Uber Seeking To Buy Self-Driving Cars (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes from an article on Reuters: In order to save money from hiring drivers, ride-hailing service Uber has shown interest in placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Earlier on Friday, Germany's Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. [The top-flight limousine does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality.] Another source familiar with the matter said no order had been placed with Mercedes-Benz. Diamler and Uber declined to comment. Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable... then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber.

Comments

And who's cleaning those cars?

[tekrat]

Yesterday was St. Patricks. Do you have any idea how many people threw up in cabs last night?

Ok, so let's go 10 years into the future and Uber actually has self-driving cars. And their Mercedes S-class picks up two drunk students. One barfs in the car on their ride home. They stumble out and go on their way.

Then that same car gets routed to it's next pickup, a well to-do couple from a fine dining establishment. They open the door, and.......

Re:I saw this coming

[tnk1]

It is a little more difficult build a successful commercial car than to stop the use of film, however.

Yes, Kodak completely screwed up because film itself became a thing of the past with digital and they refused to give up their film business.

However, making cars automated or even autonomous doesn't make cars obsolete. And car companies do a lot of things to get and keep their cars on the road.

Partnering with a software company that will make use of their expertise and infrastructure to build the initial cars, could eventually lead to the software company wanting to cut costs by changing their "hardware" to some sort of Made in China manufacturer.

How could that happen? If the software becomes more important than the car itself, car companies are out of business. And who needs 500 hp if they are all in electric, self-driving pods anyway? All they will care about is that they can play AAA games in the auto pod while they wait for it to get them to work.

I think car companies are learning that they need to get into this business while they can still control the conversation about what cars *are*, and merely being the hardware maker is not going to let them do that all by itself. Software isn't tied to their platform unless they own the platform and the software. Note how Apple is able to make its money. Car companies want to be Apple, not Nokia.

 

this idea of robot employees is going to be

[FudRucker]

the death of humanity, if every company can replace everyone with robots & AI pretty soon nobody will have a job, humans are being obsoleted

the Luddites are right, Ted Kaczynski was right about technology, i did not agree with Ted's methods but his philosophy is spot on, high tech will eventually destroy us if were not careful