Has Uber killed off its self-driving trucks?
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Uber registered with the US DOT as a freight forwarder, not as a trucking company. Freight forwarders are carriers, even if they don't own any trucks. They have financial responsibility for the load getting to the destination in good condition. Uber doesn't get to claim they're just a booking agent.
This service doesn't seem to have launched. But that's what previous reports said Uber Freight was.
http://www.businessinsider.com/cargomatic-uber-for-truckers-...
This is a funny excuse for a company in the logistics business. You'd think they'd be good at at least that one thing.
They supposedly had employees entering stuff into spreadsheets by hand. I recall that this was due to there being so many edge-cases, which made it difficult to automate processes.
The bigger problem I think with freight ever moving to self-driving is the legal liabilities involved. Consequences of even minor accidents are amplified with the size+mass involved.
We might see a hybrid system with auto-pilot doing the majority of the driving similar to how we currently fly planes, but I can't imagine how that would markedly improve the economic margins.
That seems a very plausible scenario. Improves safety (which is a big plus!) but doesn't really do much for the financials overall.
[1] http://www.atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ATRI-O...
The main issue is having good safety controls for all the various edge cases you might have out on the open road.
Very similar to what jeep does:
Red necks with pre-electronic cars and an improvised EMP device are running around hijacking self driving beer trucks.
I was thinking it would be kind of Fast & Furious style.
"Hey, Vinny. Hold my beer and watch this!"
You can do everything you mentioned already.
Just put up a barrier on a road to stop the truck, and then shoot the driver.
Police aren't going to be able to protect drivers in the middle of nowhere.
Now ask yourself, why does this not happen right now?
Somebody making off with your merch? Ask a loss prevention officer how much cops care about that.
The driver is the part that makes it difficult. Even if one had no moral qualms about murder, law enforcement and the public would be much more concerned about homicide vs merely property destruction and theft. If you were to just hijack a beer truck and nobody got hurt, I bet the average member of the public would hear about that in 'funny news'. If you killed the driver, you'd be infamous and hunted down.
Given that the objective was free beer, I assumed that in this story the robbers were the protagonists. The story is only possible in a world with self-driving trucks because in any other universe the goofy beer-stealing rednecks are threatening real people and that's not very sympathetic, but in the self-driving truck universe they're just stealing from robots.
Whenever a new technology comes along, people come up with tons of ways it could be abused and so won't work. I mean look at all the speculation around drones the past few years. The reality is most of our existing technology can be abused by creative people just the same way. The only reason society doesn't fall apart is because criminals happen to be fairly rare.
Yeah but now you're looking at 20-30 years for armed robbery instead of being just the good ol' boys never meanin' no harm, just makin' their way the only way they know, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow.
If that happens often then we'll amend the law to increase punishment for this particular crime, just like we made a single act of copyright infringement worth up to $150k.
The current political climate would never allow a car painted like that!
Most crimes are committed by people who feel they have nothing to lose.
I was thinking it would be kind of Fast & Furious style.
Fast & Furious!? Go back further! Smokey & the Bandit! That's exactly the sort of thing they would do, if someone with a TARDIS plonked the Snowman and Bandit into the 21st century!
- Mostly highway miles (or you could arrange it to be so) - Fewer weight requirements - Better economics (a greater % of the economy is dependent upon trucking logistics than taxi services)
This isn't to say that there's a big master plan of making a trucking company, more that making a self driving trucking company is a very practical step on the path to full autonomy.
It might be that the marginal advantage of not having a driver on the highway section of truck delivery is not large enough to justify building out a trucking network. They'd have to establish relationships, buy trucks, service the trucks etc. all of that would be time and money that isn't going into their big bet.
And the thing is that we're not there. Even if you say it's a decade out (which seems pie in the sky optimistic to me), can Uber really afford to burn through cash for another 10 years?
[ADDED: I didn't make my point well. I do think legal/regulatory will take some time independent of technical readiness, but IMO it's technical readiness especially in all the corner cases that's the long pole.]
I'm not sure how far away door to door taxis are, but I also would bet against Uber having a long enough market lock in to recoup losses.
1. Uber will be first to market with driverless car technology. That is, it will beat Waymo, all the actual car companies, Apple, Tesla, and 100 other startups.
2. Given 1, Uber's driverless car technology is a durable technological advantage (ie, even if it's first to market, that doesn't matter much if Waymo follows it to market 3 months later). Note that we are at this point stipulating that this technological challenge is doable with a team that you spun up out of nothing a couple of years ago, as not-the-best-resourced team on the block.
3. Given 2, the legal issues with driverless cars are resolved well enough that Uber has a viable business.
4. Given 3, Uber can successfully raise money for an incredible capital expenditure (how many cars are we talking here? 1,000,000, very conservatively? At $20,000 ea, very conservatively? So $20B investment), and then handle that kind of capital investment.
5. Given 4, build up all the supporting infrastructure for this business (parking, local cleaning, etc.)
6. Given 5, this all happens within Uber's operational runway (like, starts within 3-5 years, finishes within 10 or so)?
Personally, I'd put the odds of this at: 10% for 1 * 10% for 2 * 90% for 3 * 80% for 4 * 70% for 5 * 20% for 6 = roughly 0.1%.
But even if you're way more bullish on Uber than I am, can anyone really argue for more than 50% for 1 * 50% for 2 * 90% for 3 * 95% for 4 * 95% for 5 * 80% for 6? That's still only 16%.
P.S. did you mean bearish instead of bullish?
Waymo has already started a real pilot of fully autonomic driving for regular people in Phoenix area. I predict that means they are less than 1 year away from ditching training wheels and launching it fully.
Some think that changing laws to make legal will be the hard part but I see the opposite: states will be competing for who's first to make it possible.
Many states, including CA, already made testing possible. You just sign up and ask "can I test my self-driving cars, on real roads, possibly destroying other cars on those roads and killing people. Pretty please?".
Laws are hard when they're controversial and self-driving cars are political goldmine:
* dramatically less deaths and other kinds of destruction due to less accidents
* cheaper transportation
* the sheer coolness of self-driving
It'll take only few states in US to allow it and other states will have to follow or the politicians will look very stupid if a taxi drive in SF costs $1 and the same is $10 in Chicago.
No-one will have to flaunt the law, it'll get changed very quickly.
We are quite far apart however on how close we are to "just works."
Elon Musk said that Tesla's driverless technology was "probably better than a person" more than a year ago. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/11...). What I'm saying is, Musk is a big promoter of Tesla and taking his ideas of when the technology will be ready at 100% face value is foolish.
This is likely more due to regulatory reasons than anything else. Waymo's cars have an exceedingly low rate of required intervention.
But that's not really a very impressive feat compared to 3-5 days of non-stop driving in NYC. I mean who cares if it can go cross-country? I want it to take me from my apartment to the office to the grocery store to Target out to dinner and then back home again.
Hundreds and hundreds (probably >1,000 even) of those cross-country miles are going to be desolate and essentially carless.
As it is driving on a boring highway all day and finding a hotel at night sucks. I'd much rather leave the driving to the night while we sleep.
While that's nice, it's kinda the low-hanging fruit.
I'll be impressed if somebody manages autonomous driving in, say, New York (or Kolkata if you're feeling ambitious), at night, during snowfall, navigating a construction site and/or traffic regulated by policemen.
This is taxing but completely possible (and entirely expected) for a human driver. Whereas the lane-following autopilot in my car is routinely confused by shadows on a pleasant day.
That's the market, if uber wants to scale they have to do that driverless.
Who will want to own, maintain, deal with parking, insure, etc etc a car for 10 years when you can have this year's model appear anywhere, anytime by just taking out your phone?
The 7k savings assume you bought a cheap car and kept it, I also did not factor tax & insurance. Savings increase dramatically if you were to finance a 35k+ 2nd car that many Americans in the burbs seem to do.
Uber doesn't "scale", there is no economies of scale that kick in anywhere in their business model.
Once Uber goes self driving, they take on responsibility for all of these logistical activities, and they currently have no capability and capacity to do that. These activities only scale so far.
Why would they need to do that. They're a software company, they have explicitly demonstrated no motivation to take on this work.
It's really not hard to envision them partnering with an existing bricks and mortar to provide those services - e.g. car rental companies provision through their hubs, or uhaul steps into the game and their franchise owners become uber hubs.
I really feel this is the obvious endgame, but who is to say.
As for scale? There very much is efficiencies to be gained in becoming a true mass transit system.
By 'at that price's I mean Uber have currently lost 15 billion dollars subsidising taxi fares. They cannot sustain that.
To the point of Uber maintaining driverless cars. What's to stop them going to a franchise model. Uhaul-like hubs where the cars go to get charged, cleaned etc?
Overall, as a consumer, I couldn't care less who is first to market, but which company offers the best quality-to-price point.
On another note, when self-driving cars need to refuel, is that payment going to be in USD or some cryptocurrency?
He saw private car ownership as counter-indicator to Ubers growth and thus his own wealth.
Currently, other companies seem to have the lead.And btw, when done well, this segment has a pretty strong network effects.
In the same way,if most of UBER's advantage is awareness and installs, credit card numbers, and common trip data, in the context of real self-driving cars, that's almost nothing:
Awareness and app install - a working self driving car will the miracle of the century. Everybody will hear about the company who offers it, constantly. from there the road to installs is short. And for such value as self-driving cars offer, entering a credit card number doesn't seem like a big deal.
As for common trip data? well at the very least Apple, Google, Moovit, Cellular ISP's, and maybe others have plenty of that(in one form or the other) to start.
But most importantly:time. Self-driving cars are a risky technology. it also takes time to scale manufacturing. so they'll probably be deployed relatively slowly. That gives the companies who own them enough time to not need UBER.
But UBER still has one strong card to play: flying cars.
Automate a train or a truck and you save on persons salary. Automate personal transport and your market is 6 billion people.
It's the other way around; automste personal transport, and your market is all the trips taken by people Automate freight, and your market is all the trips taken by goods, raw and finished.
The latter is a lot more trips. Even if you just restrict it to the ones taken by ground transportation.
OTOH, Uber clearly wants to piggyback last-mile delivery of goods on its personal transport service, and that's the part of goods transport where the labor cost is probably the highest proportion, because one person carries very little compare to the long-haul routes.
Nor is it news that Levandowski and Kalanick hatched this scheme while Levandowski was still with Google. (read the second from top comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315205
I'm sure we can expect big things from them as soon as that lawsuit ends.
Elon Musk said that Tesla will be releasing an electric truck in the later part of this year [1].
Of course, self driving capabilities will be added afterwards.
Wouldn't it make sense for Uber to have this very same capability as well?