Wasn't Uber's whole money losing strategy based on the vision that one day they'll use their self-driving cars to get the driving done for cheaper?
(Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
Why would there be? If it's helping their stock price or even neutral to it then why deny it and risk it going down?
Also, more efficient use of time from app-based routing.
Sure, the driver then drives a route given to them to by the app, but so does everybody else, just in that case, the app is Google Maps.
AFAIK, the only routing cleverness is that the end of a shift, drivers can request to only take passengers who are heading in the direction of their own home. That's useful.
Also, saying that Uber/Lyft need to create their own self-driving cars is ignoring the fact that other companies that create self-driving cars are, and will likely continue to offer rides in their cars through existing ride sharing companies.
That remains to be seen. If a company is able to create self driving cars, what's the value add provided by Uber and Lyft? Having a middleman TNC platform skim some profits doesn't really make sense from that perspective.
Compared to achieving reliable and cost effective autonomy at scale, building a ride sharing app is trivial, and customers have indicated that they're willing to install another app if the fares are cheaper. The complexity of getting a self driving service is high enough that there probably will be only a few entrants in the market, unlike the current value add provided by the TNC apps that match customers with a large pool of individual providers.
As for the existential threat narrative, consider that there are many places that sell cheaper/better food than McDonalds, and yet, McD is everywhere. I don't think technical merit alone is going to win the rideshare pie.
(Though wow, mcdouble was half that 2-3 years ago. Big mac hasn't really changed.)
But yeah, a lot of the McD classics and new offerings that one might purchase for a "normal" meal are actually quite expensive nowadays. On a side note (pun intended), I suspect that there are some pricing structure shenanigans going on, because fries are clearly marked up way more than burgers.
Either ways, next year is pretty close. Perhaps I'd be proven wrong.
There is definitely a market for a modern taxi company, but it won't be as cheap as Uber is in the US. And Uber has too large overhead.
(Oversimplification, of course. I'm fully aware of corporate obligations around market disclosure, profit forecasts, etc).
They basically structured the deal as buying stock in the company and investing $400M.
Letting them focus on their core business while still having a large financial stake in AI cars.
The big development is that self driving cars turned out to be an extremely hard problem which didn’t match company timelines (or potentially company business models, if for example AI kits can get installed in existing cars and brands for which they become the denominate call network) and they outsourced it to one of the best companies around.
https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way...
Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.
It's ready/safe when governments ("the people") decide it's such.
As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side is really in full control, but that's another story.
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
They've been very careful about it, and they have not finished work on it, so they need to keep the same standard that they had until now.
The technology is also ready for Phoenix. The company is not yet ready for the whole world (but I have no specific insight into what's holding them back).
It's totally different from Uber.
Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.
You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?
There will always be corner cases that automation can't deal with, but Waymo will have some human troubleshooters around for that. So do us humans, for that matter: when a car breaks down, most people call the mechanic instead of applying their own general intelligence to fixing it.
Eg A road is accessible from 5am to 8pm. Outside those times traffic conditions change. Humans setup cones and control the flow of traffic. 2 lanes becomes 1 lane for all traffic. And traffic is managed so that depending on what direction you’re going, your driving against the normal flow of traffic.
This is a real scenario in a moderately busy area. Times may be wrong. The road is not blocked. But you have to take direction from a person. In fact this sort of temporary traffic change is fairly common especially due to road works.
I thought it was comical that his pitch was "The reason we're going to be successful at Problem 1 (taxis) is because we're going to be successful at ridiculously-difficult Problem 2 (self-driving) which we're not close to solving". Pass.
One just builds a specification of a technical system while the other builds a specification of a societal system.
Societal systems just have much more legacy code and inertia with very little in the way of mechanisms for in house testing at scale. There's no development server, just keeping tabs on competitors (ie other countries) to see how the change in production (ie a new law introduced) had second order effects.
They were an interesting - but dead - sideline of computing evolution. I never used one, but they had a interesting object-based (instead of file based) operating system.
IBM is a terrible work place if you are technically inclined, if you are a slime ball of a manager it’s perfect for you.
(Disclaimer, I worked at Uber 2014-18).
There's nothing inherent about this. If the promised alternatives to owning cars turn out to be BS, the younger generations will have to own cars whether they want to or not.
That's a pretty big opportunity for any firm that gets you home from the club at 3 AM.
I know families that are rather against the idea of owning a car and arrange housing around that consideration. They prefer to rely more heavily on public transit and the occasional car rental or cab/rideshare.
In any case, plenty of people are enthusiastic about a world where owning cars is less popular, so it's a common refrain.
And Uber/Lyft work reliably only in urban areas. "Younger generations" will inevitably grow older and may want to move out of tiny, expensive city apartments to larger accomodations outside the city. Guess what. Public infrastructure fills the gap much better than Uber/LyfBolt do (at least in Europe).
I know that where I live I've started blanching at how much it actually costs to take an Uber, which is now approaching what taxis cost.
But in context, he didn’t mean Uber needed self-driving to exist. He meant Uber can’t be left out if self-driving becomes a reality.
In that sense, the sale seems pessimistic. They no longer see self-driving on the horizon, or they aren’t on track to deliver the technology themselves.
The other option is that there will never be a sustainable business here.
The phrase "war of capital attrition", however, will send capable VCs running for the exits. If they liked that sort of thing they would have been bankers.
Amazon is also an investor charity to give us all one day shipping since the investors show no sign of wanting profit margins above 1%.
Their real problem is if some other company perfects self-driving cars and doesn't sell them. Perhaps Uber have decided that's unlikely, either because no one will or because a company that isn't looking at ride-sharing will.
Uber and Lyft have a de facto duopoly amongst those hopping off planes because it’s hard to know that there are any other local options available.
But if there's a local alternative known to be better for going out with their friends, you can be sure that a person used to going out regularly with their friends will know what it is.
OR: they finally accepted the fact that self-driving cars aren't realistically happening anytime soon, at least to the level needed to entirely eliminate the driver cost.
That, and they probably realize they have enough market share at this point to be able to (long-term) raise prices instead of lower expenses.
If you assume that self-driving cars eventually become a commodity, Uber and Lyft could just buy them rather than develop the tech in-house. The key strategic bit of the landscape to own would be the app that everyone uses to book them.
London has Uber, Bolt, Kapten, Ola, Viavan, Hailo, Wheely, Xoox and that's just a single city - so the ride-hailing-app tech isn't a moat. A self-driving-car business doesn't need any drivers on board, so driver recruitment isn't a moat. And Google already have Google Maps on a big fraction of phones, so app installation is scarcely a moat.
Of course Google will have plenty of opportunities to shoot themselves in the feet, so it's certainly not a done deal.
I've been long hoping, for their own sake, that they'd sell off the SDC division, since it was hurting their balance sheet anyway. Glad they've seen the light.