Slashdot Mirror
Uber Stops Self-Driving Car Pilot In San Francisco After The DMV Steps In (engadget.com)
93 Escort Wagon writes: San Francisco bicyclists can breathe a sigh of relief now that Uber has suspended testing of its autonomous fleet in the city. The company announced the decision after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended the registration of the vehicles involved in the testing. Uber remains "100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules," the company said. A spokesperson for Uber told Recode, "We are open to having the conversation about applying for a permit, but Uber does not have plans to do so."
The CA DMV has this page listing the requirements for testing self driving cars. They are not onerous. Speculate as you will why Uber doesn't want to comply. It could be anything from having to report incidents on a per yearly basis to not allowing commercial operation (eg not picking up actual customers) or even just a general "fuck you, we're Uber".
Application Requirements for Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The "culture" argument sounds like a smokescreen. Licensed testers need to report their problem events (to much discussion online) and from what we've seen reported -- running red lights and hooking across bike lanes -- this would reveal that their system is not currently up to quality. Frankly if it's doing those kinds of things, it needs to still be confined to test tracks.
I think Uber needs to hire new lawyers.
These cars are in fact equipped with technology that has the capability of operating without the human being there. That fact that Uber mandated a person had to sit in there and monitor it isn't the point, these vehicles have that capability, and thus do fall under this law.
That's why they just got their registrations revoked.
You think there are few barriers to entry in their industry? I disagree. There are some pretty substantial network effects in play here. There are only so many drivers and cars to go around and they are going to tend to gravitate towards the company which is most likely to have the biggest user base. Sure, users can in theory switch easily but what good is switching to a taxi service that doesn't have any drivers?
I don't use such services often, but when i do i go out of my way to use Lyft since they are at least a marginally less crappy company than Uber. A couple months ago i had to go on a series of business trips that required me to take Lyft back and forth to the airport multiple times. During those rides i noticed that most (or possibly all) of the cars had this weird white circles stuck to their windows with a small black box in the center and a "wire" coming out the side.
I mentioned them to my SO a little later, and she'd seen the same circles on the windows of a number of cars around town. We very tentatively decided that they were some kind of GPS tracker to try and get better location data, though it seemed odd that the sticker attaching the device to the window would be so large.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and we find out those are actually the new Uber logo. Which means that A: whoever is in charge of graphic design at Uber sucks and is incapable of coming up with a good logo, and B: there are drivers who have signed up for both Uber and Lyft and are switching between them on the fly, depending on who happens to have ride requests available at the moment. In fact based on (obviously biased) discussions i've had with Lyft drivers since then it's a very common practice. They prefer ride requests on the Lyft network since Lyft makes it easier to give tips but will happily pick up Uber customers as well if nothing better is available.
So getting drivers for a new service is not a real barrier to entry, the only issue is convincing customers to request rides using it.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank