, doubly so if they're unexceptional and male.
And that's even more true for less developed societies. The sanctity and preciousness of human life and desire to avoid suffering and achieve equal outcomes is a relatively new concept, unique to the developed nations of post WWII era.
It's a job, not a career
And I suspect there's some 3 years at least before self-driving is "production ready"
Uber wants to be the leader in the field because it's a threat to their business model but I don't think your average Uber driver has much to worry about for a long time.
I have a mental image of a slow, but patient Asimo trying to winch a wheelless Jeep back onto a dirt road, in a soaking wet tropical jungle, like that scene in Jurassic Park. Meanwhile, the occupants get eaten. Asimo has no event handler for that situation, and continues working patiently to get the car back on the road. He does not smell interesting to the raptors, who leave after their meal.
If everyone is obsoleted, who will have the income to consume what the robots and fancy technology produce? I personally don't see the current business / economic system being very well prepared for the possibility of a post-consumer economy.
(Obviously, if jobs merely shift, as has happened in previous technological disruptions, this scenario isn't a problem.)
Why should they feel bad about anything. The very reason they have a job is because they believed disrupting the taxi license system was good.
What they did to others is being done to them. If that was ok, so is this.
This article said it would pick people up downtown, but how far would they go to drop off? The golden triangle is mostly grid-based, but go elsewhere in the city and the road topology gets jacked up fast (like Boston), especially in the south and west. Its idiosyncrasies took some getting used to, after living in flatter regions with gridded streets for several years (central Ohio, Salt Lake). In those places, if you want to go somewhere, you start driving in its general direction; in Pittsburgh, it's not uncommon to go in the opposite direction for a while, since the roads don't connect that way.
The article also mentioned bridges being a problem. In Pittsburgh, that's a big problem, since it supposedly has more bridges than any other city in the world.
There's also a ton of roads that are extremely steep (multiple residential streets with an over 30% grade) which can be extremely dangerous in the winter.
It's an interesting choice of a city for this for sure.
The steepest street in the US is in Pittsburgh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
In this particular spot, the end of your on-ramp has a stop sign. So, you're sitting at a dead stop with 65+ mph traffic 10 ft in front of you. Things get even more complicated since you're merging into an exit ramp. You have approximately 1/4 mile of road to merge into the fast moving traffic, then immediately get over a lane otherwise you're on the exit ramp!
Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4288195,-79.9333775,3a,75y,6...
In Houston, on I-10, there are some on ramps with stop lights to control the amount of traffic entering but they are not always used and are turned off when freeway traffic is traveling at speeds. Additionally you still have some space to accelerate which it looks like isn't available here.
For a bit of humor: http://scottberkun.com/2011/help-me-teach-seattle-how-to-dri...
if (currentLocation == Squirrel Hill on ramp){ car.Stop(); } car.merge()
and then it can communicate with the other autonomous vehicles anticipating a difficult merge in this location to allow the safest merge possible.
In Pittsburgh, you have potholes, ubiquitous construction (especially on PA-28), bridges (and I'm not talking Bay Bridge esque suspension bridges here), windy single lane dirt roads without markings, to say nothing of winter (snow usually obstructs what little markings there are 6-8 months out of the year), and a completely different driving style than in NorCal. Most people in Pittsburgh drive trucks or four-wheel drive Subarus (indeed, Pittsburgh has been a good niche market for Subaru -- they focus a lot of their advertising there). In Pittsburgh, roads only have two lanes max in each direction (and that's the highways). Even downtown has its fair share of dirt roads (near Allegheny River) and brick roads (roads that are made of bricks). I was shell shocked when I first moved to California and drove on the 101 with its 4 perfectly paved lanes filled with drivers exceeding 50 MPH.
Precipitation is a nightmare for self-driving cars' LADAR sensors, rendering them completely unusable. Drought-afflicted SV has zero precipitation, and Pittsburgh has almost as much as Seattle. Driving in snow is such a drastically different task/skill than driving in perfect weather that most people in California don't even know how to drive in Tahoe on their skiing trips (and the "snow" there is maintained by humans!).
If anything, us Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle researchers are the ones more grounded in reality. Elon hasn't even seen "the Turnpike" -- it is sad to say that the rather unfortunate fatal Tesla autopilot accident happened here in Pittsburgh.
As aside, Sebastian Thrun was in snow-laden Boston, and he and his lab also have a more realistic time estimate for driverless vehicles hitting the road than TechCrunch.
Anytime anyone in California complains about the roads (and believe it or not, people do complain about them here a lot), I just laugh.
Infamous Pgh driving scenario: "Left lanes need to exit right, right lanes need to exit left, here's 300 ft, make it happen"
Also, there are a number of short merge on-ramps that have Stop signs instead of Yield signs where you are required to come to a complete stop before merging onto high speed traffic.
As for this announcement, does Uber have any credibility in this field, which combines the most individually complex AI, robotics and regulatory work that has ever been attempted? Hell, in any non-trivial engineering feats?
Also, Volvo has very active ongoing self-driving research going on. I have to wonder how much of this is Uber's supposed crack team of field experts, and how much is simply a partnership with Volvo delivering the technology.
The ATC is isolated from the rest of Uber.
Volvo has been working on self-driving cars for years; before the Uber ATC effort.
Regulatory work is one thing that Uber excels at.
To be fair, Google also hired/poached most of its self-driving experts from university robotics laboratories.
> The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets.
If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes.
Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?
For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly".
On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.
Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9...
One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime.
The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough.
This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.
Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet).
But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project.
Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.
Still point taken that its just millions.
This is Uber we're talking about.
Street view already did it... Not 100% coverage to be sure, but pretty darned close.
I would actually love for someone who works at Google to chime in here. It'd be great to find out their system is more robust than I think it is.
An interesting aside - it seems like most of Google's team left this year. Chris Urmson left, Anthony Levandowski left, and many of their engineers are gone as well (many went to Otto). It'll be interesting to see what happens now that they've lost all of the original leadership (Sebastian Thrun left long ago).
Google's approach is simpler but is highly dependent on the maps. The other approach is easier to scale, but is obviously harder and likely takes more work to get the same results. Something I think a lot of people gloss over is that these maps take up huge amounts of data - not something you can stream over a cell network and probably not even high speed WiFi (maybe you'd download a map for your trip the night before). And also, as I understand it, the maps require regular maintenance.
The real question is how will this scale? And honestly I don't know. My theory is the tech is so hard and the rewards are so great that infrastructure will change to make it easier. By installing smart traffic lights, having cars talk to each other, and adding various road marks specifically for self-driving cars you can drastically reduce the complexity of the problem.
You're making a point about end-to-end trained ML systems; if anything, that's an indictment of Tesla's approach, not Google's more traditional sensor-based-approach.
It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks.
> can't they do like the Kinect
This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.
But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does.
There are cones and roadworks quite often.
I have significant difficulty driving down there, I don't see how an automatic car could any time soon at all.
This might not be an issue if I owned the car. I could turn it off and drive down there myself but an automatic taxi couldnt do that unless there was a driver waiting in the car to do that if required. And if there is, he might as well drive it all and save thousands of [currency]
I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.
Somewhat ironically, once self driving cars figure out how to do this at scale there won't be cars parked on both sides of the road.
I can understand planes eventually being practical for transport, but the wind and noise and short distances they fly make them useless for passenger transport.
I can understand computers eventually being practical for business-y folks, but the rooms they take up make them useless for normal folk.
I can understand this internet thing is useful for nerds, but I can't see how regular people will ever use it.
I can understand a "portable" telephone is a nice idea, but the breifcase of a battery I have to carry around makes it's way to big and heavy.
... need I go on?
It's happening, whether you can imagine it or not.
"In 2016, 7 states (Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, and Tennessee), along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws for autonomous vehicles."
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-dri...
Uber is not going to make anymore money with those than their regular service, since they have to pay the driver anyway.
First, they have a lot of experience with litigation and working with local laws.
They need to replace drivers, but unlike truck drivers - Uber will drive anywhere.
Unlike trucks, there's the potential to allow the passenger to drive the car.
Many more key reasons why Uber's efforts are worth watching, but really do hope they're able to make serious progress in bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream.
Did you mean self-driving ?
The acquisition of Otto is interesting. I think Anthony Levandowski is incredible and the trucking industry is perfect for automation given the state of the technology and for logistical reasons. But it seems odd that Uber wants to branch out at this point.
Many roads in Pittsburgh, and western PA in general, can be very curvy and have tight-radius. They're also often steep.
The on-ramps are peculiar because merging traffic must yield, visibility can be poor, and since some on-ramps can have tight radius and be steep, it makes it a little more challenging to merge. However, all of that is not that difficult to learn. It's much more interesting when you add in a foot of snow and ice and blowing snow.
Also, Pittsburgh is an 'older city' so large parts of it were built before cars. Highways have been 'bolted on' in some places, especially the ones that bisect downtown. Many people unfamiliar with Pittsburgh can get lost when coming in from 376 because on entering downtown, there are several quick exits and lots of lane switching.
It makes sense since CMU is there and a lot of robotics people, but interesting nonetheless.
Ah, borrowing from the Musk marketing playbook, just say "self-driving" often enough, and enough uninformed people who have never seen contemporary luxury assisted-driving features will be impressed. Calling out Autopilot as "souped-up cruise control" is a nice touch.
> For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop.
That doesn't seem very scalable. How many cars are in this so-called "fleet"?
Is there anybody working on autonomous vehicle tech that believes there's any substance here, or is it just adverjournalism?
I can tell you that there is absolutely substance here. I have no idea what's going on inside Uber, but they have a group of people there (some of the only ones in the world) with experience building actual production-worthy fully-autonomous ground vehicles.
Having a safety driver in place during development and testing is common practice, and for sure they're still very much in the development and testing phase. Full autonomy on public roads is a harder problem that full autonomy in a more controlled environment like a mine site, for reasons that have discussed here and elsewhere, and I don't know how much progress they have made in dealing with those challenges. However, I have no doubt that they are working toward the goal of a fully-autonomous no-driver vehicle, not just the type of assisted-driving features you may have already seen in production.
Was tempted to motion to jump in front of it to see how the car would react, but didn't...
Also, as a NYC driver, I wonder how aggressively a self-driving car could legally be programmed to defend its lane. I'm picturing Uberbots sitting still in traffic while streams of human drivers gleefully cut them off. City driving is basically a game of chicken every 10 seconds; winning at chicken depends on convincing your opponent that you are willing to have an accident.
If it goes well, then Uber has suddenly pushed forward autonomous driving and set itself at the forefront of commercial adoption.
If it is a disaster and many accidents result, Uber will set back driverless cars by a decade, burying it under a wave of pessimism, allowing their current business model to persist well into the future.
This seems to be a lot exposure for Uber unless they get into the manufacturing business which seems like a rabbit hole. This type of exposure is the same as say a music streaming business that has to pay for content - i.e your business model is predicated on favorable enough terms from a third party in order to make a profit. And we've seen that the way around this is by being vertically integrated such as what Netflix has done with creating its own content.
What happens if these things get a flat tires?
What if the police want to pull one of these things over?
Can drivers exit this thing at will or are they trapped until some computer in California thinks it is safe?
Uber does know that their drivers do lot more then drive
2) The computer detects that the flat tire happened, pulls off to the side, and autodials the Uber triple A repair crew.
3) This one is hard actually. Perhaps the cameras could detect the flashing lights and sound of a police car, and automatically pull over? Or maybe there is just an emergency pull over button that the passenger presses?
4) Aforementioned emergency pull over button.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carne...
http://time.com/money/4456617/flying-cars-taxi-self-driving-...
Right now, Uber is the go-to choice in most areas because of network effects. They have the most drivers because they have the most users. They have the most users because they have the most drivers. In a world of self-driving vehicles, anyone with capital can buy a fleet to blanket a city. If you can finance a self-driving vehicle for $400/mo, it's not that hard to launch in a new city. Sidecar operated in my top-10 city with what seemed like 5 drivers. That was too few and it was terrible (given that a lot of the time they might not be on-duty). But if one could get 20 self-driving vehicles for $8,000/mo, it's an easy way to launch. If adding new vehicles is as easy as going to a local dealership and putting down your VC money, you could get more on the road within a day to meet demand. In the early days, you could keep a close eye on demand and over-provision a little.
Self-driving vehicles change the market from being one of network effects (where Uber has a huge advantage) to one of capital spend. Uber does have a lot of capital, but what if GM wants to get into the game? GM gets cars at cost and GM has a brand that people know/trust (they're not some no-name I'm-Uber-Too).
Worse, it's a market of variable capital expenditure. With cable TV/internet, a lot of the costs are fixed costs (actually laying all the cable and such). With wireless service, there's a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of fixed costs creating the network. With self-driving taxis, it seems like the vast majority of the costs are variable costs that go up with the number of riders. There's really nothing stoping a city from having dozens or even a hundred different self-driving taxi companies. I doubt it will be hundreds as it's hard to run a good company, but it does mean there won't be a good opportunity to push high margins onto consumers. An attempt at high margins would mean another company scooping up that business.
I guess I just don't see how Uber maintains high enough margins in what will become an incredibly price-competitive market where it's relatively cheap for new players to join. If Sidecar could have spent $8,000/mo to launch in my city with good coverage, they would have made users happy rather than frustrated that there were no drivers around. They could have been successful. $96,000 isn't a lot of capital needed to start up for your first year. A Dunkin' Donuts franchise costs more than that to start up (from a little Googling). At $5/ride, vehicles would only need to do 3 rides a day to justify a $400/mo price tag. Even at $2/ride (less than public transit), you'd only need to do 7 rides a day for that $400/mo vehicle. That doesn't deal with fuel costs, but you can see how you don't need a lot of usage to cover the cost of the vehicle. If you think about fuel costs on a Prius and a maybe a 5 mile average trip (which seems quite long), you're talking about 1/10th of a gallon or around 20 cents for fuel. A trip that might cost $15 on UberX drops to under $2.50 at-cost for a service that isn't popular (its vehicles only do 7 rides/day) and way lower cost for popular services. So, Uber is going to have to push its margins way down (and keep them down) to prevent someone from wanting to enter a market that requires such little capital.
The truth is, that's also possible in a world of driver-driven vehicles. Just pay the drivers more for a year or two, and the network is yours.
Uber is going to be of marginal importance in 10 years.