Lyft might be quietly making moves in this direction too, but I'd worry about their ability to stay competitive without an aggressive self-driving initiative.
a. Bigger than Uber.
b. Have actual profitable businesses that they can use to fund their research.
I have never seen any kind of evidence that Uber will either be the first to market with true self-driving cars, or that their self-driving cars will be superior in kind to their competitors. The closest thing to evidence that I've ever seen anyone provide that Uber self-driving cars are going to have any advantages to their many rivals is "this is an existential issue to Uber."
Companies fail all the time. This is pretty strong evidence that "existential problems" are not guaranteed to be solvable ones.
We have ample evidence that Uber's self-driving cars require human intervention orders of magnitude more frequently than Waymo's. The fact that they're using human-driven cars with self-driving assist in a vaguely commercial manner is a marketing tactic, not a statement of technological proficiency.
On-demand car sharing is the future, making Tesla's consumer car ownership model outdated. Uber is 5-7 years ahead of Tesla on the operations side of managing and deploying a fleet.
Lyft partners with GM that acquired Cruise and their tech is solid. They are making cars will all the sensors built in, not add-ons like Uber.
Also Uber is losing a shit ton of money. Tesla is not profitable but doesn't bleed that much money.
Depending on how Waymo vs Uber goes, Uber may have to shut down their self driving car program temporarily. Stealing 40,000 files is ridiculous.
Add that to fact that they didn't get a proper licence so they don't have to report crashes and their self driving car crashed pretty bad.
Uber is a risky bet.
right, uber might have to shutdown its autonomous car program, or it may just settle with google and move on with life...
Uber has a proper license to run in sf again
Uber is absolutely a risky bet. But if they succeed, they may eclipse the car ownership market and get 10x bigger
Also arguably the company providing the contact with the customer is more of a commodity. Certainly its the easiest aspect to replace. 100 companies could handle that tomorrow with existing tech for example. I can imagine people using a service that shops a bunch of car services and lets you connect with any of them.
But if we grant for a moment the premise that the lawsuit could substantially set back Uber's program if it is won, and that it has a decent chance of winning, then what is the incentive for Google to settle? Uber doesn't just get to decide to settle unilaterally.
If we don't grant that premise, what is our basis for believing that the premise is untrue? Personally, I don't claim to really understand the ins and outs of these kinds of lawsuits, and am comfortably agnostic.
Was mighty kind of Uber and its investors to prove out the business model for Google.