Uber to Suspend Autonomous Tests After Arizona Accident
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The company is under extreme pressure and has proven over and over again to be willing to cut corners when it comes to legal compliance. It should be frightening to anyone on the streets that Uber managers are making decisions to put self driving cars on the road. They neither have the culture, patience nor the expertise to make decisions affecting life and death.
If and when they figure out self-driving cars all they have to do is slowly replace the people driven car2go by self-driven ones and they'll become a leader of that market without any fuss!
They'll also come with software that allows you to flip a switch and see your car take off to earn some money whenever you tell it – or it is reasonably sure from experience - that you won't need it for a while.
The manufacturer will take care of billing and insure you against vandalism for a 30% cut.
Meanwhile, Uber is but the faint memory of a bro-themed ponzi scheme. They have nothing that would allow them to remain relevant: no reputation, no technology, and -50 billion in capital. All they got to scale was the one part that's irrelevant: managing drivers.
And groping women, of course.
Although in the short term, I can see the appeal of selling cars with a built-in ride-share mode. Many current car owners are likely to continue to want to own their own cars. If manufacturers can provide this feature out-of-the-box, it may help drive car sales to people who want to own cars and get "free money".
I would say highly likely that whatever car companies are left standing, one or more of them will have fairly good margins.
How the ownership ends up working out remains to be seen. May be cities will cut deals with a specific company and all non-commercial vehicles will be controlled by that municipality. May be Google Maps will turn in to a transport marketplace and operators will bid based on destination.
Likely Uber is going to have a very tough time. Likely they can cut a lot of the excess and operating expenses and be profitable for a while but at the loss of growth and new markets.
Uber paved the way for a lot of this. There is no way Google, Apple, Tesla or definitely an established car company would have been able to plow their way in to these local markets, bypassing and ignoring regulations until the point that cities became dependent on Uber. Now it is done, and it isn't particular a moat for Uber. But they fucking did it, they are the ones who need the recognition for it.
I don't understand or like this attitude. A company creating a moat by breaking the law to gain an advantage over people following the law is not something to be admired or celebrated.
(If I've misunderstood your tone I apologise but your final sentence gives me this impression).
There are two wrong assumptions in this statement.
First, the OP said that Uber didn't create a moat, they just paved the way. These days, after Uber moves into an area, other ride sharing services are able to enter the market without Uber being able to abuse their market position to push them out. That's definitely a positive.
Second, Uber did not break the law in most situations. They re-interpreted a formerly gray area of the law, by asserting that their services shouldn't be regulated by taxi laws as they were not a taxi company. This was a legal battle that none of the entrenched players were willing to fight for various reasons, and with that legal precedent, that opened the way also for other ride sharing services to operate.
Not sure that argument really holds any water (the desirability of autonomous driving in an Uber-less world is counterfactual, so we can only speculate), but there you go.
Okay they can have a cookie. A $3B+ cookie. Seems like they've been out hustled. Oh the irony.
There's no significant untapped well of car ownership to be found from self-driving cars. But the market for commuter-grade cars will plummet.
At what age might you be comfortable letting your child self-drive to school, but not walk alone to school?
At that point, why wouldn't I just pay the car manufacturer for "car use on demand"? Suddenly I don't have to care about having a garage at home, repairs, upgrades, etc. etc.
I can see the argument for still owning your own car, but owning it and renting it out seems like a half way measure that will satisfy no-one.
Renting might be convenient, but in the long term owning something is cheaper and more convinient.
And you're talking about a car as if buying it is a one-off expense that'll never be added on to. That's not true at all - insurance, maintainence and repairs are all ongoing costs that you'd be similarly unable to afford if you lost your job.
Insurance, maintenance and repairs are not monthly fixed costs. You can pay insurance e.g. once a year. And maintenance/repair really depends.
It's certainly possible that public transit is still crowded despite this, but I've never heard of anywhere that doesn't even try to scale to match demand.
Why would car insurance be a once a year cost but car service would not? I don't see any reason why a company couldn't charge once per year. That said, many consumers are unable to pay for a year of anything upfront and choose to pay monthly. Like car insurance.
> And maintenance/repair really depends.
Which is a huge problem! Again, if you don't have a ton of money a surprise repair bill can absolutely wreck your finances.
Also, pretty much every public transit system I know scales up service during peak times and winds it down at other times of day. This isn't a new concept.
Transportation as a service is clearly something. Car ownership is not always the best economic solution for an individual. The sharing demand exists but no one has established a large scale sustainable enterprise around it.
What is needed?
- Capital first and foremost as cars are not cheap. Two models so far:
-- Uber leveraging car owner capital. That area is really opaque but one can assume individuals capital cost is higher than manufacturers especially as Uber drivers likely have not the best credit ratings. The volume Uber can leverage here is - assuming 500.000 drivers with cars worth $20.000 then this is 10 Billion USD.
-- Car manufacturer and car rental companies (in the past often linked to manufacturers). There is some synergy in the vertical integration e.g. through manufacturing capacity management, tailored car features and marketing.
- Fleet servicing. Uber has managed to shift that to drivers.
- Driver. Uber has an individual driving. There may be autonomous vehicles. Then there is the person renting assuming driving license.
- Critical mass. There is a focus on serving cities. I suspect autonomous vehicles may be vital to serve the wider area.
- Insurance. Liability needs to be clarified and forms of insurance found if autonomous cars are allowed.
Zipcar et al?
I guess my question is the following: If you don't want exclusive ownership and use of your vehicle, why would you want the hassles of ownership at all? I do get the some money on the side argument but I really wonder if it makes sense with cars given that a lot of depreciation/costs is because of mileage. It's a bit different from the AirBnB situation.
Current car-sharing business (car2go, zipcar, etc...) already had to figure out all those parts, the only piece missing for them, like for everybody else so far, is the self-driving technology.
> That is a fraction of what Uber can mobilize
I don't understand your point. You're saying Uber will have random people buy self-driving car for them, service it etc... and let Uber use it? They'd effectively become a pico-bank in a very risky investment... Or am I missing something here?
Mercedes-Benz has successfully completed the first autonomous long-distance drive ever, involving both town and cross-country traffic, using near-production-standard sensor systems. The Mercedes-Benz S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE research vehicle covered 100 kilometers from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, under real traffic conditions and complex situations including traffic lights, roundabouts, pedestrians, cyclists and trams.
[1] http://www.thedrive.com/tech/5707/the-war-for-autonomous-dri...
But can you buy a Merc Maybach S class with self driving comparable to Tesla S autopilot 2? No. That's why you see more and more Tesla S these days, plus it is all electric too.
Given that the gap between Mercedes and run of the mill saloon has been closing in real terms rapidly (when I was a kid cars where serviced every 5-12,0000 miles, these days it's not unusual for service periods to be more than twice that with 7 year warranties and the generally higher build/reliability across the board) their brand of understated excellence is a key part of why they can still charge so much.
I've never understood how valuations computed from white powder are strategically in the best interest of... anyone? Maybe someone more clueful about the nuances of VC can enlighten me. Even if Uber can make the Google suit and the harassment culture go away, I still don't see how they can ever justify that valuation. Every car company is about to ship (or has) some form of auto drive and there are no strong barriers to competing with Uber on ride sharing. Transportation is a commodity.
How's Lyft doing?
This whole thread is pure platitude. "Kalanick and his bros are sociopaths". Sure. Keep operating in those terms and see where it gets you. I'm going to stay here on planet Earth, thank you.
I see what you're talking about, but overall I see (although not necessarily in this thread) people talking about Uber operating a VC subsidized per-ride loss, and just how much they need self-driving to pan out in a hurry.
I get why people might be concerned about the operating losses, at least to first order. But I just don't see the structure of how people think this disintegration is going to happen. To me, it looks like a very solid business model that makes tons of cash and spends tons of cash (like Amazon). I don't see some kind of tower of Babel built entirely on the perception of value that could topple at any moment (Twitter). People love using ride-sharing apps, and there's no way that's going to change in the near future.
Even if their self-driving-car play isn't working out, I don't see why it has to pan out _now_. They can always just fall back on their massively successful core business..
For instance, you see 3 billion in losses. In 2015 Q4, Uber generated $560M in net revenue. In 2016 Q1, $960M. Q2: $1100M. Q3: $1320M, and Q4: $1584M. I see massive growth, and massive expenditures into R&D which could be halted with relative ease if solvency becomes a problem.
You see the self-driving program as a boondoggle, and you see 6 blown red lights in 1 week as just a taste of nonfunctional technology that would have only caused more and more damage the more time it was allowed to be on the road. I see people trying to solve a difficult technical problem, and having some issues in an initial run-up test.
You see a company whose executives routinely berate their own Uber drivers. I see one dashcam video where the CEO has a human debate with one of his drivers, which has been extrapolated into a portrait of "the type of person this Kalanick guy really is".
I'm _not_ saying that they don't have their problems, or that it's impossible Uber is going to run into financial or regulatory trouble. But this sky-is-falling talk is not for me.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2016/12/02/uber...
The subsidizing is the problem. If there is no subsidizing that cost have to be paid by the passengers which makes it a much more expensive service.
If you want to talk about reality, then talk about sustainable financials in the transport industry.
Something that probably should have been in the article's title that this accident occurred because the human driver in the other car failed to yield. While Uber is certainly a very flawed company, neither its technology nor its people were at fault here.
Meanwhile, multiple brands of existing, human-driven cars already have the ability to detect an impending collision and avoid it, either through automatic emergency braking or other mechanisms. If Uber isn't even caught up to the stuff that's in cars for the general public, then what the hell are they doing?
Without more details we can't say whether this accident would have been avoidable with those systems.
Let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone who reads this headline and gets a quick summary. This headline makes it sound like Uber isn't confident of its technology and they think their technology might be the cause and hence they are suspending it. In this case, it seems pretty clear, as confirmed by the police officer, that Uber's car wasn't at fault.
Driving around Houston this happens to me several times a day. Obviously the technology wasn't designed for essentially "normal" driving conditions.
Anecdote related to TFA:, a couple months back an SUV stopped at a marked crosswalk with ped traffic. I stopped in right lane next to it. When peds cleared it began rolling before I did, and once I commenced it braked hard. I braked, looking for unseen peds and noticed it's nav gear & small uber decal. No additional peds were in crosswalk. There were dozens og people on either sidewalk for an art fair. I wonder if human intervention caused the hard braking or the large amount of data points on the periphery.
Say you're approaching an intersection with a green light while another car is traveling perpendicular at a moderately high rate of speed – perhaps just 5mph faster than their maximum safe stopping speed. You're completely allowed to just keep driving through the intersection, and when they hit you, they will be at fault. However, you could have avoided the collision by recognizing the situation and slowing down – and this is a type of analysis that autonomous vehicles are specially suited for compared to human drivers.
This isn't tangential to the engineering problems surrounding self-driving cars, rather it's at the heart of those problems and why it's an order of magnitude (or more) harder than what so many people assume. It's not insurmountable, but whenever I hear people making comments like "self-driving cars are a solved problem, and are an inevitability in the near future", I cringe so hard. With a lot of care and skepticism, we can all make self-driving cars a thing in our lifetimes. Or, with a lot of overenthusiastic credulousness, we can make self-driving cars briefly a thing in the very near future, which get regulated out of existence for the remainder of our lives by a relatively small number of high-profile accidents like this.
But I think your other point about the inevitability of regulators killing self driving cars if they are short of perfect is just as cringe-worthy, as at least as harmful.
Self-driving cars should be allowed to roll if they are better than humans, which might be the case already.
It is hard, but not impossible, for government to do the right thing.
Other driver going faster than they should? Switch lanes and avoid the situation.
Turning into traffic and there is a car in your intended lane signalling that they're going to move out of the lane? Wait for them to actually move and make space for you - don't trust that their lights are the whole truth.
For example, they were abusing an exception for businesses grossing <30K a year to not pay taxes in Canada. That law is now being reviewed.
As far as I can tell Uber's corporate culture is both self-interested, self-righteous, and entirely inconsiderate of the people and markets they affect. You can only piss in the pool so long before it catches up with you, and they don't have any other runway left.
We have some of the greatest minds in the world collaborating, and this is one of their primary ambassadors.
Uber was/is quite willing to break the law (and encourage their drivers to do so, with lies and misdirection), even in areas where it's very clear that they're in the wrong.
Leveraging a ton of market anger about the existing taxi services helped them get started, it's unclear if it'll be enough to sustain them.
What abuses are you talking about? Their assertion that they're not a taxi company holds some water, and their 30k a year exemption in Canada is for independent subcontractors, which Uber argues that its drivers are.
Every company looks at laws and sees just how much money they have to pay. There is no abuse in this case.
From http://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/temp...
Perhaps this should be considered further evidence that they didn't write their own system ...
Which road is Uber going to take in this case? I know what their past performance has shown, they'll take the shortcut. Have they ever done things the hard way?
If Uber is statistically safer without human drivers, then pushing it out 10 months early with bugs could save lives.
Humans aren't predisposed to trust science over their gut though.
Google, for example, avoids expressways and won't go on freeways, hasn't tested their cars in extreme weather, barely ever sees even bad weather, and is electronically limited to 25mph. I'd be willing to bet the majority of drivers have nearly perfect driving records in those conditions too.
Not me: I'd fall asleep if I were to be limited to 25mph all the time ;)
Statistics doesn't tell the whole story because it's backwards-looking, not future-looking, and the Uber crashes aren't going to be independent events.
And if I'm a regulator tasked with reducing road deaths, the question I'd be asking wouldn't be "is this car's autonomous mode marginally better than the average driver so Uber can cease paying drivers and hit profitability?", it's "is the human behind the wheel of a car operating in [semi]-autonomous mode no longer preventing a statistically significant number of crashes?" (or "is telemetry suggesting their interventions are actually responsible for more accidents than they prevent?"). Just because a car is a lot safer with a computer behind the wheel than a car with the average person and no computer behind the wheel doesn't mean that permitting autonomous vehicle operators to rely on technology alone is a safety improvement.
And we may never even know for sure.
____________
[1] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/R...
See pg. 4 for a summary graph with nice colours.
- Rolling Deployments
- Feature Flags
- Automated metrics analysis; With automated rollbacks if an issue is detected
Where I work, this has been standard for at least 5 years, and we are just building websites.
Tech companies are bound to have good procedures for tech... that's what they do.
Car companies? They should be good at car stuff... but... tech stuff?
Look at all the angst surrounding the IOT - companies making buggy/hack-able stuff that otherwise make good things - IE Washing Machines, Refrigerators, etc... look at all the stories about how hack-able stuff involving cars is...
Personally? I don't have a lot of faith in "Old" companies getting tech right.
Cars are a type of technology too. I don't think there's any company that's good at "technology". Maybe a university would count? Or one of those big appliance manufacturing corporations.
If you're talking specifically about computers, software, and electronics, I think IT seems more accurate.
We as humans do not judge whether to do one thing vs another on that basis. E.g. we would ban widespread gun ownership in countries that allow it at present (very large numbers of people would not die as a result); we would mandate a basic set of vaccinations in countries that at present do not do that (same outcome); we would fit the passenger seats facing backwards in commercial aircraft (same outcome). The list is endless but we do none of these things because people prefer to judge the risks in some activity or behavior in the context of their own near term pleasure or convenience.
Heck we could mandate very simple low-tech driving safety measures for human-driven cars such as top speed limits and a block on driving the wrong way down the freeway.
A common misperception is that we could ban objects, or mandate behaviours. We can only impose penalties on the possession of objects, or mandate punishments on certain behaviours. Simply passing laws does not save lives in the short run.
I am skeptical of unmanned taxis for reasons having nothing to do with autonomous driving. What do you do if a passenger gets sick, passes out, starts acting violently, has a heart attack, all things regular taxis encounter. Basically, you need a person to monitor the vehicle, passenger and contents even if the car is driving much of the time. Plus also, pleasant conversation if desired.
These are risks anywhere. I'm not monitored when I ride an elevator, how is an automated taxi any different?
> pleasant conversation if desired.
This is a good point, I'm sure many people will prefer human-operated taxis for the social aspect and possibly for local recommendations.
Current title was "clickbait-y" enough for me to click, whereas the actual title of the article could save the click.
/u/dang?
An important question is whether their system is smart enough to take evasive action.
It's becoming clear that there are two ways to approach self-driving. The first stems from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was about off-road driving. For that, the vehicles had to profile the terrain, plotting a path around obstacles, potholes, and cliff edges. The GPS route was just general guidance on where to go. That's the approach Google took, as can be seen from their SXSW videos. Google also identifies moving objects and tries to classify them. With all that capability, it's possible to take evasive action if some other road user is a threat. The control system has situational awareness and knows where there's clear space for escape.
The other approach is to start with lane following and automatic cruise control, and try to build them up into self-driving. This can be done entirely with vision systems. That's the Cruise Automation and Tesla approach. This puts the car on a track defined by lines on the pavement, with lane changes and intersections handled as a special case. There usually isn't a full terrain profile; that requires LIDAR. So there isn't enough info to plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance.
This distinction is not well understood, and it should be.
Autonomous vehicles will have challenges that human drivers do not -- like software vulnerabilities -- but those are problems worth overcoming if it means that poor decision making by humans can be reduced.
----
ps: thanks for reminding me that statistics are hard to get right.
Some hype is useful, to be sure, but it is a delicate balance with avoiding a situation where the pace of innovation has been oversold.
But this is misleading because there are far more non-self-driving cars than self-driving cars.
There are 23 other companies with permits to test autonomous vehicles in CA and they're all doing pretty much the same thing. Waymo is way out in front, Cruise/GM is doing well, but there are maybe a half dozen large, deeply invested players (including Tesla) not nearly as advanced as Uber.
Many articles and press releases make it look like self-driving is "already here" when it's actually still very much a work in progress and not at all a solved problem
So why pretend like it's not important to cite how many people die today? We write laws and rules for how to operate vehicles that can be observed and operated by a computer. It's very likely that at a certain point those computers will exceed our aggregate ability to prevent deaths.
There are likely also wins we could get from the design of vehicles by not having to accommodate a human driver. Take for example the window that a person can be ejected from the vehicle through or debris can easily penetrate.
Escalator accidents kill 17 Americans a year. So I wonder if the average American travelled as many miles per year on escalators as they do in cars if the death/injury rates would be higher or lower?
In short, accidents of all varieties are hard to classify. In this case, though you seem to vastly underestimate the numbers involved. According to latest reports [0], the Uber program is only driving about 20K miles a week. Further more, the rate of human-interventions is about once every MILE.
Normal human driving is bad, of course. But how many times in the last 1,000 miles you've driven have you needed your passenger to intervene to prevent an accident?
[0] http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...
In 2016, Waymo cars drove 636,000 miles with 124 disengagements [1].
Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile [2].
Uber is a menace.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
[2] http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...
For example, I believe Waymo cars drive mostly on a fixed number of preplanned routes. You would expect limited disengagements over time, as it's got tons of data on those specific routes.
It's probably fair to say that, in the course of a day, many of us are in driving situations where we avoid potentially dangerous situations whether or not it might technically have been someone else's fault were there an accident. Most of us (hopefully) learn to drive defensively to minimize the likelihood of an accident, not to take whatever space on a road we have a "right" to.
> If I need to break traffic laws to avoid hitting another vehicle, or being struck, that's easy.
IMO based on anecdotes and observation, not enough people do that because of the "it's not my fault" attitude. The first consideration is fault, the second is safety.
But then again, you're defending a clickbait headline about a robot getting into an accident that it may or may not be responsible for that didn't even result in someone being injured.
Wait a minute: I don't think the argument is whether machines can drive better than humans. It's whether these companies that are desperate to make money (Uber, Tesla) are pushing potentially dangerous technology on to society before it's ready.
Because if the answer is yes we should get the dangerous technology off the roads ASAP -- namely humans.
It's a good question whether society is ready to accept this, though.
Hah, "it" being ready as in the technology, not society. Poor writing on my part.
But I guess either works.
How much better? 1% over median? That means it's still worse than 49% of the drivers on the road. Statistically, the automated driver would be "better" for society at large, but it's still going to cause a lot of accidents and kill a lot of people.
I also wonder if there might be even more accidents with an automated system which is still in the fat portion of the bell curve, since there will be no "good" drivers to reduce conditions ripe for an accident in the first place.
Is that the "BMW" defence to the "Tesla" defence?
We already have things like taxis, Uber and Lyft and people still get drunk and drive under the influence of alcohol and kill people.
Why would ride services with autonomous vehicles change that?
If someone is going to get drunk and drive a car rather than calling an Uber with a human driving they are no more likely to get drunk and call Uber because Uber has driverless vehicles.
The target for self driving cars is ride services not individuals.
Many reasons for that, from being cheap (I already own a car, I won't pay some random guy money!) to mere convenience. But such incidences are bound to get fewer once self-driving cars make up the majority of cars on the road and can take over from drunk drivers.
>The target for self driving cars is ride services not individuals.
In the short-term for Uber maybe, but not in the long-term for everybody else. I doubt that traditional car manufacturers, like BMW, Audi, Honda, Jaguar or Mercedes-Benz are pursuing self driving cars merely to offer ride sharing services, after all these companies are in the business of selling cars to individuals.
1 )That we will see the demise of self-ownership of cars when you state:
>"once self-driving cars make up the majority of cars on the road"
2) Car makers will continue to market car ownerships to individuals when you state:
>"I doubt that traditional car manufacturers, like BMW, Audi, Honda, Jaguar or Mercedes-Benz are pursuing self driving cars merely to offer ride sharing services, after all these companies are in the business of selling cars to individuals"
The problem with inebriation is that people don't exercise good judgement which is the reason they get behind the wheel and drive because they "think" they are OK.
Someone who has a car that has a "self-driving mode" can just as easily get behind the wheel and operate the car in manual mode because in their impaired state they also "think" they are ok to drive.
Self-driving cars don't solve the problem of impaired judgement.
I stated no such thing, a car having self-driving capabilities has literally nothing to do with the ownership/proprietor status of said car.
>Someone who has a car that has a "self-driving mode" can just as easily get behind the wheel and operate the car in manual mode because in their impaired state they also "think" they are ok to drive.
You are still thinking way too much in the present. Try to imagine a future where pretty much every vehicle on the street is autonomously self-driving, legalities have changed that no human "security driver" is required anymore. In such a setting it would become the norm to do something other than driving while traveling in a vehicle, like being productive or having some leisure time. Sure enough, there will still be people who would want the "thrill" of controlling their vehicles themselves, but manual driving will probably be reserved to special lanes/circuits, due to how rare it will become and it negatively impacting the performance of the fully autonomous traffic.
We won't get there from now to tomorrow, we will only get there with many small baby steps until we are actually there.
Seriously, I get the point you're trying to make, but at least try to find some data that actually makes sense for a comparison.
Then someone who owns a self-driving (preferably electric) car will be "renting" his/her car to Uber for the hours when he/she does not need it.
The uber will THRIVE using someone else's vehicle, kicking the responsibility for maintenance etc to THEM and Uber will be collecting a nice 5-10-20% cut JUST for the service provision (booking, ACH, etc).
These marketplace companies don't tend to do very well when the supply side of the market isn't properly prepared for the nature of operating in the marketplace - i.e. most Uber drivers are exclusively Uber drivers - it isn't really car sharing any more.
The time and effort would shift away from dealing with drivers who know where they stand, to providing constant support to upset car owners. Quickly, it would switch to the supply primarily being provided by large businesses who own 1k+ cars because the economics stack up well in large quantities.
At that point, Uber might as well just buy the cars directly and cut out the middleman.
Uber's got a few advantages, but I think they mostly boil down to being the first ones to have an app, and having a whole bunch of VC cash to pour into a business that hasn't proven to be any more profitable for them in the past few years than it has been for everyone else over the past couple centuries.
They've got one big disadvantage, which is that the fleet maintenance costs for their service model are extraordinarily high. There are no in-house mechanics, and there's no fleet standardization. They've been able to get by without that through a combination of that VC money, and being able to shift the fleet maintenance costs onto the ledgers of their drivers, who presumably aren't generally factoring those costs in when forming a business plan.
I don't know when self-driving cars will be fully autonomous. But it seems a pretty safe bet that, by the time they do, their advantages in the app and the VC cash department will have eroded away.
By that point we're back to the same old commoditized, race-to-the-bottom industry that, minor departures aside, has characterized taxi service since the horse and buggy days. At which point there's no room for individual owners anymore. In that kind of industry environment, the people who have standardized fleets and in-house mechanics will always be able to outcompete the people who need to pay Volvo dealer prices for vehicle maintenance.
I also don't know when self-driving cars will be cheap enough that typical individual owners will have either the need or the inclination to massively jump their depreciation rate, or to subject them to wear and tear by random strangers. But it seems a safe bet that's going to be a long way along the technology's maturity arc. I, personally, wouldn't be willing to lay down cash to bet whether the long term looks like a bunch of individuals renting out cars they own anyway, or people mostly not owning cars because it's not worth the trouble to own one anymore. For my part, though, I'm more keenly interested in the latter - right now, for me, the main value proposition behind owning a car is that it's kind of a hassle to haul myself to a car rental shop when I want one for a weekend trip. That hassle disappears when they can just send the car to me instead.
tl;dr - Uber's "sharing economy" model, attractive as it sounds, never really made a whole lot of economic sense in the long view. Their more likely futures are to either become one of the traditional taxi companies, or be squashed by them.
So many "car sharing" discussions seem to be predicated on the idea that auto costs/depreciation are time-based. In fact, they're probably a lot more mileage-based, especially in areas that don't get snow. So that extra 25K miles that get put on a "shared" car are not remotely free just because you already own the car anyway.
The end-result of these services is that we'll be renting from Uber/whatever, not the other way around.
It would be easy for locally owned competitors / taxi companies to be competitive with the added bonus of tayloring the service to suit the clients.
Why would you assume Uber would have exclusive rights to use people's vehicles, IMO it will just start price wars to the bottom right ?
Why would stop others from building booking software and leasing it ?
How do you ensure the third party vehicles are clean and up to standard etc?
Sorry, but I don't see it.
The whole, "in case of emergency, grab the wheel" is just a legal formality. If you are not actively driving you won't be in a state of mind to be able to do that.
I think eventually there will be enough data to show that a human behind the wheel does absolutely nothing to prevent a crash.
The human driver dozing off or browsing Facebook on their phone simply isn't going to be paying enough attention to realize they're barrelling towards an active train crossing or whatever the unexpected edge case is.
It's looking to be just the opposite, with several of the autonomous projects mumbling about how they don't think it is a workable level of automation, exactly because people don't stay engaged.
They are going to try to jump from assistive systems like automatic braking to vehicles intended to handle unexpected driving conditions without immediate human intervention (maybe the system can't proceed, but it will safely stop).
I think Ford's study proved that humans can't react quickly like that if they don't already drive the vehicle, and I was able to figure that out myself simply through intuition, way before Ford discovered it. I also think that internally Tesla does believe the same thing, which is why it has pulled its "self-driving" ads from around the world.
It's just publicly continuing to say that if there is an accident then it's the drivers' fault "because there are plenty of warnings" (like 200 miliseconds before a crash) or that it asks you to put your hands on the wheel every 5 minutes, as if that does anything. An accident could easily happen in-between those 5 minutes. I guess that feature is there because Tesla also learned that people keep dozing off when a car is self-driven. But I think people who start dozing off because they aren't driving the car themselves will be able to ignore the sounds relatively easily.
The bottom line is that such systems put humans in an almost impossible situation that they're not equipped to deal with as humans, and Tesla and others act like they're legally covered and that's all that matters.
I think there should only be two types of systems: autonomous features that only activate in emergency situations to save people's lives (like auto-braking when there is an accident about to happen), and complete self-driving that doesn't need a human's attention at all. There shouldn't be anything in between.
Tesla revamps autopilot technology after fatal crash
https://www.ft.com/content/3ddb43f0-785c-11e6-a0c6-39e263316...
Tesla's system may still be in the deadly valley, I don't know, but I guess many people will not put up with having to stop the car repeatedly.
Owned by a company so the failure of one isn't a huge deal (difference between at worst having to switch cabs compared to losing your own car for a few days).
Costs are already high.
Costs can be spread out.
Costs are very important to the customer.
People expect to be sharing the same space as others have used before them.
Limited expected range and run time.
Customers are already not in control, and taxis are not well known for careful driving in many places (fairly or unfairly).
Speed is not a huge issue (can't run trucks limited to 25mph).
Can pick locations city by city, so you could run an effective business if you can do London but not rural Wales.
You start by just automating the highway driving, which is a much easier problem than city driving. You might still need the human operator to deal with the off-highway driving at the beginning and end of each journey, but in the middle they can just hang out in the cab and work on their PhD dissertation or whatever. At that point your business has become quite a bit more efficient, because you've gotten rid of the need for your trucks to be stationary for 10 out of every 24 hours.
So that's already a big win for tackling a relatively small piece of the problem. You can keep chipping away from there, and each increment will net even more returns.
I'm still believing that taxi/uber service will be the first consumer facing application.
This may work similar to ports, where a pilot come to the ship to navigate the port area.
Right. Which means that a lot of trucking isn't especially long haul already which in turn means that taking people out of only the highway portion isn't necessarily the big win that a lot of people assume it could be. If you still need truckers around the endpoints, it doesn't necessarily make sense to take them out of the middle (given other advantages to having a human operator). Of course, good assistive systems can still be used to improve safety.
I have a relative who is a trucking regulation consultant. It's not some trivial business... there are a lot of moving parts.
Can't this already be handled in a pony-express fashion? Hand off the trucks between people? Honest question, I assumed that this kind of thing might already be setup.
Your solution also requires that a person sit in a single box for 24 hours, I can see that taking a toll, and the start and end of the journey must be timed that a person can sleep at the right time before waking up ready to drive again as the truck needs to come off the highway.
I guess my key thoughts are that this doesn't actually lower the human cost (employed for the full time still), and adds on a few extra issues dealing with people. What you gain is a faster overall transport.
However, I can see the added automation cost being a lower part of the overall vehicle bill, and there are enough large trucking companies to mean the costs can be spread out over the business.
I can only imagine the internal struggles in Volvo right now. At the very least, if I were running Volvo Cars I'd ask Uber to replace the Volvo logos on those cars with Uber logos...
(Volvo has their own, quite advanced self-driving program, but they seem to be doing it the correct/cautious way.)
It makes you appreciate actual journalism.
There's mention of a third car ... we'll see what the traffic cameras say!
Or if I lease my car out when I'm not using it how do I not get my car when I really need it or want to go home sick?
Human error accounts for something like 95% of all crashes.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/human-error-cause-...
If human pilots had a 15% error rate, and autonomous planes had an error rate of 5% - which would you fly? It's basic math - you pick the one that is most likely to get you there safely.
Most people have no issues getting into cars - despite the fact that they're one of the largest killers. So we've already established that for most people, the convenience (or their love affair) of cars is enough to overcome the current risk of death/injury - if we could decrease that, is that not surely a net win?
Neither.
I'd want autonomous cars to be a lot safer than the average human driver before they were allowed on regular roads without a human behind the wheel. In fact, given that humans and machines are likely to make systematically different errors such that the human can solve most of the driving issues that the machine has and the machine can solve most of the driving issues a human has, the case for getting rid of the legally-responsible human driver altogether (humans ought to have the right to be drunk or sending emails whilst in their own vehicle; taxis ought to be cheaper?) isn't particularly strong.
You're making a subjective judgement that humans are fundamentally less safe than autonomous drivers.
Like most HN commenters you are making this assertion without any facts, as there isn't sufficient data to make the assertion. Other than drunk driving diversion, the case isn't as clear cut as you may think.
If you want to reduce fatalities, reducing SUVs and drunk driving is the end goal, as rollovers and alcohol related crashes are the most preventable fatality sources.
In Uber's case, that happens a little more than once per mile driven http://www.recode.net/2017/3/16/14938116/uber-travis-kalanic...
I don't know the exact situation in the US (also I'm no lawyer or something), but in Germany when some kind of Negligence is involved people can lose their drivers licence temporarily or forever, may have to pay fines (on top of compensations) or even have to go to jail. (Edit: also a costly Medical-psychological assessment may be needed afterwards to be able to drive again in the future.)
Coming back to the costs, it's also interesting to say that insurances usually cover sums 1 - 20 millions. That's how much damage a single person can easily do with a car.
It's said that it's a plus that self-driving cars are somehow interconnected and learning from each other. You may argue they are thus one entity and may have to be insured like that. Ok, but that's maybe a bit too esoteric now... ;)
That is also a model that works well for autonomous cars, probably with some kind of licensing of the car and a mandatory insurance. The thing is, we do not need to deter a autonomous vehicle from speeding or driving under the influence, we can directly program it to respect speed limits and not drink.
Yes, but in the case of the toaster, it's pretty much the case of some sort of human error on the part of the owner (the cord was damaged, they jammed something in and it got stuck) or it's product liability on the part of the manufacturer.
It's an interesting aspect to these sorts of autonomous systems that you can expect to have accidents, even fatal ones, at some rate and that may have to be considered acceptable because "stuff happens" sometimes. There aren't a lot of examples where this is the norm in consumer-facing products. Pharmaceuticals probably come closest.
To be more concrete: the probability that a car owner gets involved in an accident at some point is actually really high. I've already been involved in 2 car accidents, not driving myself though, one of them was very serious. On the other hand I've never heard of someone having a toaster catching fire. And even if it would catch fire, you are probably watching the toaster and can put it out easily - maybe even by throwing the toaster out of the window.
On the other hand, car hacking is a credible threat. We already have a Michael Hastings incident.
If you're not risk averse, you'd dead meat in 10s in Bangalore - quite lit. if you're riding a motorcycle.
(Watch out for the yellow number plates and the Tata Indicas if you're ever here!)
Thanks, Uber.