I imagine this is a response to the awful press around the company the past several months. The Uber of 2015 would not have taken these cars off the road.
Self driving vehicles will have the same profile as the existing automotive industry: high capital costs and commodity margins. The existing automotive mega-corporations already have the capital investment and distribution networks like ships and rail cars and lots and auto-carrier semi-trailers. Tesla is building some of that and the jury is still out on whether Tesla will make a meaningful dent.
Even the idea of Uber rolling out a self-driving fleet means a massive infusion of capital that is at odds with its current cost structure. And the existing automotive mega-corps can step into the ondemand business with a cost advantage in regard to rolling out vehicle fleets.
On the surface autonomous vehicles appear to be a long-term capital draining exercise. Do they view the first mover advantage as that beneficial in this case that they'd risk all their future growth to be first to market for something that they could, conceivably, get a better ROI for being "second" to market with a more durable option?
But I think the real reason is that everyone building self-driving cars today - including the big car manufacturers - will have little interest in selling to Uber. They will be running their own Uber-style Car-as-a-Service.
Interesting to see it's flipped itself somehow, too, I wonder what the computer decided to do that it maybe shouldn't have done? I suspect Uber will keep very quiet on this one, as there's all kinds of assumptions to be made.
The examiner marked it as a minor mistake; He told me that I could get rear end for that. I didn't argue with him as he was the examiner. But I'd prefer 10 rear ends over one t-bone.
When implementing a self-driving car, I'm not sure if we can explicitly write code that is against the DMV guidelines. For example, human seems to slow down at the junction even with the right of way and drive 5mph over the speed limit.