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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.
The robots at Carls Jr never leave work. No need for these cars.
It only makes sense. Uber can reduce the largest cost of taxi services by eliminating the temperamental drivers. This way, they can provide a consistent service that is the same everywhere.
And further note, the taxi companies could *also* do this and get the same benefit
I can't believe people don't see what's going to happen when all the unskilled work either disappears or pays so little that you have a permanent underclass of people. Driving a cab is pretty much a last-resort job for people who need to moonlight or can't get any other job. It's unrealistic to think that all these people have the intelligence or resources to train for a higher-level job. Look at all the factory workers who can't get anything better than a home health care aide job. I'd sure hate to be thrown out after 20 years on an assembly line to clean up after dementia patients.
Don't be surprised when the "knowledge worker" jobs are gone too. I consider myself reasonably smart and a hard worker, but no job is immune to this. I also worry about a massive glut of middle-skilled people getting displaced. I work in IT services, and there are so many "customer account coordinators" and "relationship specialists" and "technical project enablers" who fit this mold. They're not deeply technical, most are ex-fraternity or sorority types from Big State University who partied their way through a business degree or maybe even an MBA, and they'll be absolutely screwed when big corporations get around to cutting them out too. The thing is this - those C students pay taxes, buy stuff with their salaries and have children. When the safety net of stable work is cut, no one is going to want to spend or procreate, and then we're really stuck.
I'm thinking it's about 50/50 that Uber will survive... however, the ride hailing idea is NEVER going to die. The desire for ride hailing companies to not pay employees, and instead invest in self driving tech is also not going anywhere. I think you put too much faith in "laws" which are in fact more like racketeering. The taxi laws are not in place to protect the taxi companies, they are in place to protect the customers and the general public. Once self driving tech is considered safer than human drivers (the bar is pretty low people...) then you will see the industry kick every last driver to the curb.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Uber also placed an order for 1,000 self driving air cars...
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.......
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Who didn't see this coming? Did people honestly think their business plan was to hire random people to drive their own cars? Right now that's the cheapest way to collect data. A year ago they went in and poached Carnegie Mellon's Robotics department (Those guys behind the Red Humvees in the DARPA autonomous vehicle project).
Taking vacation in Florida I can't wait for a self driving future over the current crop of aging drivers. Grandma doesn't need to own, maintain or anything a car. She just uses the Amazon Echo-ish device to order a car to take her to the store and home.
The thing is, maintaining a car that was driven by algorithm to be easy on the hardware is going to be much easier than maintaining a car that was driven by an emotional, fallible, sleepy, hungry, angry human. Also, fuel won't be that big of a deal since I predict most self driving cars will be electric. Finally, parking a car in a safe out-of-the-way place is a lot easier when your parking garage only needs 5' tall ceilings, cars can be placed 3" apart and you don't need to leave right of way space (assuming your parking garage has a FIFO layout, you can park them wall to wall door to door. Plus, the highways themselves could potentially provide the "parking" space if you simply mean getting it out of the way of a hurricane... the car doesn't technically have to stop to be parked... it just needs to be out of the way. Hell, with a big enough fleet, you could get half your cars out of the the city by making rides 1/2 price for anyone wanting to leave. Send half your cars 200 miles inland to a safer city (with a paying passenger of course) and once it arrives in the new city, it can work the city for a couple of days while infrastructure gets put back together, then it can head back home with the returning surge of people who also want to come back. Self driving cars FTW.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
"the source, who declined to be named"
So ... "some guy said Uber wants to buy self driving cars instead of hiring drivers".
(1) Uber does not hire drivers; Uber uses contractors
(2) Uber is not a taxi company
(3) If Uber owned the cars, self driving or not, they damn well *would* be a taxi company
(4) Uber has no interest in *being* a taxi company, because that would cause them to fall under onerous regulations that the taxi companies have lobbied to put in place over the last century, as an anticompetitive measure to keep other taxi companies from coming into existence and competing against them.
It's pretty obvious that about the stupidest thing Uber could possibly do is buy self-driving cars. If self-driving cars ever become a viable thing, then Uber will most likely *contract* with the owners of the self-driving cars, rather than owning the cars themselves, and that way they can remain a ride sharing service, rather than getting sucked into the morass that is the taxi industry.
"We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable... then disappeared,"
then don't partner with Microsoft because that is exactly what killed Nokia's handset business.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Google latest prototype already comes without wheel or pedals. Sure there will be conditions where machine is unable to perform up to standard but for majority of cases I believe we are only a few years from something available on the market. Assuming the technology is as safe or safer than humans, perhaps public transportation will be first to get automated as routes tend to be very predictable.
... force Uber to comply with the same laws and regulations as taxis, which is what Uber is.
I agree, and this announcement is significant because it signals that Uber is abandoning the claim that their drivers are just contractors. They are not only admitting that their drivers are employees but that they are also going to be providing the cars. This puts them in exactly the same status as taxis, except they're still trying to avoid the laws that cover taxi service.
and questions about liability
In this case, there would be no question as to the liability. Not only would the manufacturer be sued, so would Uber. There would be no innocent party (driver/owner) who was depending on the over-hyped hyper-reliability of autonomous vehicles.
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.
News flash exactly why would the automakers bother with selling cars to Uber. Seriously auto executives would simply say, fuck Uber, we will make our own auto taxi service direct and keep those profits, let the morons at Uber make their own cars. Uber has a tiny limited window in the transportation market and it is doomed, expect it to go public ASAP, so the insiders can sell out and watch it go boom from some tax haven.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
A young engineer by the name of Steven Sasson created the first digital camera in 1975 while working for Kodak. It was a completely functional self contained prototype, with batteries, and a cassette recorder to store the images on, and a separate system to load and display the image onto a television screen. He demonstrated what he had made to executives at Kodak, several times. The executives could not imagine why anyone would want to view their images on a television screen, and they had a monopoly on the processed film market anyway, so why would they want to compromise that. That didn't stop them from patenting the technology in 1978.
Steven Sasson took the technology a step further in 1989, creating the first SLR camera, with a 1.2 megapixel sensor and a memory card. Again, Kodak would have none of it. They wanted to sell consumables. The rest is history.
Ironically Kodak still earned billions from digital photography, thanks to royalties earned on the patent granted in 1978. That patent expired in 2007. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Life's a bitch.
I would say Kodak had THE expertise, they had the first move advantage, they tried their hardest NOT to convert to digital, they refused to compete, and they could have saved themselves every single day since 1975. Kodak fucked up. If the automakers think they can ignore this technology then they will fuck themselves up too.
Sources here, and here.
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