Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact

https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-investing-500-million-in-uber-in-driverless-car-pact-1535393774

by smaili • 8 years ago

310 208 8 years ago

wsj.com

stephengillie• 8 years ago

Isn't Uber pivoting from the self driving car market, to the bikesharing market?[0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849364

sebleon2• 8 years ago

They're not doing a full pivot - rather they're shifting from "car-ride-hailing," to the all-encompassing "mobility" and diversifying their revenue across a number of transportation means.

taurath2• 8 years ago

It doesn't matter if you're not profitable, don't have the technology, or have huge risks - if people with money believe you, you can make the future you want (and get extraordinarily rich in the process). Seems to be the theme of the tech industry lately. At least the end "goal" is a bit more appealing than the Magic Leap.

newfocogi4• 8 years ago

I must be in the minority here, but the AR future is really compelling to me. The amount of money that Magic Leap was able to raise without a real product is astounding. But I do see wearable computing as the future. Of course we all hope it doesn't become a steady stream of marketing directly into our retinas, but I joined tech because I wanted to help build the future, not just watch it happen.

taurath2• 8 years ago

If anything the amount of money they were able to raise and resources they were able to throw at the problem proves that its at minimum 10 years away, barring some ground-shaking advances in displays and sensors. With billions of dollars they ended up with a clip-on computer, a 50 degree FOV "lens", no compelling demo and the same judder the hololens had. It seems much closer to being at the VirualBoy stage than the Oculus/Vive.

ORioN632• 8 years ago

I am actually stunned how there was no displacement of the current input devices.

We fitted keyboard onto our screens, AR devices normally come with a joystick or something.

I have high hopes for similar projects to Tap Keyboard or the Myo armband, that continue to evolve on something that IMO has large implications on how we can evolve as a society the same way smartphones did. A wearable input device that was _good_ (defined by not being cumbersome, probably even fashionable and functional, as should match current input) would be for me the extra step .

ghaff4• 8 years ago

I actually can imagine a future AR being a lot more compelling than VR. But it would take a lot of significant advances both from a hardware and software/data perspective to be useful. There's also a pretty significant question of whether it caan overcome the glasshole factor for mainstream use.

smhost• 8 years ago

i hope you will actively help to ensure that the future that is built is the one you want to be built, instead of just hoping that everything will magically work out. A lot of old-school nerds (including yours truly) had the same ideological blind spot as your comment, and look where that's gotten us. a god damned cyberpunk dystopia.

maxxxxx2• 8 years ago

Yeah, it seems more and more that the process is to get as much money as you can and then figure out how to use it.

nradov2• 8 years ago

It's only logical that management raises money when money is cheap. That way the company has extra breathing room to survive and pivot if necessary. And if it turns out they don't need the cash, they can always just return it to investors.

naveen992• 8 years ago

True. In fact rich people even give money to non-profits.

Uber is a thing that should exist. Profitable or not.

qeternity4• 8 years ago

I'm not saying that Kalanick et all aren't going to be very well off in any event, but all this cash they raise at eye popping valuations is going to have liquidation preference...and that's scary for a company with serious cash flow issues like Uber.

naveen992• 8 years ago

people with lower liquidity preference (from earlier rounds or common share holders) usually have some opportunities to exit in secondary markets at each of these funding events.

rasz2• 8 years ago

Do you have any historical examples to back up that assertion?

newfocogi4• 8 years ago

I am surprised Toyota would want to work with Uber at this point - it seems Uber's ills are piling up faster than their successes. Could this be a desperation play where if Toyota doesn't partner up with somebody, they won't have a part in a driverless future that looks like it will belong to Waymo and friends?

sebleon2• 8 years ago

What ills do you speak of? The negative media narrative is not a full reflection of reality, rather what will attract the most eyeballs to monetize in this current media cycle.

MBCook2• 8 years ago

Uber’s history outside of self-driving cars is hardly clean either.

My only guess would be Toyota is hoping that when Uber goes full self-driving they would use Toyota vehicles to do it.

smt883• 8 years ago

Their reckless (compared to Waymo) behavior with self-driving car testing is certainly more than negative press. It seems to reflect their entire culture.

JamesBarney• 8 years ago

Everything that came out after that last fatality points to Uber trailing everyone else in terms of functionality and sacrificing safety to appear further along.

henryfjordan• 8 years ago

Uber's self driving cars killed a woman...

schaefer• 8 years ago

Link to the report from Uber's fatal accident: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

To summarize what happened - Uber's autopilot makes decisions about when emergency braking is necessary. But the software was braking so often on public roads that overall it's driving was erratic.

So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases.

This essentially turned the car into a missile on our public roads.

at the time of the accident, the autopilot detected the pedestrian. Calculated an imminent collision, and initiated emergency braking. Instead of actually breaking, the message to break simply went to the logs.

Combine that with a safety driver that was looking down at the console and not up at the road - and the fatality was the result.

It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads.

How many times have you seen footage of a crash test dummy safely landing in an air bag? I want to see footage of crash test dummies getting pushed out in front of autopilot cars - and hopefully, never getting run down.

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

I wish they had invested 500 million into buying a self-driving startup or something instead. Or just opening up a new AI branch for Toyota / Lexus. It's not like people en masse are driving around in self driving cars while asleep at the wheel yet so the race for self-driving is still a turtle race. They have the resources imho to do great things, maybe they're afraid after the software issues where cars would keep accelerating, but that shouldn't stop them from getting in on the game.

Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.

newfocogi4• 8 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future.

It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections.

Does anyone have a name for this type of advantage, or know of examples in other areas?

tashoecraft• 8 years ago

You do know that there were no software issues that would keep cars accelerating, it was purely user error that got blown out of proportion?

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

clu15902• 8 years ago

They already have Toyota Research Institute, which they've invested 1 billion and got the Gill Pratt to head so I not sure why they want to team up with Uber now.

skipwalker• 8 years ago

The evidence that there actually were any software issues related to unintended acceleration is pretty tenuous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle...

"Driver error or pedal misapplication was found responsible for most of the incidents.[28] The report ended stating, "Our conclusion is Toyota's problems were mechanical, not electrical." This included sticking accelerator pedals, and pedals caught under floor mats."

And Malcolm Gladwell's podcast about the subject, http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

qeternity4• 8 years ago

The skills necessary to "win" driverless cars (i.e. first/second place) are scarce as is, and ridiculously competitive. There will not be a long tail of driverless car companies, so it makes more sense to invest in an existing one that already has momentum, than to take up the challenge from scratch yourself.

karthikb2• 8 years ago

A huge fraction of cars driven by Uber drivers are made by Toyota. More often than not, you'll get picked up by a Prius, Corolla, or Camry. So to some extent, this is about maintaining market share.

MBCook2• 8 years ago

Is it really larger than expected? Or could it simply be a reflection of how popular Toyota cars are in general?

rightbyte• 8 years ago

My guess is that Volvo ditched them after they messed up Volvo's emergency-brake for some homebrew VC version.

mvpu• 8 years ago

I think this isn't just about self-driving tech (I believe Toyota already partnered with Waymo on that given the old Google self driving cars were Lexus RX and Prius) - but this is also about car sharing. I think car sharing might be a bigger and sooner threat to car manufacturers than self driving cars. By partnering with Uber Toyota gets to hedge.

erikpukinskis4• 8 years ago

Notably, Toyota Prius is the sole vehicle for Gig.

drenvuk• 8 years ago

I don't know if this is a fair point of view but from an outsider's perspective it seems like any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money. What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? Anyone have a list of real contenders free of the marketing bs?

ForHackernews2• 8 years ago

GM Cruise is a strong contender.

mi_lk• 8 years ago

Curious, what makes you claim that?

sounds_ironic• 8 years ago

No, I was almost t-boned by one coincidentally by their corporate office...Top speed 25 mph and they drive clueless while autonomous.

ebikelaw• 8 years ago

There's still plenty of execution risk ahead for Waymo and a narrow opportunity for a very focused competitor to catch up to their technology. I don't think Uber is that competitor and I don't think that competitor exists, but it's possible. Cruise would be the obvious candidate and they have a big war chest from Softbank.

mantas2• 8 years ago

Audi is already selling autonomous-on-autobahns A8 so I guess VW is a strong contender too.

newfocogi4• 8 years ago

Tesla is selling autonomous-but-don't-quote-us but that doesn't qualify them as a strong contender. The autobahn system isn't large enough to be difficult to map out, and highway driving is the easy case.

nradov2• 8 years ago

Does the Audi system work safely in severe weather?

gilbetron• 8 years ago

Argo AI seems to be the place where any good researcher/engineer not in Waymo has gone to.

qeternity4• 8 years ago

The upside to solving driverless is so huge that companies feel they can't miss out on it. It's still very early in the game. Uber is a great example, everyone assumed with all their VC money that they were serious contenders to Waymo...then the crash happened and we get a (literal) glimpse under the hood and realize things aint so pretty. These operations are opaque by necessity and from an investor perspective, it's not a guarantee that Waymo won't have their own setback which becomes Uber's saving grace (however unlikely that seems at the moment).

pwaai4• 8 years ago

I doubt it. It seems like a top down strategy outside of Waymo. Operate in silence training on vast amounts of data while your competitors are splashing in VC money thinking if they throw money at it they can solve it.

dzdt4• 8 years ago

Consider the smartphone revolution. Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone. The Android team was already up and working in that area and were able to pivot quickly to mimic the iphone. Both Apple and Android became huge businesses.

Being prepared as a second mover once a trailblazer demonstrates a good path can be good business. It even has some advantages over trying to lead and possibly wasting lots of R&D money on dead ends.

patrickaljord• 8 years ago

Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone

The first iPhone was revolutionary and ahead of its time, but copying a user experience, a grid of square icons, fancy animations and double touch is a lot easier than copying Waymo. You can't just copy Waymo by looking at it like you could by looking at an iPhone. Waymo's code is all in a black box of compiled code and how it works really is anyone's guess besides neural network and all the captors and millions of hours of simulations and drives etc.

smt883• 8 years ago

Several important differences between self-driving and smartphones:

1. Driving automation is orders of magnitude more expensive

2. Improperly-tested vehicles are much more likely to have fatal consequences, meaning a 90% perfect smartphone is OK, but 90% perfect driving software would kill people

3. It's much, much easier to clone an iPhone than Waymo hardware + software

dopamean• 8 years ago

I dont think anyone is misunderstanding how two or more players can make it wrt developing new tech. I think the concern is about what that process looks like when the tech being developed can kill people if it goes wrong.

puranjay2• 8 years ago

Isn't trust a massive problem? If I'm getting into a car without a driver, I have to trust that the system is smart enough to get me to my destination safely.

The problem with Uber is that they already operate on a trust deficit. They've had a long history of ignoring local rules and had a string of high-profile exits - including the CEOs - after workplace harassment issues.

That's not exactly a company I want to trust with my life.

Waymo, otoh, is operated by a company known for its "braininess". Self-driving is a computationally challenging problem. I trust Google to solve it much more than Uber.

There's also the fact that Waymo doesn't have to be a profit center for Google at all. They can afford to incur losses for years until they get the technology perfect.

For Uber, self-driving cars HAVE to be a profit center. If the company's existence depends on it, can I trust them to not cut corners?

kerng• 8 years ago

> What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway?

What chances does a regular human driver have in killing someone else while they cross the street? Its pretty high, given the number of casualties per day. All the people on their phones while driving and being otherwise distracted it's an enormous risk... Chances will never be 0, but autonomous cars have the potential to be safer then majority of human drivers.

noobermin• 8 years ago

have the potential

At least you're honest. Low number statistics so far but AV's have been worse per car per year compared to human drivers. And you certainly can't trust Uber's engineering department given they literally raised the detection threshold because their computer vision sucked.

adrianN2• 8 years ago

Way too many people die in traffic, but per mile an unimpaired human is actually not that dangerous. In the US there are about seven deaths per billion(!) miles and that includes drunk drivers. It's not trivial to beat human drivers.

wpietri• 8 years ago

Purely from a financial perspective, I think Uber can't possibly admit that. They are gunning for an IPO at a valuation where they are most definitely selling the dream. That dream has to include autonomous vehicles.

I think it's not nearly as exciting a dream if they're just buying the tech like everybody else. Aside from a strong brand and a lot of customer relationships, Uber doesn't have much in the way of assets. Google's got a stronger brand [1] and a lot more customer relationships, as do many others. If Uber is just one of many companies slapping labels on other people's tech, I'm not sure what makes it worth $75-100bn.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank

vertline3• 8 years ago

Toyota plays closer to their vests, so I'm not sure we even know enough about what they have.

I suppose I should clarify since I was downvoted, Forbes wrote a story "what Ubers crash tells us about Japan's silent strategy for driverless cars"

"it illustrates a very important distinction between how U.S. and Japanese companies are approaching the research and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

Japanese firms have maintained a much lower profile in autonomous vehicles than their American counterparts, and many outside the industry assume this lack of publicity is a sign of lagging technology. Speaking with several industry leaders, however, makes it clear that this is not the case.

"While American firms have been grabbing the headlines, Japanese firms have been making steady progress behind the scenes. The fact that they have been less anxious to promote that progress outside of Japan is more a reflection of go-to-market strategy than the state of the underlying technology.""

pwaai4• 8 years ago

This is an interesting perspective but knowing Japanese culture, it's more to do with risk aversion and losing face by announcing something and then having it blow up in public. Very different environment.

In the US you can commit white collar crimes and still have people invest and give you the benefit of the doubt. There's no sense of shame rather glee and glorification, the i-get-money-fuck-you attitude.

In Japan, people will commit suicide for way less or even perceived wrong because there is a great deal of shame imposed on the individual for fucking up. Tough to innovate when failure is so taboo, people are willing to remove themselves from earth.

drawkbox• 8 years ago

any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money

Waymo/Google is winning and has self-driving vehicles all over Chandler, Tempe and Gilbert Arizona at any given time.

For the most part it is going well, sometimes they act too safe but that isn't a bad idea for now, there have been a few complaints of Waymos going when fire engines or safety vehicles are on the road not slowing and in normal traffic slowing more than needed, or cars partially in a lane and slowing or stopping for them too much. I think the more grandma driving any self-driving is right now is good.

The biggest win of Waymo which is a competitive advantage and huge bonus is that by being Google/Alphabet, they also have access to tons of data and the best maps / map data i.e. speed limits, traffic, routes, dark/light changes to behavior, weather detection, data outside the CV/LIDAR that may be hugely beneficial. Other companies are going to have to pay for that or use Google, which they will collect immensely on in addition to use for free.

Think of that Tesla crash where other Teslas commonly had the same issue by drifting towards the ramp, Waymo/Google could correct that quicker it seems with their access. They need to be autonomous but also a neural network that can learn from other vehicles. They also need to tie into other systems like weather, day/night, emergency vehicles, traffic, routes etc etc. That Uber crash in Tempe, with day/night data and known pedestrian trails nearby + across the road, it may have been more cautious through that area and Waymo has that data with Google. Waymo is leading in multiple ways not just the self-driving part.

pwaai4• 8 years ago

This. Google's economic moat is their data. Proprietary data they've accumulated for the past two decades for various products and strategies. We should see a serious google competitor but we don't. Bing tried it and failed because they just cannot match Google's superior data.

So whoever is trying to emulate Tesla is in for a nasty surprise, Tesla is automation 2.89. The last miles is the hardest and requires an ever increasing amount of data. while safer than humans driving Tesla's autopilot failures have done far more damage to the brand than accounted in the stock price.

Google/Alphabet/Waymo figured out their end game was to build the data that their competitors will not be able to emulate easily or costly.

So far Uber is spinning its wheels and Tesla has lost focus of the killer feature of their car, coming dead last in terms of automation ranking when compared to other major luxury brand manufacturers. But this is HN, and they love Don Papi Musk

cornellwright• 8 years ago

I don't see how the market is winner take all and it's certainly big enough for more than one player. Everyone who comes after whoever's first to market will have the advantage of a clear regulatory pathway and an example of what works, simplifying many (though clearly not all) decisions.

Someone2• 8 years ago

A Chinese competitor doesn’t even have to be truly competitive with Waymo to stand a chance.

Also, I don’t think Waymo is guaranteed to be the first to reach fully autonomous driving. What I know of their approach (which is fairly little, but wat does anybody outside Waymo know for sure there?), to me, seems they are building not cars that are autonomous, but networked. That has advantages (if one car notices a bump in the road, one riding the same road 10 minutes later can slow down), but also has the disadvantages that their software may depend too much on always having that network knowledge available. That may leave space for a competitor to grow in regions where roads barely exist.

Waymo also spends a lot on things that, in a few years, autonomous cars may not need not do at all.

For example, countries that want to speed up adoption of autonomous cars may make detecting traffic signs and traffic lights easier (e.g. by superimposing a high-frequency signal on LED traffic lights or by giving cars read access to a city’s traffic light infrastructure), make la e detection easier (e.g. by embedding cat eyes in the center of lanes) or require cars to better signal their intentions. If that happens, a lot of the work Waymo does on detecting all kinds of ‘static’ infrastructure becomes worth less.

nopinsight• 8 years ago

How long would changing infrastructure and cars to better support self-driving take? Many cars will continue to be on the road for many years. What are the costs of adapting all of them?

IF that really happens, it would take at least a decade and Waymo's lead from network effects, more mature tech, more self-driving data, etc would be enormous by then.

BurningFrog• 8 years ago

Waymo is killing it in the press releases, but what's to say other players aren't doing just as well while not telling the world all about it?

Also, is this really going to be just one "Self Driving Vehicle Systems" market? I can imagine Waymo being great in one segment, and other companies doing well in others.

samstave• 8 years ago

how can one get a ride in a waymo car, right now, with an app that is installed on millions of phones?

I just see the inertia uber has with their install base will carry some considerable weight.

but seriously, how can i get a ride in a waymo so i can experience it?

sytelus• 8 years ago

Go to Phoenix, AZ and apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/

Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet the Teen Who Rides One Every Day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

ajross• 8 years ago

a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway?

There are no such systems, even organic ones. I despair that the conventional wisdom here among the "hacker" intelligencia has pushed the burden so far. Autonomous vehicles are worth it if they are safeER than human drivers, not 100% free of accidents.

And it's noisy data anyway. Waymo is notable for the fact that their measured fatal accident rate is still zero, where the others are hovering in the small integers. That's not the same thing as a true safety advantage (though I'll buy that they're way ahead technologically).

martinshen• 8 years ago

Waymo will be first to market and will not likely sell their self-driving software to other would-be rideshare players (or their suppliers) for several years. All other OEMs, Tier 1s and startups in this space will be quick to follow with a comparable self-driving system by 2021. With all the new regulatory hurdles in mobility (as seen with scooter mania), I doubt that Waymo will just be able to throw money to scale fast enough to push out future competitors.

Once those self-driving systems hit around ~99.99% reliability, they will be indistinguishable from each other. Therefore, self-driving systems will be commoditized and sold to any vehicle manufacturer. Generally speaking, existing Tier 1/2 suppliers already plan to do this.

From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides.

Today, it doesn't make sense to build core self-driving technology unless you have a strong resume to do so. Just wait 4-5 years and you'll be able to buy it off the rack (more or less). I am very happy that Waymo isn't the only one building because otherwise we wouldn't have strong enough market forces to drive down the cost of mobility.

Disclaimer: Founder of an AV related startup.

malandrew• 8 years ago

The longer AVs take to penetrate the market, the greater the advantage of incumbent TNCs.

lsc2• 8 years ago

From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides.

If you are willing to lose money like uber was, why wouldn't you be able to launch a competitor with drivers? I bet drivers would download a new app to make more money even faster than passengers would download such an app to save money.

I mean, if anything, a system where you own (or lease in an inflexible way) the cars makes your up-front costs higher; I think new driver incentives right now are on the order of a few grand; a lot less than the cost of a new car with top-end tech. I mean, double the signup bonuses of uber, and you'll quickly get drivers to open your app, and you've still spent a lot less up-front.

Of course, your long-term profitability looks a lot better if you can just own the cars, but make no mistake about it; uber's moat is that you have to lose money at first to build up a critical mass of vehicles (and that uber is willing to continue to operate at a loss)

Directly owning/leasing the vehicles rather than paying owner-operators per mile might be cheaper long term, but it doesn't lower the up-front cost of getting a critical mass of vehicles on the road.

samirparikh• 8 years ago

I wonder what this means for TRI/TRI-AD which currently work on AV development for Toyota.

jpm_sd• 8 years ago

That is a really good question. An outside investment on this scale seems kind of like a vote of no-confidence for the internal efforts.

ingenieroariel• 8 years ago

From what I have heard Toyota’s approach is to prefer taking over the driver in difficult situations instead of the other way around. Uber could benefit a lot from this.

evadne• 8 years ago

This reminds me of the SEC filing for Toyota which I had to pull up earlier out of curiosity

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1094517/000119312518...

As filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 25, 2018
Toyota and Uber Technologies, Inc. have entered into a memorandum of understanding to explore collaboration with respect to ridesharing. As part of the partnership, the companies created new leasing options in which car purchasers can lease vehicles with connected terminals from Toyota Financial Services and cover their payments through earnings generated as Uber drivers

So not their first rodeo, Toyota sells cars after all

Also Toyota Connected is making quite a big splash in Europe at the moment with a London office having been established March 2018 to soak up local talent.

ghaff4• 8 years ago

Toyota also has a joint research center with MIT CSAIL. https://toyota.csail.mit.edu/

rhacker• 8 years ago

My read: Once Waymo has released re-usable tech, Toyota will install that on its cars, and Uber will facilitate the dispatch - And that Uber won't do this with another car vendor for X years (in the deal)

PunchTornado2• 8 years ago

Seems like a bad deal to me.

Uber looks like it is behind it's competitors.

Uber is a company that I just hate. It doesn't have any ethics whatsoever.

PunchTornado2• 8 years ago

Anyone know how VW is doing in self-driving cars? This move by Toyota seems a little desperate, so I'm wondering what the other giant is doing...

selimthegrim• 8 years ago

What happened to Uber wanting to focus equally on bikeshare going forward?

clu15902• 8 years ago

This makes no sense to me. They already have TRI which has billions in funding and poached the former head of the DARPA challenge. Why do they need Uber?

debt• 8 years ago

They want to win.

cityzen• 8 years ago

Jam Pad.

neonate• 8 years ago

http://archive.is/RQtYT

true_tuna• 8 years ago

I have no idea what this article says.

ectospheno• 8 years ago

Toyota likes their best selling car in America moniker. This is why they sell so many cars to rental car agencies. Honda and others don't aggressively pursue this and have lower "sales" as a result.

So I don't find this "investment" very surprising at all.

oculusthrift• 8 years ago

don’t get what you’re getting at. are sales to rental car agencies not real sales? if so why not? i don’t know much about it so curious.

smolder3• 8 years ago

I think he's implying they just take a hit to their profitability in some cases to maintain their high market share.

dalbasal• 8 years ago

It seems reasonable enough. If driverless happens, Uber would be rushing to acquire a very large number of cars. Regardless of autonomousness, there are paths that Uber could take which would make them a huge consumer and operator of cars.

It's a hard to predict future. There is at least some possibility that driverless will eat a market fast, and the market changes for car makers. They need a hedge.

Overall though... how much money is going in to autonomous r&d? It's also possible that driverless doesn't get to the making money part for a long time. Is the funding sustainable?

smolder3• 8 years ago

I think "autonomy" is the right word where you said "autonomousness"

az123zaz• 8 years ago

Many of the posts here assume Toyota is investing in Uber to get access Uber's self-driving tech.

This is a Toyota self-driving vehicle in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Qey8ksE18

I think Uber self-driving initiative got serious around 2015.

nissimk• 8 years ago

I thought the investment was to open a channel for selling more Toyotas. They're going to offer preferential lease deals that can be paid through Uber earnings.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/05/24/toyota-inv...

thrwjddi8932• 8 years ago

This is quite strange. Toyota has a research center in SC and Boston (TRI) and has invested about 100M in PFN.

This seems to indicate the complete lack of progress on this front. This'd not be surprising. I think Renault Nissan is the only one with a working system.

nojvek• 8 years ago

Right now there is too much money chasing too few startups. Some startups literally operate with a "we have a bottomless pit of money and it doesn't matter if we never show a dollar of profit, we just need to keep on raising more from investors who think they'll miss the train".

Uber and Cruise kind of feel like that. I'm sure Waymo has a bottomless pit from Google too. I guess that's the reality of moonshot projects.

A lot of them are going to burn billions of dollars throwing lavish office parties and off sites, but one of them will be huge. That's essentially what SoftBank's 100B vision fund is kind of doing.

A lot of investors operate with a "fear of missing out" syndrome and that's probably why Uber gets more funding than 99% of all US startups combined.

superkuh• 8 years ago

Driving a vehicle is the most dangerous thing most people do regularly. Not just to themselves but in terms of potential of hurting or killing others.

Software is the most unreliable thing that most people use regularly.

Combinging the two is kind of crazy. Especially since no one has even begun to demonstrate a self driving car that can handle inclimate weather (like, say, the 5 months of snow covered pavement for a large part of the USA).

kart232• 8 years ago

I think people underrate human drivers. When you take into account the massive amount of miles driven each day, the amount of crashes isnt that bad, and currently self driving cars have much more fatalities per mile than humans.

trytophan• 8 years ago

The leading cause of transportation deaths are, by a long mile, automobiles. Automobile fatalities also have the highest rate of people killed per miles traveled. I think human driving ability is overrated, but I agree with you that self driving cars aren't doing too great either

beerlord• 8 years ago

Where are Toyota's electric cars?

uptownfunk• 8 years ago

I think Tesla is highly underrated in this space. All Tesla cars now have sonar and radar capability built in, in addition to the extensive camera system.

As someone who frequently commutes in Teslas, I would say Tesla is closest to actually deploying something close to self-driving to the general population out of all the current self-driving competitors. Furthermore, I imagine they're collecting data on all the Tesla cars currently being driven.

I have seen the model updates substantially improve the auto-pilot capabilities with every update. And as someone who works with lots of quantitative data on a daily basis, I think there is a fundamental difference between training on billions of miles of simulated data vs. actual data. Simulated data may reduce overfitting, but there is still scope to overfit compared to raw data gathered from the field. Simply put, you won't generalize as well to data that's been simulated vs. field-generated data.

michaelt3• 8 years ago

You can train on a hundred billion miles of real world data - you'll still be wasting your time if you need LIDAR and you don't have it.

lgbr• 8 years ago

you'll still be wasting your time if you need LIDAR

This is not for certain. I'm quoting Tesla's CEO, but it's suggested that LIDAR leads to optimizing for local minima. It means that LIDAR can get you 90% of the way there, but there's still going to be a lot of situations where LIDAR might not be capable.

The problem that needs to be solved is vision. Humans only have vision, and they can drive with it. Radar and LIDAR are nice-to-haves, but until you solve vision, you haven't solved self driving.

kart232• 8 years ago

No they aren't. Teslas only self drive on the highway, which is great, but wouldn't last a minute in a more urban scenario with crosswalks, lights, tight merges, etc. And radar is not good for these scenarios either, because of the huge amount of false positives with the system.

halhod• 8 years ago

There are reasons to think that Toyota's automated driving strategy is a good one. Wrote about it here https://www.economist.com/business/2018/05/19/toyota-takes-a.... I'd assume that the Uber partnership is about mobility and ridesharing. One of Toyota's main focuses with autonomy is on making the driving safer and more comfortable. Gil Pratt talks explicitly about improving the experience for ride-hailing drivers

Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact

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