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Comment by origami777 | Hacker News Reader

There are certain industries and companies that you do really need to continue to innovate. If your product is a technology innovation, it has a life span. Eventually, something will replace it. History has proven this over and over again.

At this point of time, Uber is an excellent example. There is an innovation on the horizon that will completely change the taxi industry; autonomous vehicles. It's not a secret either. It's an inevitable future. The date of realization? No one knows, but we can see it's coming. Now, should Uber optimize on it's current product set and optimize until they are profitable on every ride? Or should they balance some part of that, with innovating on the future of autonomous vehicles? Travis seems to be working towards the big vision of driverless cars. What would Jeff do?

Fun stuff to think about :)

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"It's an inevitable future"?

I'm assuming you mean it's something that will happen within the next 50 years?

I just don't get how this isn't a super-hard social/political issue that we haven't even begun to address as a society. Maybe spending significant resources on this now, is not optimal.

How are driverless cars a huge social issue?

They'll put millions of people out of their jobs.

* Who will be liable when a self-driving car hits someone.

* Will people, on mass, accept being driven around by a machines, on public roads.

* How will they deal with "trolley problem" type ethical scenarios? How will these decisions be made.

* How will self-driving cars cope with rural roads (where they are arguably MORE useful than in Urban settings better served by public transport)?

* How will they cope with signs/marking intentionally designed to fool machine vision systems. Who will be liable for accidents caused in these cases?

There are other issues too. However, overall, I think with some infrastructure investment we could have had self-driving cars since the late 90s early 2000s and there have been many prototypes. It's the ethical/social issues that are the bigger barrier in my mind.

> How will they cope with signs/marking intentionally designed to fool machine vision systems.

They won't, but neither can humans. Signs aren't secure. Anyone with a wrench can take down a stop sign or put up a fake speed limit.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...

Even if a sign is modified, a human will sanity check/ignore it. Currently many machine vision systems would be fooled. Basically in this scenario I think it's likely humans would fail safe.

Autonomous cars will do ride-sharing, years from now when autonomous cars eventually become legal and accepted. And every ride sharing service will buy them, because every car company will sell them.

You don't have to panic, throw huge amounts of stock at a shifty development team, while ignoring due diligence (or do an incompetent job at it) all to do your own.

Autonomous cars will do ride-sharing, years from now when autonomous cars eventually become legal and accepted. And every ride sharing service will buy them, because every car company will sell them.

Car rental companies are the most likely first bulk buyers of self-driving cars. They already buy, store, maintain, and clean large fleets of cars. They're all set up to handle the problems of a big fleet of cars used by many people. Uber doesn't have that infrastructure.

Car rental companies would like to have a car pick you up outside baggage claim and drive you away, rather than using a shuttle bus to get you to their car lot. Customers will like that, too. Even if the cars aren't self-driving on all roads, if they can get from rental car storage to the airport and onto the freeway, that's enough to justify the technology.

Yeah but do you think any car rental company is innovative enough to do so? Every taxi company was the perfect business to start Uber but they didn't

Avis is already there. They handle the fleet maintenance and storage of Waymo's self-driving cars for Waymo's Phoenix testing.[1] When one breaks down, Avis sends the tow truck.

Avis already owns Zipcar, so they have app-based car services already deployed. So as soon as the technology is ready, Avis is there with the customer base and the infrastructure.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-26/alphabet-...

And with that model Ubers best bet would then still not be innovation - it would be infrastructure. It would be building out the support network to transition to look more like a rental company.

If rental cars have the infrastructure Uber lacks, it should focus on surviving until autonomous is freely available and having the resources to build that infrastructure.

Burning money on autonomous now buys them little. They can't control it, they don't have key patents, they will have to buy it just like everyone else.

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