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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

Startups won't win this. Manufacturers will. They have brand, cars, and soon can license the self driving tech. How hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a ride hailing app? Think about where that leaves Uber. They have to buy the cars from said manufacturers. This already gives them a significantly larger cost base and let's face it, while they also have a brand it is no more powerful a draw than Mercedes or Toyota.

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> soon can license the self driving tech

My personal guess is that "soon" for fully autonomous cars is not any reasonable definition of soon. Even if you accept the tech is close to okay in Arizona (I wouldn't), think about the weather and driving conditions in most of the worlds' markets for these global companies.

50% of the worlds population live in cities. Car ownership is more expensive and has less utility in cities too. I'm also certain that we will start retrofitting AV enabling tech into our city streets soon to speed up the process. AV's will be "good enough" for many use cases very soon.

mm. so I don't think driving in cities is easier - I mean, it's certainly harder for a human to drive in a city; I don't see any reason why it would be easier for a machine to drive in a city than in the country.

Controlled environment with good lane marking etc. Obviously some cities are easier than others.

Controlled environment? well-maintained roads? this doesn't sound like any city I've spent much time in.

I'm thinking like 101 seems reasonably straightforward, modulo the occasional construction, but once you get into san Francisco, there's a lot of dodging pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, shopping carts, stopped delivery vehicles, etc... It doesn't look nearly as controlled, to my eyes, as 101 does further out.

I agree. The other day I was driving and thinking about this, and I started noticing "how many times during this drive have I looked another human (driver or pedestrian) in the eyes in order to determine their intentions?" It was a significant number even in a 15 minute drive.

I was still thinking about it during my bike ride later in the day, and I noticed that more than a dozen times I exchanged looks and nods with drivers to ensure they had seen me and that it was safe to do something.

No self driving car is able to look a human in the eyes and determine their likely course of action. And it most certainly won't be able to signal to the human a message as complex as "I have understood your intentions".

I got bear-ish on self-driving cars when I realized that, in order to be able to drive in Bucharest, you _have to_ break the (letter of the) law fairly often[1]. Knowing when to do so requires "common sense" which is a notoriously difficult nut to crack - computer vision may be advanced enough, but it's simply not enough. I still think it will evolve in time and reach mass-market, it's just that it will take lots of time - it's not something that will have a purely-technological solution, it will likely require legal and social changes too, and those take time.

[1] E.g. Car stopped in front; do you cross the continuous line to go to the opposite lane, or just wait a bit? Or merging from a side street into a busy main road.... some drivers will let you, but which ones? If you wait until "it's safe", well, good luck.

This is another good point. There's a hardware store near to where I live where it's literally illegal (if you observe the signs) to enter or exit the parking lot of said store. Everyone just understands that someone forgot to remove a road sign saying "buses only, cars forbidden" for the lane where you enter this parking lot. But how would a computer understand this?

I’m not sure that figuring out when to break the law in your example is any harder then figuring out when turning left is legal and safe on unprotected intersection. This is not to say that it's easy, but autonomous vehicles need to solve problems exactly like that one on a regular basis.

Yes - and I was saying that I realized that solving these problems require the elusive "common sense". If we get that figured out, even just roughly, I think we'll break the barrier of general-purpose AI. I'm not sure we're close to doing that... But, maybe I'm wrong.

This argument always seems a little strange to me. I think I can count on one hand the number of times, in 14 years, I've ever made eye contact with another driver while driving, or used some kind of hand signals. And in all of those cases, if the signaling had failed, the situation would have resolved itself just fine in less than a minute anyway. Most of the time, I can't even see the other drivers through reflections on their windshields. Sure, sometimes I'll stick an arm out the window to wave my thanks when somebody lets me merge, but that's not a critical communication.

Where do you live?

It is literally impossible to drive in Rome, Buenos Aires, Lima or Rio without looking at drivers for their intentions.

Here's a thought experiment: how hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a simple crud app? Easy, right? Now name a single major bank with an app that is better than "barely usable". Which is easier? A crud app or a ride hailing app?

All my banks have good apps on par with the fintech startup apps I use (and actually I trust them more because they aren't moving fast and breaking things).

> and actually I trust them more because they aren't moving fast and breaking things

VERY true, not just in finance.

Same for me too - my incumbent bank's app is mostly comparable with the latest hot fintech's. The latter has nothing but a slightly more polished visual look, and that's not enough for me to trust them with my paycheck.

I use a regional bank and their app is only usable for minor day to day things. For that it's fine. But I can't do anything "serious" in it: checking account transactions are limited to only the last 2 weeks; I can't search transactions for a specific amount or merchant or date; I can't view past payments I've made for bills, etc.

For any of the above, I have to use the desktop site. These are not technical limitations either and should all be in the app if we want full parity with mobile.

Which national US bank or investment company has an app you find “barely usable”? The only one that comes to mind is Vanguard and that fits my mental model they’ve cultivated of keeping costs low on extraneous things so in a perverse way is a positive.

Chase's website is pretty crappy. I regularly have to login twice, or check the developer console to debug why I get infinite loading spinners. This is with a stock and up-to-date Chrome install on a good network.

I would give the Bank of American app 4 out of 5 stars, it's better than, say, the Gmail app.

This is one of the more ill-informed tweets. How hard is it to roll out a ride hailing up? Borderline impossible. Especially for companies that have zero competency in service, software and marketplaces.

...which is part of why Audi bought Silvercar. This gave them a well-run service company with physical locations in most metros. And they've recently added renter pickup so it's not like this is black magic.

What's more unrealistic to think is that a move to driverless cars / less car ownership would lead to the manufacturer's rolling over.

> How hard is it to roll out a ride hailing up? Borderline impossible.

So how do we already have Lyft, Cabify, MyTaxi, Bolt, Kapten, Didi, AutoNavi, Meituan, Grab, OlaCabs, and a bunch more?

Lyft is the only one I've ever seen in the USA. Even Uber has struggled in markets where a strong player already existed.

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