Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

https://blog.waymo.com/2023/05/waymo-and-uber-partner-to-bring-waymos.html

by oflordal • 3 years ago

411 372 3 years ago

blog.waymo.com

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.

DSingularity2• 3 years ago

Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.

SilverBirch2• 3 years ago

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.

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

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.

mbesto• 3 years ago

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.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Just because uber is not profitable with human drivers doesn't mean it'll be the opposite without them.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 3 years ago

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.

jonas212• 3 years ago

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?

Marazan• 3 years ago

They also can't be profitable with autonomous vehicles either.

freejazz3• 3 years ago

Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple.

says who?

trophycase• 3 years ago

They can be and very soon will be. Just look at their financials.

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

msoad• 3 years ago

Or multiple on various places. Google Rides, Google Play Hail, Youtube Taxi and so on...

toddmorey• 3 years ago

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.

htrp2• 3 years ago

Just like Google can bang out a messaging app in a weekend?

nickfromseattle2• 3 years ago

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.

ra710• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

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.

makestuff• 3 years ago

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.

bartwr• 3 years ago

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".

shagie6• 3 years ago

... 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_• 3 years ago

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.

krebby2• 3 years ago

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.

anaganisk4• 3 years ago

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.

015a• 3 years ago

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.

grumple• 3 years ago

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?

fizwhiz• 3 years ago

Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

nashashmi3• 3 years ago

The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate

londons_explore3• 3 years ago

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.

EddieEngineers• 3 years ago

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.

sidcool3• 3 years ago

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.

nunez• 3 years ago

They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider; shut down in 2022.

temporalparts• 3 years ago

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).

wmf3• 3 years ago

Y'all are talking as if the Waymo app doesn't already exist. https://waymo.com/waymo-one/

fairity3• 3 years ago

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.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

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.

nashashmi3• 3 years ago

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.

krebby2• 3 years ago

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.

deegles• 3 years ago

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).

Tepix• 3 years ago

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.

lhorie2• 3 years ago

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.

ra710• 3 years ago

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.

mnd999• 3 years ago

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.

chaostheory• 3 years ago

For me the question is who is liable in an accident

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

If it's the fault of the car, it has to be Waymo.

359972793• 3 years ago

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.

freejazz3• 3 years ago

has all the customer service infra

Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone

wmf3• 3 years ago

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.

tialaramex4• 3 years ago

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.

DSingularity2• 3 years ago

Alphabet investment synergy potential is high.

edgefield• 3 years ago

This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?

smt882• 3 years ago

This won't be in widespread use for quite a while. Places with weather still aren't great candidates for Waymo.

onlyrealcuzzo3• 3 years ago

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...

minwcnt53• 3 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot

Suggests a natural partnership with Cruise.

propogandist• 3 years ago

old enemies coming together, they must be out of options

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Literally the only way out for Uber if they aren't to be a glorified taxi app.

spratzt• 3 years ago

It’s just an attempt to distract people from realizing that’s all they are.

paganel• 3 years ago

It goes the other way, too. Waymo has always been only "a few years away" from getting to autonomous driving.

kornhole2• 3 years ago

If I can't bike or bus it, taxis paid with cash is still my first preference.

spacKingChamath• 3 years ago

Thanks for letting us all know.

359972793• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Yeah taxi dispatch is hit and miss. They might be in NYC somewhere where it's possible to flag down a cab.

ilikecakeandpie• 3 years ago

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.

kornhole2• 3 years ago

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.

snapcaster• 3 years ago

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

tialaramex4• 3 years ago

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.

astrange5• 3 years ago

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.

afavour2• 3 years ago

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.

astrange5• 3 years ago

Do you prefer cash because they always have broken credit card readers?

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Shame Uber and to kill someone before just licensing the tech.

mduggles• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Cruise and Zoox are still in the game.

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

And Aurora

dkislyuk• 3 years ago

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.

ra710• 3 years ago

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...

notatoad3• 3 years ago

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.

ra710• 3 years ago

Good point. That would also allow them to bring true Level 4 autonomous driving to passenger cars with sufficient miniaturization of their sensor stack.

jfoster5• 3 years ago

Someone has to spend it, though. Uber seem in even less of a position to be footing that bill.

ackbar03• 3 years ago

So now Uber is going to be a gazillion dollar company? Wasn't that sort of their value hypothesis?

omneity• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Do we have a proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate?

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

boringg3• 3 years ago

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.

hardware2win2• 3 years ago

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.

boringg3• 3 years ago

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.

hahaxdxd123• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

ra710• 3 years ago

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.

tialaramex4• 3 years ago

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.

shmatt2• 3 years ago

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

spiderice2• 3 years ago

I’m guessing this is a big city problem? I’ve never once experienced this

Gunnerhead2• 3 years ago

Neither have I in NYC.

anaganisk4• 3 years ago

BeepbeeepBoop to you too and I'm gonna report you. 10sec later: You are banned from our platform for violation of our safety protocols.

mdale• 3 years ago

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.

amelius2• 3 years ago

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.

belter• 3 years ago

And why would this not wake them up?

jefftk4• 3 years ago

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?

ra710• 3 years ago

Google Maps already links to Waymo in the ridehail tab (but only in Phoenix): https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1400484190064422916?s=20

morley• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Let's not forget Google maps, which already integrates other ride share platforms.

jefftk4• 3 years ago

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

metadaemon• 3 years ago

This also looks slightly bad on Uber as it had its own autonomous driving division that I suspect isn't doing well anymore.

notatoad3• 3 years ago

Uber's autonomous driving division is doing so poorly that they completely shut it down a few years ago.

rafaelero• 3 years ago

Sounds like a great deal for Uber and a meh deal for Waymo.

hardware2win2• 3 years ago

I guess Anthony didnt have to steal Waymos secrets after all

wg0• 3 years ago

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?

sofixa4• 3 years ago

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.

zeroonetwothree2• 3 years ago

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)

ketzo• 3 years ago

I mean, Waymo is doing hundreds of regular trips throughout all of San Francisco. I think the technology is getting pretty good.

mrshadowgoose4• 3 years ago

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.

zild3d2• 3 years ago

the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't

Partnering with Uber let's them offer self driving only within pretty well known constraints. Weather, locality, traffic, routes, time, etc.

cloudwalking• 3 years ago

This is actually not true at all. At Waymo we have a very good understanding of our behavior.

yalogin• 3 years ago

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.

gitfan86• 3 years ago

Yes, but this is about PR and the stock price for both companies

aardvarkr2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Given that Waymo looses $5bn a year that seems like a drop in the ocean.

tmpz22• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

the-dude• 3 years ago

What about preventing anyone else partnering with Uber?

anaganisk4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Taxi service that only runs in the middle of the night and a very narrow corridor

wefarrell• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

r00fus• 3 years ago

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.

metalspot3• 3 years ago

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.

Master_Odin• 3 years ago

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.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

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.

sidcool3• 3 years ago

I think you oversimplify what Uber has achieved in terms of tech and customer acquisition.

owaislone• 3 years ago

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.

zild3d2• 3 years ago

What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable

What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)

Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table

nerdchum2• 3 years ago

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?

aardvarkr2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

I have literally never used an Internet connection that I feel is reliable enough to consider driving a real car over it

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

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.

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

As a passenger you want the driver to have skin in the game.

plasticchris• 3 years ago

Connectivity and latency. A stutter would be very bad.

rafram• 3 years ago

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.

spiderice2• 3 years ago

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.

nerdchum2• 3 years ago

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.

anaganisk4• 3 years ago

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

AndrewDucker2• 3 years ago

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.

metalspot3• 3 years ago

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.

luxurytent• 3 years ago

What kind of use case does this solve?

carstenhag• 3 years ago

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.

metalspot3• 3 years ago

"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.

AlotOfReading3• 3 years ago

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.

bertil5• 3 years ago

As far as I understand it, Waymo uses remote driving when the situation isn’t clear for the AI.

mikeortman• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

with a horizontal bar between logos

I was very intrigued until I opened the article and realized you meant a vertical bar.

fnord77• 3 years ago

ironic since Uber tried to steal Waymo's industrial secrets

haxton• 3 years ago

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.

boh2• 3 years ago

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.

bhelkey• 3 years ago

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....

ghaff6• 3 years ago

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.

bertil5• 3 years ago

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.

boh2• 3 years ago

So if we look exclusively at only successful software products for our comparison, we'll see success for a completely different product category with high capital costs--got it.

AndrewDucker2• 3 years ago

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?

xnx• 3 years ago

Amazing headline given that someone tried to previously bring(/steal) Waymo's autonomous driving technology to Uber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

hnburnsy• 3 years ago

Amazing that they can both get past the 245 million dollar lawsuit settlement over IP and trade secret theft.

ghaff6• 3 years ago

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.

xyst• 3 years ago

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.

eptcyka• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Unemployed is the lowest paying job possible.

jorvi• 3 years ago

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.

panarky3• 3 years ago

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.

morelisp• 3 years ago

Now we will generate the pollution without having to pay anyone anything! Progress!

freejazz3• 3 years ago

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).

chpatrick• 3 years ago

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.

dang• 3 years ago

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

dicroce• 3 years ago

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.

lopkeny12ko• 3 years ago

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?

sidcool3• 3 years ago

Pivoting based on whatever works

VirusNewbie• 3 years ago

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.

sangnoir• 3 years ago

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

deepzn3• 3 years ago

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.

shmatt2• 3 years ago

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

deepzn3• 3 years ago

if we're talking about overall effectiveness, then I think it is. Maybe passing a minimum threshold and having a safety effective of say 95% vs 99% or something. It's obviously going to be a very high percentage threshold that needs to be crossed to allow the public to use it.

So, right now it's like a trial experiment with FSD, but I definitely feel like a data advantage would play out into a higher safety rating before it's in GA. Maybe eventually others will catch up, that could be quicker than longer, but it's a valid potential advantage for Tesla.

threeseed4• 3 years ago

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.

Animats• 3 years ago

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.

elromulous• 3 years ago

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.

bertil5• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?

hanniabu• 3 years ago

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"

justinzollars• 3 years ago

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)

fairity3• 3 years ago

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.

zamnos3• 3 years ago

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.

SheinhardtWigCo• 3 years ago

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?

bertil5• 3 years ago

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.

AnishLaddha• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Uber had a lot of data scientists and AI engineers working on their autonomous driving technology. Wonder if they all left.

zodzedzi2• 3 years ago

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.

kevinventullo2• 3 years ago

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.

jxramos2• 3 years ago

maybe even buy Uber if possible

zodzedzi2• 3 years ago

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.

fishsticks89• 3 years ago

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.

summerlight• 3 years ago

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.

astrange5• 3 years ago

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.

lchengify• 3 years ago

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.

honeybadger1• 3 years ago

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.

voz_• 3 years ago

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.

tamade• 3 years ago

Ironic given the legal saga between the two

cco• 3 years ago

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

realjohng• 3 years ago

Lol remember when Uber stole Wayne code? Now they’re buds. True settlement

KETpXDDzR• 3 years ago

I'm delighted to read these news. Uber finally found someone to partner with/get bought by. They offered their complete self-driving department for sale more than two years ago (I was part of a group to assess the deal with a possible buyer). I think Waymo also realized that Uber's self-driving devision is no competition to the big players. So I guess Waymo is mainly interested in their user base.

Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

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