Hacker News Reader

Comment by 100ideas | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Uber wanted this to happen. But why?

I think they underestimated the rapidity and effectiveness of the DMV's response, and were perhaps anticipating a lawsuit they could draw out and spin to their advantage, knowing that corporate malfeasance is rarely meted appropriate punishment.

Possibly

1. They didn't want to reveal the accidents the technology was involved in as dictated by the permit

2. They wanted to have Tesla be held to the same standard and have to apply for permits for all their autopilot vehicles

Like every other time Uber publicly throws a fit about a rule, it's an effort to get the rule changed in their favor.

My thoughts exactly. I just can't fathom an angle where this works out to their advantage. From what I've seen, this permit is literally a formality, so did they just not want to test in California?

> I just can't fathom an angle where this works out to their advantage

Trump appoints Travis Kalanick Grand Moff of Western US

Kidding! It will be Peter Thiel of course. Also always amusing when I see articles like this artificially flagged down the frontpage.

They probably want to be able to blame someone else (the DMV) for the reasons they're not actively testing in CA. I wouldn't be surprised to see a proposition next year that wants to allow companies to test their autonomous vehicles without permits, with Uber pushing millions of dollars into advertising into it.

Millions for a ballot battle sounds way cheaper than paying $250 per car while in a testing phase? Were they planning to use more than 8000 autopiloted cars like this in the near future?

It'd be cheaper to lobby the legislature anyway, I bet they could get their bill out of the Waze and Means Committee.

That argument doesn't really work considering Uber (along with Lyft) spent a combined $8MM in Austin fighting fingerprinting legislation when it would have been significantly cheaper to just fingerprint their drivers.

So basically Uber and Lyft are just bad at business. Right. I'll adjust my investments accordingly.

Uber will lose over 3 billion dollars this year. It lost 2 billion last year. Personally, that should influence your investments more than them avoiding a $150 permit or an attempt to avoid invading their drivers rights more than they already do.

They've also just (after first announcing their intent to defy the permit requirement in their CA pilot) revealed that their cars do not handle turns across bike lanes safely or (under California law, at least) legally, so, in addition to using it as a PR mechanism to create pressure for favorable regulation, they may in part be trying to use controversy over the proper regulatory regime for self-driving vehicles to provide a distraction for the media so that there is less focus on safety issues particular to their system. That especially makes sense if they knew they were going to be releasing the safety information before they announced the plan to defy regulations (getting enough attention on that first, so that when they did pull the project it would have some chance as being seen to be about the regulatory issue of permitting, and not the safety defect.)

Free publicity maybe? In any case though, the whole thing is a bit weird...

Free publicity is a possibility, but I don't necessarily see it as an advantage, especially with the tone of the articles. The adage that all publicity is good publicity is simply not always true.

i'm not sure what uber's intention was, but there's a silver lining:

1) The barrier to entry in this space is somewhat low and now it's higher. Within 4 months, a small talented group can build a decent self-driving system from scratch. The DMV's action might have a (slight) chilling affect on small self-driving car operations, and gives (a small) advantage to big operations like Uber.

2) If uber thought their launch was a failure (maybe the supervisors had to intervene too often), scuttling the launch in this way buys them some time to incorporate the lessons they learned from their brief foray.

"Within 4 months, a small talented group can build a decent self-driving system from scratch."

What makes you think that? It's a lot more work than that. For starters, self-driving cars still aren't a commercial reality despite decades of research and many many millions of dollars in funding. I've never heard of a team build anything other than a super limited prototype in that time frame - nothing anyone would reasonably call a self-driving car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com