[HN Gopher] Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving t...
___________________________________________________________________
Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to
Uber
Author : oflordal
Score : 378 points
Date : 2023-05-23 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.waymo.com)
| fnord77 wrote:
| ironic since Uber tried to steal Waymo's industrial secrets
| bertil wrote:
| Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are
| explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense
| in principle, but in practice... This will be all the wrong kinds
| of exciting for a while.
|
| If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta,
| and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at
| options there, because:
|
| - Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if
| there's a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it's
| not true for everyone: drive through probably aren't close enough
| without the car having an articulated arm.
|
| - Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that
| looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to
| deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at,
| and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.
|
| - Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes,
| they can't. Always, they don't want to -- "playing video games"
| is the traditional excuse for "I can't right now!" but bowel
| movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just
| plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food
| gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably
| can't pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part:
| their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not
| the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong:
| it's those you haven't seen yet because they can't go to
| Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at
| home most of the time.
|
| Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what's
| left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles
| to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get
| to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
| i2cmaster wrote:
| [flagged]
| elromulous wrote:
| I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own
| app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a
| ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next
| time.
|
| With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both
| available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still
| gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback
| if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.
| bertil wrote:
| I see the benefits from both for now, but I'm not capturing how
| they could agree on the long-term negotiation.
|
| There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of
| that deal... That was always the issue with Uber promising
| self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown,
| uncontrollable deadline.
| kortilla wrote:
| Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?
| bertil wrote:
| They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo
| competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated
| fleet will need Uber's human drivers. Acquiring riders is
| cheap--good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all
| over the city will do the rest.
|
| That partnership makes sense in the transition period when
| Waymo can't buy enough cars to scale for football matches,
| handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team.
| I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software,
| etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance,
| is 100% something I'd recommend acquiring wholesale. Even
| with a thousand better options at Google, I'm sure their
| back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself?
| The confusing everything app? It's a bad brand whose toe-
| stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying
| to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I
| know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don't
| see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be
| self driving without a human safety driver. They'll get
| there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual
| deployment of this tech.
| londons_explore wrote:
| With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end
| to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think
| this may change quickly.
|
| Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but
| this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla
| has the opportunity to collect far more than any other
| manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars
| collecting video data of the next closest competitor.
|
| And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that _if_
| anyone can get it working at all, it _may_ not have the
| issues with the long tail of unusual situations that
| other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a
| picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive
| over it or around it?" might be answered better by the
| end to end system than a rules based system.
|
| _If_ all of those things work out, then Tesla will win
| this race. Otherwise, they 'll lose.
| threeseed wrote:
| > They'll get there eventually
|
| Debatable.
|
| So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR
| sensors.
| hanniabu wrote:
| If I were Uber I would structure this as "we'll integrate
| waymo as a trial and if it's successful then we'll acquire
| waymo after x period of time"
| ra7 wrote:
| From the TechCrunch news story [1]:
|
| > The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo's self-driving
| technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine
| Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is "building a
| Driver, not a vehicle." That "driver-as-a-service" model is
| similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks,
| and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology,
| rather than being the owner-operator of that technology.
|
| Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their
| Waymo One taxi service and be a "technology provider" for other
| ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative
| business model. Less operational costs due to someone else
| running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they
| can just develop/maintain the tech.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-
| cars-w...
| [deleted]
| notatoad wrote:
| i think the main goal of licencing would be less capital costs.
| buying cars isn't cheap, especially not at scale - licencing
| their tech to somebody else means every car they put on the
| road is $150k waymo doesn't have to spend.
| jfoster wrote:
| Someone has to spend it, though. Uber seem in even less of a
| position to be footing that bill.
| notatoad wrote:
| but if uber spend a couple billion on cars, and lyft spend
| a couple billion, and didi spends a couple billion, etc,
| that's a lot more spend than if only waymo spends it.
| ra7 wrote:
| Good point. That would also allow them to bring true Level 4
| autonomous driving to passenger cars with sufficient
| miniaturization of their sensor stack.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber
| as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first
| question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo
| get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture
| loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because
| they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it
| doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at
| around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show
| signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber,
| vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer
| base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and
| they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out
| autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.
| mbesto wrote:
| > The first question I had though was "who extracts value
| here".
|
| Uber can't be profitable _without_ autonomous vehicles, so the
| answer IMHO here is simple.
|
| For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner
| with literally anyone to get distribution.
| jonas21 wrote:
| You say the answer is simple, but I can't tell what your
| answer is.
|
| The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really
| bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of
| the value.
|
| The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of
| Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would
| presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value.
|
| So which is it?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| No contradiction.
|
| The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to
| partner with, so they could play them against each other,
| so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Got it. Maybe I was reading too much into the tone. I
| read "they'll partner with literally anyone to get
| distribution" as them being desperate to get distribution
| and therefore willing to take a bad deal.
| Marazan wrote:
| They also can't be profitable with autonomous vehicles
| either.
| freejazz wrote:
| > Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so
| the answer IMHO here is simple.
|
| says who?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Just because uber is not profitable with human drivers
| doesn't mean it'll be the opposite without them.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This is a win-win for Google.
|
| If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame
| Uber.
|
| Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people
| will think twice about Uber taking the blame.
| lhorie wrote:
| The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that
| self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why
| Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something
| Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.
|
| Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving
| player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have
| the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with
| Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of
| these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of
| vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough
| hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs
| is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than
| Bolt, or even Alto.
|
| The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy
| from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable
| brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
|
| Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI.
| Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the
| already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these
| costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for
| them.
| ra7 wrote:
| > The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is
| that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor.
| It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's
| something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be
| figured out.
|
| Uber sold their self driving division because they killed
| someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony
| Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated
| Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm
| pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not
| for those incidents.
| id00 wrote:
| I think the more likely here is that Uber sold self-driving
| group (alongside other "big bets" like flying taxi research
| group) because of existential threat to the business during
| the start of COVID-19 which made them focusing on the main
| business (+eats) and sell parts that have no profitability
| in sight.
| lhorie wrote:
| That's exactly right. Uber self driving was burning
| through the tune of billions of dollars a year when covid
| reduced revenue by the tune of 70%. Not exactly
| sustainable w/ only a few billion dollars of cash on
| hand.
|
| As terrible as a pedestrian death is, the reality is
| there's news about Tesla accidents and near-accidents on
| the news all the time and people still love the brand.
| Sometimes it's easy to forget that Uber/Amazon/M$/etc
| hating is not as widespread in the general population as
| it is among tech bros.
|
| As for Otto, my understanding is Uber pivoted similarly
| on the freight side, with a partnership w/ Volvo
| Autonomous Solutions.
| astrange wrote:
| The self-driving division was done to attract investment
| because investors thought it sounded cool. It would have
| been bad for Uber's business to have them - Uber relies on
| not owning cars, which moves all the maintenance to the
| driver-owners. If you own a self-driving car you still have
| to maintain it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Did they even lose a civil suit for killing that person?
| They were not punished.
| mnd999 wrote:
| > The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is
| that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor.
|
| They also don't work. At least not by any sane definition.
| Sure, if you've mapped the area in advance, nothing
| changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all
| might be okay but otherwise it's a shitshow.
|
| Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no
| point in this other than trying to persuade the markets
| Google hasn't spanked millions on a dead end.
| krebby wrote:
| If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a
| reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins.
|
| Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC
| providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're
| Android; they want to own the network and have multiple
| operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers
| don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way
| marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to
| be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not
| owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other
| operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the
| investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber
| customers off that way.
| Tepix wrote:
| If another company solves self driving after Waymo, they can
| still enter the market. I would usually give new, cheaper
| competitors a try. Who wouldn't?
|
| Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services
| because i consider them scum.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who
| wouldn't?
|
| Just want to point out that the failure case of self
| driving (if this product fails I crash into another car
| while going 80 mph) makes the race to the bottom slightly
| less plausible.
| deegles wrote:
| What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either
| drive safely or they don't.
|
| We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-
| market fit in history.
|
| Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an
| informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have
| a choice).
|
| The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad,
| leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).
| repsilat wrote:
| The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-
| sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly
| impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous
| fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100
| vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty
| quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super
| important.
|
| Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing
| hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover
| advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition
| will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement
| (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.
| osigurdson wrote:
| To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could
| bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.
| msoad wrote:
| Or multiple on various places. Google Rides, Google Play
| Hail, Youtube Taxi and so on...
| usrusr wrote:
| And a betting platform about shutdown order?
| toddmorey wrote:
| Seems like but then why the interest from Waymo in an Uber
| partnership? They already have the Waymo One app. I think
| it's because getting users to switch or use multiple apps
| proves difficult.
| [deleted]
| htrp wrote:
| Just like Google can bang out a messaging app in a weekend?
| vsskanth wrote:
| They have been. A new one every weekend.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| >Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.
|
| Google's culture isn't really built around providing human
| support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding
| involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there.
|
| With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google
| reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer
| has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins
| than a restaurant would.
| kaliqt wrote:
| To be fair, I don't think Uber has a lot of human to
| customer interaction either.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Yes they do. especially in the delivery area they need
| tons of ops people to deal with the restaurants.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Maybe not, but a human at Uber responded within 15
| minutes when a ride I had booked drove away from me just
| before pickup. They canceled the original booking with no
| fee, then sent another car to pick me up and gave me some
| Uber credits.
|
| That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect
| from big G. Google would probably charge me a
| cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my
| account for having the temerity to complain I'd been
| stranded, and then followed up with automated email
| confirming they made the right decision after review.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| According to Linkedin 54% of Uber employees (48,000) are
| in operations roles.[0]
|
| I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe
| Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of
| the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't
| scale operations in the same way you can scale
| development.
|
| Google would have to do something similar to launch their
| own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense
| to just keep Uber in the middle.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/company/uber-com/insights/
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Or put it in Google Maps if they had any sense. They should
| know when to recommend ride hailing with high accuracy to
| those who enable location history, and they can skip the
| clunky app switching that other ride hailing services
| require.
| ra7 wrote:
| Agreed. I'm not sure an acquisition makes sense for
| Waymo/Alphabet. Operating a robotaxi is technologically quite
| different from an Uber vehicle -- mapping is different,
| routing is different, customer service is different (a Waymo
| is stuck and needs remote assistance), maintenance is
| different (charging, cleaning in depots). Uber's platform
| wouldn't help with any of that.
|
| This seems like a play to attract users from the most popular
| ridehail platform and eventually funnel them to the Waymo
| app. I don't believe users are loyal to ridehail apps like
| they are to social networks (I don't use Uber because my
| friends use it) and would jump to a service that is cost
| competitive and autonomous. Or, as I said another comment,
| maybe they are setting the stage to be just a technology
| provider to ridehail companies and let them deal with all the
| operational overhead.
| yard2010 wrote:
| They couldn't bang out a social network over the last
| decade(s), I hardly believe they could bang out anything than
| keep extracting more money from the dying ad industry
| re-thc wrote:
| They can and have (Google Plus) but just scrapped it
| straight after in typical Google style.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chaostheory wrote:
| For me the question is who is liable in an accident
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is America. When a "self driving" car kills someone, we
| blame the someone for daring to not pay due respect to the
| magic machine. They shouldn't have crossed the road in the
| dark! They should have been more visible! They should have
| been in their own big self driving box!
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If it's the fault of the car, it has to be Waymo.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don't need to own it
| outright to realize huge returns.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How much of Uber does Alphabet own? They do not show up in
| the top 10 list here, so presumably 1% at most?
|
| https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/
|
| Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet's other
| investments.
| jefftk wrote:
| They owned 5% from 2013 to at least 2019:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-
| sta...
|
| I _think_ they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired,
| but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news
| (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-
| suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
| avrionov wrote:
| According to this they own part of it:
|
| https://www.gv.com/portfolio
| htrp wrote:
| I think google offloaded most of that stake when Uber
| went public
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is not surprising, or in question. The claim I am
| questioning is:
|
| > Alphabet has a large stake in Uber.
|
| Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners
| are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a
| significant portion of ownership in Uber.
| riskable wrote:
| I just want to chime in to say that _it is ridiculous_ that
| such information is not so easy to come by. Billion-dollar
| corporations should _not_ be allowed to keep their external
| investments so opaque! _Especially_ businesses that are
| publicly-traded.
|
| Also: I don't give a damn if the business _isn 't_ publicly
| traded either. If they're that big they have enough
| influence over any given market that the public should have
| the right to know what they're up to.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house.
| The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as
| autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a
| massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically
| it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a
| heat shield.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Uber have always wanting to go autonomous cars. They poured
| a lot of money to try to develop them in-house and I think
| that they were too optimistic on how easy and quick that
| would be.
|
| But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they
| will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.
| wmf wrote:
| _Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and
| therefore capture loads of value_
|
| I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver
| at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper
| eventually but who knows when that will happen.
| tialaramex wrote:
| This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the
| telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build
| even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with
| Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to
| work as operators, let alone to design something like System
| X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK
| from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D
| on an ongoing basis. The girls married, or got less boring
| jobs, or just left work, each time you must recruit and train
| replacements - but you design System X once and use it for
| forty years no problem.
|
| There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it
| works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are
| discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some
| sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager
| electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.
| wmf wrote:
| No, I think the BOM cost of Waymo is higher.
| fairity wrote:
| By public accounts, the total hardware costs for one SDC
| is around $300k. If you amortize that over a 5 year
| lifespan & 50 rides a day, you get $3.28 of variable
| costs per ride.
|
| $3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is
| paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I
| imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after
| adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance.
| And, the $300k should decrease over time.
| ghaff wrote:
| An SDC has many of the same operational costs (and maybe
| more) than a human-driven car. (Also garaging, cleaning,
| etc. As well as the support staff if a car gets in
| trouble somehow.) You can admittedly assume electric and
| assume operational costs may be lower than say a Prius
| today. But I don't consider it a given that a company
| which purchases and operates an SDC fleet from Waymo can
| operate profitably while undercutting rideshare as it
| exists today.
| shagie wrote:
| Consumer reports puts the cost per mile at $0.49 for a
| Prius ( https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/best-
| cars-blog/20... ).
|
| That includes electrical and maintenance. That's still
| less than a regular car, but it's still a larger number
| than most people consider.
|
| It would be possible to say its less, though I'd tend to
| suggest it would be more than the Prius since there's no
| human custodian of the car to handle the "pull over, I've
| gotta puke" situations which can add unexpected expenses.
|
| There's also things like fines when the car doesn't
| observe the laws (who gets the ticket if it causes a
| traffic jam, cuts off a bus, running over a fire hose, or
| fails to give way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk - https:
| //www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2018/03/29/first-a...
| https://sfist.com/2023/01/31/sf-regulators-have-had-it-
| with-... )
| [deleted]
| makestuff wrote:
| I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate
| the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber
| obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving
| vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has
| all of the power since they could develop their own app and
| undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave
| as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
| shagie wrote:
| ... and as soon as it started losing money Google could
| cancel it (Uber has never made a profit -
| https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ ).
|
| ... and the government would (again) look into Google using
| anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle
| other companies in the area.
|
| ... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few
| cities would lose a significant part of the network effect
| that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just
| a limited few).
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful?
| Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to
| convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the
| other existing apps in this space.
|
| Getting into a new market didn't work for videos so they
| bought YouTube, it didn't work for their social network, and
| it didn't work for a ton of other cancelled projects.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| There are no drivers in self driving cars
| nindalf wrote:
| Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market -
| you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and
| neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's
| _not a problem_ for Waymo because they control the driving
| side. They simply need to get users to sign up.
|
| When you have something unique and useful, people will sign
| up.
| [deleted]
| EddieEngineers wrote:
| Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in
| numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add
| to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and
| they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust
| an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual,
| based on precedent - _looks at Stadia controller annoyed_.
| grumple wrote:
| You're pretty wrong. No organization can just spin up large
| international companies. I don't know where you'd get such an
| idea from. Even the technical parts of Uber alone would take
| years to replicate. The app frontend? Sure, with manpower you
| can get that out in a few months. The backend, supporting
| infra, legal systems, customer support, relationships with
| users, restaurants, etc? Years to decades. Google could never
| do it, they are too big to move fast. Think, when is the last
| time Google successfully launched a project of even a
| fraction of the scale of Uber?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Trivial compared with getting regulatory approval for self-
| driving, with which it has a lot of overlap.
| wmf wrote:
| Y'all are talking as if the Waymo app doesn't already exist.
| https://waymo.com/waymo-one/
| temporalparts wrote:
| That's what they thought about Google Video, but then Google
| decided to buy Youtube. Technical advantage (which Google has
| in strides) does not always translate to business advantage
| (which Uber has done remarkably well for itself).
| afavour wrote:
| I think you're right here. You can recreate the technical
| aspects of YouTube relatively easily. You can't recreate
| the brand.
|
| Just because it's big doesn't mean Google will inevitably
| succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind
| there's no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture
| mindshare.
| bruceb wrote:
| YT was relatively cheap and much stronger network effects.
| Uber does not.
|
| Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than
| 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would
| have millions of customers immediately.
|
| What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I
| think the main point thing stopping is what others have
| pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running
| their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let
| them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines
| will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in
| favor of robot cars.
| fizwhiz wrote:
| Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
| krebby wrote:
| I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has
| built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining
| pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with
| local governments is at the core of its service. Google has
| traditionally shied away from businesses that require big
| operational investments in real-world assets the way that,
| say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build
| properly, and is a big piece of the puzzle that I can't see
| Waymo wanting to take on. It makes sense for them to want to
| partner, especially now that Uber has spun out Aurora.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Waymo already has to deal with local governments.
| worik wrote:
| > Waymo already has to deal with local governments.
|
| Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They
| know how hard it is
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, in a couple of small geographies where the local
| governments have been particularly accommodating.
|
| Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for
| dozens of places and handle customer service for
| rideshare, etc, at scale?
| sidcool wrote:
| Uber is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex
| operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web
| scraper.
| [deleted]
| nashashmi wrote:
| The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate
| kibwen wrote:
| There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All
| Google would need to do is push a notification to every
| Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that
| says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first
| ten rides are free!" and they're in business.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| I mean, I use mostly Lyft in the US. And if there were
| another app or two that had a reputation for being
| cheaper or better service even if they didn't service
| everywhere, I'd be installing that in a minute. Brand has
| _some_ value and I don 't want to be installing one or
| more apps for every city I visit. But it mostly works
| when someone is as good or better for most purposes.
| [deleted]
| bartwr wrote:
| Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up
| the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations
| and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries
| and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane
| timeline is close to impossible.
|
| And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants
| to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press
| (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous
| vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
| worik wrote:
| > Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial.
|
| Nonsense
|
| It would be a huge job. Even for Google
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| > figuring out all the local regulations and getting
| permits (it's not 2010 anymore!
|
| Hm. This is like --
|
| It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.
|
| The original regulatory capture.
|
| Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.
|
| Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.
|
| Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how
| things work.
|
| On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For
| each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors
| who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the
| guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and
| weekends.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an
| Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is
| uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every
| android phone quite quickly.
| [deleted]
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Hello, antitrust litigation! Before my time, but what you
| have just described is what got Microsoft in big trouble
| in the '90s.
| newleaf wrote:
| Not just that, but you can put it in front of every
| Google Maps user.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.
| mcny wrote:
| > you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an
| uber.
|
| yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a
| successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem
| is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M
| a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year
| from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down
| before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
| dweekly wrote:
| When I worked at Google our team came up with a data
| product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with
| customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested
| in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual
| OKRs.
|
| Google is a great company but it has never been truly
| hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all
| up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are
| slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more
| trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.
| stickyricky wrote:
| What's the product? Asking for a friend...
| [deleted]
| JB_Dev wrote:
| If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I
| think we'll get quite a few riders in a short amount of
| time. Uber won't be able to compete.
| shagie wrote:
| Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of
| undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the
| drivers' vehicles.
|
| If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to
| use its market dominance in Android to drive out a
| competitor that would potentially be something that would
| be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would
| likely be interested in it.
|
| I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing
| money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for
| purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them
| outside of a few test cities for a technology demo.
| Having driverless taxis _also_ means that they would need
| to do a better job with end user support (compare the
| urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their
| current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and
| can't get out!").
| squokko wrote:
| >give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an
| Uber app maybe in 3-6 months
|
| LOLOLOL
| Gunnerhead wrote:
| The good old "I can build that in a weekend".
| somsak2 wrote:
| with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from
| 2010.
|
| consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago
| and that's not going to cut it.
| jfoster wrote:
| What's an example of something for consumers that Uber
| 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers
| behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking
| autonomous vehicles here)
| somsak2 wrote:
| route planning / fleet management i think is a huge
| optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but
| it would require having a big multiple of drivers to
| provide the same service
|
| another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a
| pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer
| expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
| STRiDEX wrote:
| airport terminal maps and regulations for every major
| airport in the united states
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the
| local regulations and getting permits
|
| They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws
| and provide false information to regulators.
| alsodumb wrote:
| It's not like Waymo/Uber can roll in with autonomous taxis
| in every city just because Uber figured out the local
| regulation - many cities would have explicit regulation for
| anything driverless. I think it's the later point - they
| want to stay in the shadows until they are super confident.
| I wonder what will happen to Uber eventually though.
|
| It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering
| with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still
| betting on their Origin vehicle.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Black Wolf [0] has been all over the news lately, and seems
| to be doing this.
|
| [0] https://blackwolfapp.com/
| chris222 wrote:
| It's not trivial at all. Do you work in the space at all?
| riskable wrote:
| > Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the
| local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010
| anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing
| pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.
|
| This is nonsense. Google has _more_ than enough legal
| resources to handle this. So much so that it would be
| nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be
| assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It 's no
| different than any other regionally-regulated product
| launch at large companies.
|
| Not only that but Google has enough money that they could
| just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a
| huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't
| _need_ such expertise they 'd probably still recruit and
| hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective
| of people with experience.
|
| Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't
| actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so
| many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would
| probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with
| lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state
| assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their
| research and for bigger states they might even have county-
| level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that
| focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably
| be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.
|
| It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and
| conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across
| a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
| willio58 wrote:
| Google has enough resources to in theory thrive in any
| business they attempt. Yet, they fail in so many
| businesses they attempt to get into.
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| hospitalJail wrote:
| To be fair, most companies don't even bother trying.
|
| At least we got FOSS chromium + FOSS android.
|
| That said, things like Google Play Music -> Youtube Music
| was poorly handled and has permanently shook me. Have
| been leaving Google since.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal
| resources to handle this.
|
| I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were
| hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than
| 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely
| (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was
| reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our
| own).
| waboremo wrote:
| Sure, technically that's correct. But it's google we're
| talking about. The company with a tremendous list of
| failures that should have been _easy_ slam dunks.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Google has tons of legal resources for their current
| business. But that doesn't mean they can spin up the
| legal docs and relationships needed to run an Uber-like
| business at the drop of a hat. The type of risk that
| Google's lawyers are used to mitigating are simply not
| the same, and their lawyers are for the most part not the
| type of lawyers that you'd want to set up a
| transportation company with international operations.
| There are some relevant lawyers there, but the vast
| majority are specialized in software/cloud, not wheels-
| on-the-ground.
|
| Of course, it would be easier to put together the
| necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have
| already both done so. It's easier to be a follower than a
| leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than
| building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up
| Google's alley.
| panarky wrote:
| Google's missing piece isn't the app.
|
| And it isn't the lawyers.
|
| It's the network of riders.
|
| Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.
|
| Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles
| waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a
| fraction of Uber's volume.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I don't think people's brand loyalty for Uber is very
| high these days, is it?
| davey48016 wrote:
| I don't know a lot of people who love Uber, but I know a
| lot of people who are only ever going to use one ride
| sharing app. If Waymo's app is limited to a 180 sq. mile
| territory and only half of their trips are in that
| territory, they won't bother. The first time the Waymo
| app tells them they're going outside their territory, it
| will be back to Uber forever.
|
| I may have an unusually lazy social circle.
| gnicholas wrote:
| As others have pointed out, Google could scoop up tons of
| riders in a heartbeat, by announcing a ride share
| platform publicly (which would get tons of news coverage)
| and by advertising the feature within Google Maps, Waze,
| etc.
|
| Google only needs to put together a one-sided
| marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided
| marketplace. And Google already has a connection to
| billions (at least hundreds of millions) of potential
| riders.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if Google
| started advertising its own taxi service on Google Maps.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| FWIW I just checked that I can book a Lyft directly from
| the Google Maps app.
| shagie wrote:
| It would also need to invest in the vehicles and the
| technology and the maintenance and the garage to store
| them in and pay the insurance on the vehicles.
|
| All this to try to compete with Uber (which isn't
| profitable) in a few areas where the legal, political and
| climate ("we have cars in Chicago but they only run from
| March 1st to November 1st") options are favorable.
|
| The marketplace is not the biggest issue that Google
| would need to overcome.
| vizzah wrote:
| the hype of driverless taxis will explode a new app's
| customer base immediately. no need to tap in into the
| existing ecosystem.
| [deleted]
| VanillaCafe wrote:
| Evidence suggests that none of this is true. Just look at
| how Google Fiber wasn't able to navigate the myriad
| regional regulatory roadblocks thrown up by local
| governments when lobbied by incumbent ISPs. It's
| reasonable to expect exactly the same scenario to play
| out if Google tries to make a competitive ride sharing
| service from scratch.
| endtime wrote:
| That's a pretty good example. But in the case of Fiber,
| part of the problem was that other ISPs own/control
| infrastructure (like poles) to which they're legally
| obligated to give competitors access...and they would
| just _not comply_ , or drag their feet on it. Fiber
| physically couldn't execute because of this. Of course
| there was corruption involved, as you pointed out, but in
| the case of ride share apps I can't immediately think of
| anything analogous, where Uber could physically prevent
| Waymo from competing with them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Big companies have big legal organizations and they
| don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs
| that so many of us on HN are used to.
|
| Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms
| in the tech industry where that's the core business
| (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more
| like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously
| minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to
| handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new,
| emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
| edude03 wrote:
| Realistically though they don't have to figure out the
| legal problems immediately, they could and likely would
| start in their own backyards and expand from there
| moralestapia wrote:
| >figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits
|
| But this will be different for robots though. This is not a
| moat for Uber.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the
| local regulations and getting permits_
|
| Is experience doing this with human drivers all that
| helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the
| legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
| bushbaba wrote:
| Don't forget regulatory pressure of buying Uber. That might
| not be approved.
| anaganisk wrote:
| The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app, Google famously
| has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know
| how many times it's failed. Then comes Google+, Google's
| attempt to get into social networking. Unless Google came up
| with something novel or something different from incumbents
| it never ever succeeded. Any SWE worth his salt can build a
| ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and
| confidence in using that app both by riders and drivers is
| what drives its success.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The power of Uber doesn 't lie in it's app_
|
| I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name
| recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install
| base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber
| app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as
| this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
| andruby wrote:
| Name recognition and installed user base in a 2-sided
| marketplace. That's huuuge.
|
| Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns
| the action to "get an Uber".
|
| Also, don't underestimate the value of a working
| business. Google has only ever been successful with a
| search engine and an ad platform. They've never been
| success in a consumer product/service. I don't think
| their corporate structure and business culture makes them
| likely to succeed in B2C.
|
| Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a
| consumer. And have responsive and helpful support.
| Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a
| stranded user or resolve a dispute.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| The idea is to make it a 1-sided marketplace. Uber's
| entire business model is focused around squeezing vendors
| - now they think they can squeeze Google if Google
| becomes their vendor instead of a bunch of independent
| contractors who are legally inhibited from collective
| bargaining? Uber has no idea how to be successful when
| the seller side of their marketplace is organized and
| plays hardball at the negotiating table.
| slushh wrote:
| The car companies will do everything to prevent Google
| from having that monopoly. E.g. Google could be forced to
| license their software. Then, Uber gets their 2-sided
| marketplace back.
| andruby wrote:
| The 1-sided marketplace is a good point.
|
| Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close in self-driving
| technology, so there's already another player. Uber could
| just buy a bunch of Tesla's once their tech is good
| enough for autonomous driving.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close
|
| No they aren't. The latest FSD betas have been widely
| panned.
|
| And the lack of LiDAR sensors means Tesla still fails to
| accurately define the bounding boxes for scene objects.
| iinnPP wrote:
| If they kept GTalk they would have a chat app.
| fairity wrote:
| > I am pretty confident google _could_ spin up an org to
| replicate the uber app
|
| Google has _already_ done this. Waymo One is the name of
| Google 's app, and it's live and serving customers already in
| Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger
| in the car.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to
| replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.
|
| The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to
| expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite
| local taxi laws fairly successfully.
|
| There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd
| nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be
| denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't
| want their jobs taken.
| nunez wrote:
| They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider;
| shut down in 2022.
| 015a wrote:
| > I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to
| replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.
|
| Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app?
|
| Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard.
| Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github
| competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts
| (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting
| product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at.
| It was worth it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling
| differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling
| differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of
| Uber and _boom_ instant market share.
| paulcole wrote:
| Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the
| money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are
| going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a
| 50% paycut.
| darkwater wrote:
| Waymo is about driverless cars aka robotaxis
| shagie wrote:
| Using Google's dominance to expand into other sectors (at
| a loss) is a perfect example of anticompetitive practices
| that regulators would likely take a keen interest in
| investigating.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Using robots to cut costs and thus prices is not
| anticompetitive.
| shagie wrote:
| Using Android's market share to push or encourage the use
| of a Waymo robot taxi booking application that is in
| competition with Uber and Lyft might be seen as
| anticompetitive.
|
| Other comments elsewhere are "No but if you're Google you
| can put it on literally every android phone quite
| quickly." and "All Google would need to do is push a
| notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps
| (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through
| Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and
| they're in business."
|
| That sort of approach would very likely be examined by
| regulators.
| zamnos wrote:
| Followed by a slap on the wrist of a fine? How many tens
| of millions of dollars do you think the TAM of NYC taxi
| service is, vs a single digit million dollar fine from
| regulators?
|
| Most days, fines are just the cost of doing business.
| They cut into your profits, sure, but as long as profits
| >> fine, just pay the fine and keep doing it.
| 35997279 wrote:
| >surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet
| just swoops in and buys up Uber
|
| It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers
| like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent
| to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good.
| Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not
| overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means
| politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like
| they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does
| autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a
| variety of reasons. It's why local taxi dispatches are still in
| business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same.
|
| Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and
| getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But
| there was always a market it could not take.
|
| Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market
| share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| > Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber
|
| Please no. We don't need the ultimate "startup that was
| unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying
| to get bought by big tech" example to fuel more nonsense.
| freejazz wrote:
| > has all the customer service infra
|
| Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone
| ackbar03 wrote:
| So now Uber is going to be a gazillion dollar company? Wasn't
| that sort of their value hypothesis?
| Animats wrote:
| This may just mean that Waymo is outsourcing its Chandler AZ
| self-driving operations to Uber. That makes sense for Waymo. Have
| details come out about which way the money is flowing?
|
| For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Alphabet investment synergy potential is high.
| edgefield wrote:
| This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?
| smt88 wrote:
| This won't be in widespread use for quite a while. Places with
| weather still aren't great candidates for Waymo.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's VERY few population centers in the US where it's
| raining heavily >10% of the time.
|
| The vast majority of rides in the US - and even in a place
| like Florida that's a swamp where it rains literally every
| day - happen under just fine conditions for Waymo.
|
| This is fine for a taxi service.
|
| If you make 10x as much profit in the vast majority of cases
| - you'll let someone else pick up the scraps in the edge
| cases.
|
| It's almost as if Waymo & Uber considered weather...
| smt88 wrote:
| > _There 's VERY few population centers in the US where
| it's raining heavily >10% of the time._
|
| First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities are[1].
| Most of the population of the US lives in a place that has
| more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast Corridor
| by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual rainy days.
|
| It also doesn't need to be "raining heavily". It can also
| be raining lightly, snowing, foggy, dusty, or smoky.
|
| But even if you're right and it's 10%, the predictability
| becomes a huge issue. I've spent my whole life on the East
| Coast, and you never know if it's really going to rain
| until it does or doesn't. The forecast changes literally
| minute to minute.
|
| 1. https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-
| annual-pre...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > First, you're utterly wrong about how rainy cities
| are[1]. Most of the population of the US lives in a place
| that has more than 100 rainy days per year. The Northeast
| Corridor by itself has 50 million people and 120+ annual
| rainy days.
|
| First, you are utterly wrong with your facts.
|
| 100 rainy days per year does not equal 2400 hours of rain
| per year.
|
| It's closer to 500 hours of rain per year = 5.7% of the
| time.
|
| Realistically, you're looking at the VAST majority of
| cities Uber being able to operate in 99% of the time.
|
| Additionally - "rain" does not equal downpour. Waymo can
| drive in light rain.
|
| And guess what - when it's downpouring, people crash MUCH
| MORE (fun fact - my father almost killed my hyrdoplaning
| in a downpour to get to my brother's basketball game).
|
| Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if people
| aren't on the roads nearly dying in the middle of The
| Perfect Storm (<1% of the time) to get places they
| probably don't really need to get to in the first
| place...
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure how one gets to anything like 10x. Uber
| drivers maybe making minimum wage driving their own cars
| are just not that expensive.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Automotive EE here, I could not disagree with you more on
| the state and expectations of self-driving vehicles.
|
| I can tell you with confidence they have not really put
| effort into weather and it's a problem "to be solved
| later".
|
| It's all a joke. If we actually wanted this, it would be
| long haul A to B routes. Turning semi trucks into rail.
|
| Self-driving was already slowing down before the era of
| free money. So I expect this is just PR to set expectations
| for Uber and prepare for a scenario where Uber is
| eventually swallowed by someone else.
|
| The article to me (an Automotive EE/CE of 20 years) that
| "Fairy dust makers combine efforts to bring genie wish
| program forward".
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| But have they solved the Trolley Problem?
| astrange wrote:
| There's no need because 1. cars have brakes 2.
| programming this into a car would make it more dangerous,
| because it might decide to trolley-program-sacrifice a
| grandmother when nobody was actually in danger.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Mercedes got flack for it, but ultimately they had the
| right answer.
|
| When a sort of pitch was made to an exec where the car
| has to crash into a tree or a cyclist, he said the bike.
| Because you aren't going to pay $80,000 for your car to
| choose your death.
|
| If you look at car ownership as owning a weapon, it does
| only make sense that you'll have to prioritize for the
| owner.
|
| But really, we aren't even remotely to trolley problem.
| The systems BARELY detect and react properly to single
| issues, let alone detecting multiple and selecting
| between them.
|
| I honestly think it's a scam that was popular in the era
| of Free Money, and I'm so glad that is temporarily on
| pause.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The trolley problem is functionally irrelevant to AVs,
| but even if it wasn't, it's still prohibited if you ever
| plan to pursue type certification in Europe per
| 2022/1426, section 2.1.1.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| "I can tell you with confidence they have not really put
| effort into weather"
|
| Ah, the Internet, where people who know absolutely
| nothing about a topic make bold assertions about it with
| 100% confidence.
|
| https://blog.waymo.com/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-
| weather-re...
| tialaramex wrote:
| Even more so, if they "have not really put effort into
| weather" then apparently they didn't need to, there are
| videos of Waymo drives through SF at night in rain for
| example, it seems to work fine whether it took "real"
| effort or not
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That blog is a great example about how they have no
| solution to the weather problem. Their heading image is a
| light drizzle, and they talk about "predicting" the
| weather, as if their cars being unable to manage an
| unpredictable situation is an okay product.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Ah, the internet where people who know absolutely nothing
| cite a PR blog directly from a company providing bold
| assertions that then give them 100% confidence.
|
| I've been in at least four fully self-driving dev / S0 /
| drivable buck vehicles and they are absolute garbage imo.
| We had one planned demo that was delayed because of fog
| in 2020, not road fog, but crap on the LiDAR glass. How
| many have you directly worked with?
|
| You'll be happy to know it isn't just weather that makes
| this all fake though.
|
| Road crown, even minor, but especially major in the
| northwest. Reflections, refractions. Lights and
| electronic billboards. Potholes. Missing road paint. ANY
| sort of road work at all. "Unhomed" people washing
| windshields. Squirrels (day) and mice/rats (night). Other
| bad drivers. Just plain dirty vehicles, self and others.
| Dust.
|
| It's all garbage. If we were serious it would be long
| haul, V2V V2I (vehicle to infra/vehicle). But yea yea,
| Waygo says they solved weather so just post their claim
| and you win! Reality can't compete with marketing, except
| it always does.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'm not the person you're responding to, but I've ridden
| inside probably dozens of AVs at this point (and my work
| product is in hundreds). I can't relate to your
| experiences at all. That's weird, because if you're an EE
| at one of the major AV companies, we're likely within 1
| degree of separation.
|
| Every serious company has put significant effort into
| testing with weather (note: not all weather conditions
| and not the same testing as traditional automotive).
| They've also put effort into handling all the other
| scenarios you've mentioned. Waymo does pose estimation to
| better handle construction workers and traffic cops, for
| example.
|
| Also the TAM numbers should make it clear why long
| distance freight isn't getting as much attention. Surely
| your employer has shared their outlook internally?
| ra7 wrote:
| Waymo driving in rain:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbMnLCXXxU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiD9l72uFCg
|
| Waymo driving in fog:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgDTCCdL6s
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I can tell that you WANT to believe. so, be my guest. Do
| come back and let me know when you have your reliable
| fully autonomous vehicle.
| ra7 wrote:
| There are people taking rides in rain and fog, albeit
| only in SF and Phoenix. You can claim they haven't put
| any effort into weather driving all you want, but the
| evidence suggests otherwise.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| There's no way to get 10x unless human drivers are earning
| 90% of the price currently which is clearly very far from
| the case.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Why not? It seems to work fine in rain - as evidenced by all
| the "bomb cyclones" in San Francisco this past rainy season.
| There are a lot of places they can go that don't have snow.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot_
|
| Suggests a natural partnership with Cruise.
| realjohng wrote:
| Lol remember when Uber stole Wayne code? Now they're buds. True
| settlement
| haxton wrote:
| I had interviewed with Uber's ATG years ago and their pitch, even
| then, was that they were building a platform for whoever won the
| autonomous game to be available on uber, not just their own cars.
|
| Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that
| group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to
| help with this product.
| yalogin wrote:
| I still don't understand the strategy for Waymo. After running
| that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to
| partnering with Uber, it's a huge failure. What does Uber bring
| to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with
| google's reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to
| their own platform. It's a colossal failure. I was really hoping
| they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride
| sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The
| ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.
| the-dude wrote:
| What about preventing anyone else partnering with Uber?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Waymo is a technology provider. Uber has lots of existing users
| and no ability to do autonomous driving. This way, Waymo gets
| to enter their cars in Uber's app and make a similar kind of
| revenue as a driver would. All Uber does is take their cut and
| supply passengers.
|
| So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already
| does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe
| get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a
| need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the
| driving and rolling out in more cities.
|
| I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a
| competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes, but this is about PR and the stock price for both
| companies
| anaganisk wrote:
| Google doesn't even want to have human interaction, and
| Google's reputation for sure didn't help it in chat and social
| network spaces either. And I'm sure Google doesn't even want to
| work it with restaurants and drivers, because you can't just
| put an AI algorithm to deal with their issues. Small businesses
| go through a lot to just edit their own listings on local
| businesses, I wouldn't wish Google to be the middle man for my
| deliveries.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Taxi service that only runs in the middle of the night and a
| very narrow corridor
| metalspot wrote:
| > strategy for Waymo
|
| getting their technology working profitably at scale is
| obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than
| expected.
|
| > app that is easily replicable
|
| Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the
| problem is that if you only have limited service in one small
| market then nobody has that app installed.
|
| business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of
| ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the
| largest install base.
|
| > What does Uber bring to the table at all?
|
| demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets
| their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for
| them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app
| then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to
| Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the
| process.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| I think they're accepting the fact that it's crazy tough to
| gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending.
| Sometimes it's better to have a small piece of a large pie,
| especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of
| taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
| jahewson wrote:
| Given that Waymo looses $5bn a year that seems like a drop in
| the ocean.
| sidcool wrote:
| I think you oversimplify what Uber has achieved in terms of
| tech and customer acquisition.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Uber has saturated a lot of markets and might have a better
| legal foothold then Waymo/Google can spin up in a short time
| span.
|
| Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a
| variety of business processes and needs help.
| hbn wrote:
| Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily,
| but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if
| Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in
| cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might
| be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which
| already exists that has the technology supplied by
| Google/Waymo.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| With Google's reputation, I'd expect them to provide terrible
| customer support and then also just let the whole thing
| stagnate after the initial splashy rollout and it had to be
| maintained.
| wefarrell wrote:
| It's a signal that ride share apps won't be 100% autonomous
| anytime soon.
|
| If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B
| you don't want to have to think about whether your route will
| be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in
| current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs
| available.
|
| You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you
| from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human
| behind the wheel or not.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Google had this with Google Maps showing the fare for your
| route on both Uber and Lyft, but I guess Google was getting
| some sort of kickback because Uber stopped [paying] to be on
| there perhaps over a year ago.
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| This makes so much sense - and why they'd team up with Uber.
| Google/Waymo don't care about non-coverage human-driver
| rideshare. However the users definitely do. So this
| partnership makes a ton of sense - if you're in a Waymo area,
| you could have a separate app, but having a single app for
| both types of rides is definitely a win for both.
| owaislone wrote:
| Not sure if that is the case. Imagine all ride hailing and cab
| services in a few years are based on Waymo tech including
| Waymo's own fleet. Waymo would be the clear winner.
| propogandist wrote:
| old enemies coming together, they must be out of options
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Literally the only way out for Uber if they aren't to be a
| glorified taxi app.
| paganel wrote:
| It goes the other way, too. Waymo has always been only "a few
| years away" from getting to autonomous driving.
| spratzt wrote:
| It's just an attempt to distract people from realizing that's
| all they are.
| omneity wrote:
| Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game.
| Interesting times.
|
| I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo
| to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback
| against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...),
| and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially
| being exchanged here.
| d33 wrote:
| Do we have a proof that this means that they're ready for the
| late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _proof that this means that they 're ready for the late
| game, as opposed to just investors being desperate_
|
| Whose investors? Uber isn't taking technology risk. And Waymo
| has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a
| show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their
| technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation
| (Uber did this, Uber did that ...)_
|
| They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection
| wouldn't go well. This is a risky integration pursued for
| scale.
| xur17 wrote:
| I think it also helps Waymo fill in the gaps between markets
| that they support. Customers get an app that works pretty much
| anywhere, and Waymo can drop into any given market with 10k
| self driving cars pretty much overnight.
| nojs wrote:
| This. Spinning up an Uber app clone is easy, actually running
| the service and having it available everywhere is hard and
| not something Google is likely to be good at.
| nerdchum wrote:
| Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving?
|
| Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my
| Uber/18 wheeler from my house?
| plasticchris wrote:
| Connectivity and latency. A stutter would be very bad.
| bertil wrote:
| As far as I understand it, Waymo uses remote driving when the
| situation isn't clear for the AI.
| rafram wrote:
| Drone planes are good for the military because they move all
| the risk from the pilot to the vehicle. Drone cars are bad for
| civilians because they move all the risk from the driver to the
| vehicle. What you're suggesting would quickly replace America's
| mass shooting problem with a VBIED problem. And it wouldn't
| even save any time or effort! You'd still need to concentrate
| on driving the car.
| spiderice wrote:
| Somehow this seems scarier to me than self driving cars.
|
| 1. Driving without the physical feedback that comes from
| acceleration, braking, taking a turn too fast, etc.. is really
| hard. Maybe they could overcome this with simulators of some
| sort, but I expect that would be too cost prohibitive.
|
| 2. I want the driver that can think to have skin in the game. I
| don't want them to be able to drive off a cliff, or in to a
| crowd, from the comfort of their couch.
|
| You could probably overcome this with some sort of hybrid model
| that simply doesn't allow stuff like this. But at that point
| you're still having to develop some pretty sophisticated self
| driving technology, and you still have to pay a driver. Not
| sure who is motivated to do this.
|
| 3. What's the point? You still have to pay a driver either way.
| Sure you get some cost savings by being able to switch out
| tired drivers instantly. But in the end, the most expensive
| cost is paying someone to sit there and drive.
| nerdchum wrote:
| Yeah ultimately it could be a sort of hybrid where the AI
| drives until it encounters a situation it is high risk to
| handle, like crowded street, then a human is alerted to take
| over. A pool of humans could then manage exponentially far
| more than one to one vehicles depending on how good the AI
| is.
|
| That's a huge money saver.
|
| Additionally recruiting truck drivers is difficult to do so
| maybe having a work from home job would make it easier.
|
| It's not that it's point less it's that some people just
| don't see the point.
|
| I don't know just seems like an idea worth pursuing for a
| million reasons, including being able to outsource driving or
| find the best drivers in the world. Also.mikitary reasons.
| Save lives with a remote controlled tank.
| [deleted]
| anaganisk wrote:
| But that doesn't create any profit, it's only a convenience for
| some random number on a sheet. Also managers probably don't
| like remote work in that industry :p
| luxurytent wrote:
| What kind of use case does this solve?
| carstenhag wrote:
| There isn't that much of a difference between the taxi driver
| sitting in the physical car or at home. Only when you Location
| A is in low demand, you could "hop" into a car at Location B.
|
| But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which
| increases efficiency a lot.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| What's the gain here? Can they pay you less than another driver
| who will sit in the car? Because dealing with signal being lost
| sounds like a huge problem to deal with for very little
| payback.
| metalspot wrote:
| in the typical scenario taxi/ride-share drivers are only
| driving paid miles for a small fraction of the time they are
| on the clock.
|
| with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-
| less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation
| in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled
| for situations they can't handle.
|
| this means that you can have a remote driver who is
| continually switching between driving different vehicles and
| only driving in the situations where actually needed and
| profitable.
|
| with driver based transportation when you get into low
| utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of
| the street, the drivers who are working spend more time
| sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick
| up rides.
|
| in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less
| cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff
| takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick
| up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving
| with much less mileage waste.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Remote driving would likely result in worse safety with very
| little gained by a commercial transportation company. They
| still have to pay for a driver but now that driver is staring
| at a screen 12 hours a day. Humans are already mediocre drivers
| when physically present and that would get so much worse if
| they were doing everything remotely instead
| TOMDM wrote:
| I have literally never used an Internet connection that I feel
| is reliable enough to consider driving a real car over it
| mrguyorama wrote:
| At this point even multiplayer driving games haven't figured
| out how to not kill half the field every time there is a
| single late packet. You cannot drive in a concrete jungle and
| get stable, reliable, verifiably usable internet.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| As a passenger you want the driver to have skin in the game.
| metalspot wrote:
| "autonomous" vehicles are remotely monitored and controlled.
| that is just not part of the marketing.
|
| the big blocker, and why autonomous/remote vehicles are not
| being rolled out more widely, is that remote requires lots of
| very reliable low latency bandwidth.
|
| 5G (mmWave 5G in particular) is a key enabling technology.
| until you get mmWave 5G or some comparable technology the
| bandwidth for remote at scale doesn't exist.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The Waymo vehicles being discussed in the article are not
| remote controlled like the GP is talking about. Remote
| assistance isn't controlling the vehicle, the autonomy stack
| remains in control throughout. They're just giving it
| additional information that it can't determine for itself.
| They're also not a part of the typical operation, but rather
| for infrequent, exceptional circumstances.
| mdale wrote:
| Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high
| percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so
| incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow.
|
| It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic
| partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another
| app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer.
| Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage
| that to it's advantages as well.
|
| But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace
| matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that
| it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover
| some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a
| platform basis which would be expensive per city high density
| rollout.
|
| Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time
| and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be
| fast to get a ride.
|
| For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of
| Uber platform of on tap riders.
|
| All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation
| apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous
| vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will
| dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery
| infra once it reached a certain scale.
|
| I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given
| density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps /
| cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo
| continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone
| platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete
| with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise,
| wherever apple lands and others globally.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B_
|
| Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not
| listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about
| them considering selling their stake [2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043796
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36044335
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and
| completely destroy Uber.
|
| But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory
| watchdogs.
| ra7 wrote:
| Google Maps already links to Waymo in the ridehail tab (but
| only in Phoenix):
| https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1400484190064422916?s=20
| belter wrote:
| And why would this not wake them up?
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Because Uber won't make a noise.
| jefftk wrote:
| Google Maps has had this for 6y:
| https://www.uber.com/newsroom/googlemaps/
|
| In the mobile app it used to be a tab at the top ("rideshare
| services") but now it's at the bottom of the public transit
| tab ("also consider").
|
| It used to be a deep integration where you could handle your
| whole ride without leaving Google Maps, but I think they
| removed that a few years ago?
| jessriedel wrote:
| Yes, but I think amelius is suggesting that Google could
| put a button in Google Maps that called a Waymo (and just a
| Waymo). That's what could run afoul of antitrust laws.
| morley wrote:
| Interesting thoughts. I was actually going to say that _Uber_
| had the advantage in this deal, since it owns the customer
| relationship and can shape demand toward or away from Waymo.
|
| Google has a distribution channel via Android, but I don't
| think it's strong enough (otherwise Stadia would still be
| around). They'd still have to build a destination for consumers
| to remember, in addition to the interface, matchmaking,
| billing, etc.
|
| I guess in any deal like this, there's the potential for
| advantage and disadvantage from both angles. As Clay said, a
| good compromise is one where both parties are dissatisfied.
| stri8ed wrote:
| Let's not forget Google maps, which already integrates other
| ride share platforms.
| metadaemon wrote:
| This also looks slightly bad on Uber as it had its own
| autonomous driving division that I suspect isn't doing well
| anymore.
| notatoad wrote:
| Uber's autonomous driving division is doing so poorly that
| they completely shut it down a few years ago.
| mikeortman wrote:
| On a side note, I don't think anything screams big company
| enterprise more than contracts being announced with a horizontal
| bar between logos
| frutiger wrote:
| > with a horizontal bar between logos
|
| I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized
| you meant a vertical bar.
| boringg wrote:
| After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got
| caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now
| they are going to go the route they should have always gone since
| they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off..
| partnership.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :)
|
| >In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of
| alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August
| 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was
| sentenced to 18 months in prison.
|
| >He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20,
| 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
| boringg wrote:
| I forgot he got pardoned. Trump presidency: if you have money
| you could use that money to literally buy a get out of jail
| card.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| It's not just Trump, democrats have done similar things in
| the past.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_contr
| overs... especially Marc Rich
| boringg wrote:
| I know - its the brashness, level of ease and amount of
| pardons by the Trump presidency that makes it different.
| Not that it isn't done by other parties.
| propogandist wrote:
| [flagged]
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Are you talking about Biden?
| propogandist wrote:
| the puppet in office that needs direction on where to
| walk and how to talk. Also, no questions allowed.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Effectively yes.
|
| But a federal pardon is for federal crimes. So if a state
| such as New York convicted you then a presidential pardon
| won't save you.
| xnx wrote:
| Amazing headline given that someone tried to previously
| bring(/steal) Waymo's autonomous driving technology to Uber:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski
| AnishLaddha wrote:
| its probably the best way to approach this. Waymo doesn't need to
| waste its time on all the complicated regulations and technology
| around just ridesharing + Uber gets a foot back in the door to
| AVs.
| borissk wrote:
| Uber had a lot of data scientists and AI engineers working on
| their autonomous driving technology. Wonder if they all left.
| deepzn wrote:
| I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it
| seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest
| fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta-
| one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it,
| which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a
| lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets
| better and is able to prove better driving than a human, which
| seems possible in certain metros at least as Waymo is doing, then
| they can do an autonomous Uber network of their Teslas.
|
| But I think this is a smart move to join forces, and will give
| the consumer healthy competition in this space.
| shmatt wrote:
| If Tesla's competitors were able to get government FSD permits
| without all that data. Maybe that data isn't really important
| to achieve the target
| threeseed wrote:
| People should underestimate Tesla:
|
| 1. Lack of LiDAR sensors. Vision is still not (and IMHO will
| never be) an adequate replacement.
|
| 2. Waymo/Cruise etc. can upgrade their taxis easily with
| capabilities over time. Tesla is restricted by their promise
| that FSD will work on previously shipped cars.
| rafaelero wrote:
| Sounds like a great deal for Uber and a meh deal for Waymo.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| I am happy to see movement from any big player on autonomous
| driving. I still believe Tesla will win this war but I am happy
| to see healthy competition in this space, happy that partnerships
| forming to make it happen.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Amazing that they can both get past the 245 million dollar
| lawsuit settlement over IP and trade secret theft.
| ghaff wrote:
| Big companies are very good at letting bygones be bygones when
| behaviors and circumstances change. Look at the changed
| relationships between any number of companies and Microsoft.
| hardware2win wrote:
| I guess Anthony didnt have to steal Waymos secrets after all
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective?
|
| * Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.
|
| * Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole
| trade secrets from Waymo.
|
| * Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the
| cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that
| Google might launch a competitor to Uber.
|
| * And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.
|
| What's going on here?
| sangnoir wrote:
| All those things are related.
|
| Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole
| Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be
| BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in
| return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving
| project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed
| a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on
| sidcool wrote:
| Pivoting based on whatever works
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of
| ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits
| from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things
| they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars
| or running their own data centers.
| boh wrote:
| One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test
| markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be
| popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a
| car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in
| practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From
| the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the
| better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may
| be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the
| double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger
| in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know
| immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and
| likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car
| becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able
| to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely
| scenario.
| bertil wrote:
| This is very true, but it sounds to me like a classic case of
| design iterations: find patterns, develop them among users,
| learn ways to introduce new users... A search engine, an email,
| chat... non of that was natural, and the first iterations where
| clunky, but you know can't imagine they'd be any simpler or
| that anyone would want anything else.
| bhelkey wrote:
| I imagine autonomous taxis will be significantly cheaper than
| driver taxis. From a quick search it looks like in general Uber
| drivers earn somewhere around $9 for a 30 minute ride [1].
|
| [1] https://blog.completepayroll.com/fares-driver-pay-and-the-
| fi....
| ghoogl wrote:
| [dead]
| ghaff wrote:
| And out of that $9, the driver has to pay for their gas (or
| electricity) and upkeep of the car. Uber apparently earns
| about $3-4 for their service. If Uber is now covering the
| costs of an expensive for now autonomous vehicle, it's not
| clear to me the fare drops at all.
| [deleted]
| zodzedzi wrote:
| Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-
| replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber
| allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch.
|
| They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the
| Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you
| requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available.
|
| This way they can also collect tons of data about how users
| respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region,
| price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as
| they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars
| if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth.
|
| On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of
| car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending
| regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then
| switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare.
|
| Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations
| of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an
| affinity for.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I think my confusion is more about Uber's incentives here.
| They're providing a ramp-up platform for Waymo as you
| described, but as soon as it hits any scale Waymo can easily
| part ways.
| fishsticks89 wrote:
| Waymo maybe could have gone with Lyft (or built their own
| app) if the deal with Uber fell through, which is probably
| why Uber accepted it. It's not "help Waymo get to market or
| not," it's "help Waymo get to market or risk somebody else
| (or Waymo themselves) passing on Waymo's value to customers
| and taking the market." Especially with the chance that Uber
| might get to play gatekeeper in the future, it's a hard deal
| to turn down.
| jxramos wrote:
| maybe even buy Uber if possible
| asadm wrote:
| Is there any value there? Seems like baggage. Waymo doesn't
| have a distribution problem.
| zodzedzi wrote:
| Uber gets to introduce driverless cars finally (an old
| promise of theirs) without the costs of owning or developing
| hardware, and use that as leverage over drivers.
|
| I don't think Uber has anything to fear from Waymo:
|
| (1) It will take years for Waymo to ramp up to "independence"
| scale. How many cars do they have now, and how many would
| they need? How long will it take them to negotiate new
| regulations with every city and state? 5 years?
|
| (2) This deal is probably not exclusive. Uber can strike a
| similar deal with Cruise as well. Uber becomes the Amazon of
| driving services, a platform gating access, with all the
| data.
|
| (3) Having a big money company behind them is good. And if
| Waymo acquires Uber in 3 years, it's not necessarily a bad
| thing for Uber.
| tamade wrote:
| Ironic given the legal saga between the two
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| [dead]
| kornhole wrote:
| If I can't bike or bus it, taxis paid with cash is still my first
| preference.
| snapcaster wrote:
| This doesn't work in my city, taxis will literally just not
| show up. I know that sounds weird but you'll call, request a
| time and place and then be at the time and place and... nothing
| tialaramex wrote:
| To be fair my only experience of Uber was a friend calls an
| Uber for us, the Uber eventually cancels, she requested
| another one, they cancelled too, and then magically there are
| no Uber drivers in my city.
|
| Conventional "radio controlled" taxi was the eventual
| solution I used to get us out of there.
| astrange wrote:
| I switched to Uber because I got stuck at the Palo Alto Ikea
| for hours once because every taxi decided to go to a Stanford
| football game instead.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm glad that works for you. But I've learned over years of
| discussing this stuff that there are so many different
| transportation situations experienced by different people that
| any universal rule is destined to become wrong.
| astrange wrote:
| Do you prefer cash because they always have broken credit card
| readers?
| spacKingChamath wrote:
| Thanks for letting us all know.
| 35997279 wrote:
| Can you get a taxi to show up? The last two times I tried to
| rebel against the rideshare duopoly was the morning before
| international flights. Trips to the airport are the only use
| case I have for rideshare. Both times I scheduled the pick up
| by calling the phone number the day before, both times the
| driver just... didn't show up. I panicked and downloaded Lyft.
|
| I know some taxi companies have apps now, but if I'm going that
| route, I don't see the point of not using Lyft.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah taxi dispatch is hit and miss. They might be in NYC
| somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _might be in NYC somewhere where it 's possible to flag
| down a cab_
|
| Unless it's shift change or you're in the wrong
| neighbourhood or have the wrong skin colour.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| Same. Every time we tried to call taxis pre-rideshare apps,
| we always got a "between 30 minutes and 2 hours" estimate if
| they ever showed up at all. Their CC machine was always
| conveniently broken unless you didn't have cash and the ATM
| was real far away. Good riddance.
| 35997279 wrote:
| The "sorry the credit card machine is broken" scam is about
| as ludicrous as the homeless people asking me for $1.
| Buddy, I haven't carried cash since the Obama
| administration. Half the time I don't even carry a credit
| card.
| kornhole wrote:
| Sadly they have been squeezed out of many locations, and I
| can not always find one. I know where I can usually get them
| and try it as my first option. It depends on where you are.
| fairity wrote:
| People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang
| out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware
| that Google has already done this.
|
| Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving
| customers already in Phoenix, AZ.
|
| Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with
| Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly
| to own the customer eventually.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| It's live in SF too, and the overall user experience is in a
| different league compared to UberX. The rides are much more
| comfortable, and quieter. I feel safer because it drives
| carefully and I'm not getting into a stranger's car. Pickup
| times and ETAs are actually accurate. It's like upgrading from
| cable to streaming, or from a Nokia 3310 to an iPhone.
|
| The only problem is the fleet size; there's still a waitlist
| and it can take 20 minutes to get a ride. But that's just
| because they're waiting on permits to scale up and start
| charging for autonomous rides in CA.
|
| It's not clear why Uber would choose to direct their customers
| to a superior product that they can't hope to beat on either
| price or UX -- except perhaps as a desperate move to squeeze
| the last dregs of revenue from the human-operated rideshare
| market before AV operators move in and clean house?
| zamnos wrote:
| Except this is Google we're talking about. Expect the Waymo One
| app to be discontinued in favor of the Uber app, so Uber can
| "own" the customer service costs.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| This doesn't really make sense to me.
|
| What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value
| proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc),
| people would be willing to download another app? Especially once
| word of mouth goes through.
|
| Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is
| on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a
| red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to
| API access issues.
| sschueller wrote:
| What people don't realize is that full autonomous does not work
| 100%. There are always people watching and taking over if
| something goes a foul.
|
| I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking
| over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous
| experience.
| tialaramex wrote:
| You can't drive the cars remotely.
|
| Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo
| driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the
| model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this
| is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard
| Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close
| to it) but they cannot drive the car.
| ra7 wrote:
| To clarify: they have remote assistance teams, but they
| cannot "take over" and control the car at all. All they can
| do is things like plotting a path to go around if the vehicle
| gets stuck. They have no ability to do safety critical
| interventions, the vehicle is capable of reaching a 'minimum
| risk condition' all on its own.
|
| Uber drivers would also need to be trained to do this and
| Uber needs to setup facilities for this. I don't believe this
| is likely.
| voz_ wrote:
| I was a founding engineer on the first uber platform for third
| party autonomous vehicles. It was just ~4 people and we got a ton
| done, growing to ~60 people and onboarding a lot of partners
| before I left. It was a really interesting time, and I wonder how
| much of that original code is still running here, or if the
| marketplace team (where the project eventually transferred) ended
| up replacing it all.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| [dead]
| EddieEngineers wrote:
| [flagged]
| mattlondon wrote:
| Shame Uber and to kill someone before just licensing the tech.
| shmatt wrote:
| The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad
|
| "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't
| leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car
| next to a hydrant, please come outside"
|
| Now it's going to be a lot more interesting
| spiderice wrote:
| I'm guessing this is a big city problem? I've never once
| experienced this
| anaganisk wrote:
| BeepbeeepBoop to you too and I'm gonna report you. 10sec later:
| You are banned from our platform for violation of our safety
| protocols.
| dicroce wrote:
| I bet Alphabet has calculated that of all of the rides a typical
| ridesharing service offers only a subset is currently serviceable
| by autonomous vehicles. A deal (or buying) Uber allows them to
| offer the service on only the rides they are confident they can
| fulfill.
| justinzollars wrote:
| Exciting! Now Uber can drive to the wrong GPS location - and
| never be able to course correct.
|
| (For whatever reason my apartment building is NP-impossible to
| deliver to)
| summerlight wrote:
| I think this makes sense for the both. Waymo's technological
| advantage won't last forever. Unless they can overtake the entire
| automaker industry in a foreseeable future (which is extremely
| challenging goal even with Google's money), it's probably better
| to put path dependencies on your potential future customers and
| make it much harder to change. Uber desperately want to reduce
| its spend on drivers, so this also aligns well with their goal.
| astrange wrote:
| Having a sole source partner with self-driving cars doesn't
| help Uber reduce spending much; Waymo isn't charging Uber cost-
| plus pricing, they're charging as much as they can get away
| with. And Waymo has more negotiating power for its car fleet
| than individual Uber drivers have for their one car.
| mduggles wrote:
| I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles.
| Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious
| approach seems to be the last real contender standing.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Cruise and Zoox are still in the game.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| And Aurora
| dkislyuk wrote:
| Uber sold off its own self-driving division back in 2020:
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving...
| so this kind of partnership has probably been looming for a
| while.
| [deleted]
| cco wrote:
| Well...my prediction was off just a bit[1]. Waymo and Uber are
| partnering, not Cruise buying Lyft.
|
| imo the thesis is the same though, I would expect to see Cruise
| and Lyft partner and/or similar sometime in the near future.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710
| xyst wrote:
| Yea let's just kick people to the streets and let the "autonomous
| drivers" take over. Any "value" spent on humans is then gobbled
| up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will
| anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1
|
| The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.
| chpatrick wrote:
| On the other hand poor people who can't afford car ownership
| would get much more mobility and access to jobs and services if
| really cheap autonomous car sharing takes off.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Low-paying jobs don't exist to let poor people have jobs. Low
| paying jobs, among a wealth of other things, keep poor people
| poor.
| snoochyboochies wrote:
| Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Don't tell HN that, it would make them upset.
| jorvi wrote:
| Shunting away low-paying (usually with low education
| requirement) jobs doesn't magically move people up the job
| totem pole. Those people need to be retrained, and during
| that training they still need to make a living, preferably
| above subsistence level.
| panarky wrote:
| Yea let's just keep workers in such a precarious state that
| they not only must sell their labor for pennies, but incredibly
| they must now supply the capital to the corporation, all to do
| a job that isn't even necessary for a human to do, is hazardous
| for the worker and the public, and generates tremendous amounts
| of pollution. Why the "optics" aren't already absolute dog shit
| is left as an exercise for the reader.
| freejazz wrote:
| This is a strawman. He's advocating that things shouldn't
| become worse than they are, you are ignoring that point and
| instead just talking about how bad things are now (without
| any regard to how worse this would make it).
| morelisp wrote:
| Now we will generate the pollution without having to pay
| anyone anything! Progress!
| dang wrote:
| Can you please make your substantive points without fulmination
| or flamewar? That's always possible, and we're trying for
| something else on this site.
|
| I know these topics are important and the feelings are
| understandable but the problem is that on an online forum, this
| kind of rhetoric becomes just-more-internet-drama-noise, which
| doesn't do anybody any good and drowns out the quieter, more
| curious conversation we're hoping for here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| So they're going to make the cars they're already running in
| Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have
| enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then
| expand into other areas without having to spend money on
| advertising/operations? What's the game plan?
| wg0 wrote:
| At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are.
| When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they
| don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing
| when they'll work and when they won't.
|
| Isn't it or something has changed lately?
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| That's not actually a blocking problem, as you have the same
| issues with human drivers today. At the end of the day, just
| like literally everything else in life, self-driving tech is a
| statistical process with corresponding costs.
|
| The bar for success here isn't perfection. Rather, it's whether
| or not self-driving vehicles are cheaper than human-driven
| vehicles. Part of the cost of a self-driving vehicle hinges on
| how often the vehicles end up in failure states necessitating
| remote human intervention and/or insurance payouts. It's fine
| if they sometimes fail, they just have to do so infrequently
| enough to be cheaper. And if Waymo is to be trusted, they
| already appear to be safer.
| sofixa wrote:
| The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can
| and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such
| option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly
| at stake if things go wrong.
|
| For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good
| weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's
| tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more
| funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it
| doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being
| there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being
| solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no
| noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the
| global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal
| practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more
| and cheaper taxis).
|
| Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that
| could solve probably the majority of transportation needs,
| congestion and pollution all in one go.
| ketzo wrote:
| I mean, Waymo is doing hundreds of regular trips throughout
| all of San Francisco. I think the technology is getting
| pretty good.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and
| this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end
| up cheaper than self owned cars)
| sofixa wrote:
| If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be
| the reconfiguration about and where would it come from?
| Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical
| impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle
| on the roads at the same time.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| This is false.
|
| It's been shown through computer modeling that road
| congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road
| segment/time unit and human driving behavior.
|
| Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your
| effective road capacity goes up significantly without
| doing anything else.
| sofixa wrote:
| Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take
| into account induced demand?
|
| And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more
| efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is
| still drastically less efficient (even the biggest
| highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper
| metro).
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| > Do you have links to those computer models?
|
| You're more than capable of doing this research yourself.
|
| > with a passenger per car the space use is still
| drastically less efficient
|
| Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might
| be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's
| metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in
| cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
|
| Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to
| eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just
| going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
| sofixa wrote:
| How would they eliminate congestion when they're so space
| inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at traffic
| flow, there's only so much _physical_ capacity on the
| roads that people want to travel on.
|
| > you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't
| going anywhere.
|
| Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong
| solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to
| time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land
| use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part
| of transportation needs.
|
| > A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car
|
| And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
|
| > "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned.
|
| Mindless? There's only so much physical space available
| in the places where people live and work. American cities
| are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up
| valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply
| because most people are forced to commute by car. Give
| them another option and many (of course not all) would
| prefer it, which would also make driving much more
| pleasant for the remaining drivers.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| > How would they eliminate congestion when they're so
| space inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at
| traffic flow, there's only so much physical capacity on
| the roads that people want to travel on.
|
| Sure, but that's not the limiting factor at all, which
| you'd understand if you bothered to do the slightest bit
| of research outside of your comfort zone.
|
| > And a lot don't and aren't given that option.
|
| That's very true, but it's not one-or-the-other. I am a
| strong supporter for intensive funding of mass transit
| systems....for those who want to use them. But that
| doesn't preclude continued usage of cars.
|
| > massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can
| be put to much better use
|
| "better" is in the eye of beholder. Car users are
| generally okay with how space is currently allocated.
|
| If you want change towards increased mass transit, I
| highly recommend not being hostile about it. There is no
| need for mass transit to be positioned as a replacement
| for car use. When you threaten peoples' way of life,
| that's how you get people actively working against you.
|
| It should come as no surprise that I'm a huge fan of
| getting around by car, but I would still happily have my
| tax money go towards bolstering mass transit systems and
| walkable/cyclable infrastructure for the portion of the
| population that wants to commute that way.
| pwpw wrote:
| Would this not lead to induced demand where more people
| decide to start traveling more frequently once they
| perceive the roads as having cleared up? An additional
| consideration would be people incapable of driving would
| now have greater access to freely take rides.
| sempron64 wrote:
| The notion of shutting down all improvements due to fear
| of induced demand is ridiculous. Let's also stop building
| sewage systems because of induced demand and all defecate
| on the ground. It will reduce water use and be good for
| the environment by enriching the soil.
| pwpw wrote:
| That's not what I meant to imply. I was simply asking if
| removing humans from the driver's seat and replacing them
| with autonomous vehicles that are hypothetically more
| convenient to take would actually increase the effective
| road capacity.
|
| I'm not so sure it would actually solve the problem. I
| think a more effective and easier solution would be to
| design cities to be more accessible without cars. That
| way, traffic would likely be reduced due to fewer humans
| in the driver's seats even if they continued commuting.
| To summarize, in order to achieve a greater road
| capacity, I think we should focus on replacing the method
| of commuting that requires taking the road altogether.
| Subbing it for another method that still uses the road
| will invoke induced demand.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| People in America mostly view cars as a status symbol and a
| part of their identity, which is why everyone buys giant
| trucks and SUVs. Why would a better taxi change that? Only
| "the poors" use taxis
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is not as true in cities, where almost no one has a
| giant truck and there are not so many SUVs.
| lchengify wrote:
| I expected this deal to happen right after Dara became CEO, and
| definitely after Uber sold off their self-driving division. This
| is why I've owned Uber stock since the IPO, despite the ongoing
| volatility.
|
| Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is
| squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics
| problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from
| the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both
| sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from
| overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's
| finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services
| (Uber).
|
| There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money
| for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a
| super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both,
| they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one
| amazing one.
|
| The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His
| past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he
| knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to
| feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies,
| if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google
| isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service,
| and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot.
| The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable.
|
| From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara,
| but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same
| style. They are _very_ effective at execution, especially when it
| comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit
| of both Google and Uber.
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