“Uber passengers were paying only 41% of the actual cost of their trips; Uber was using these massive subsidies to undercut the fares and provide more capacity than the competitors who had to cover 100% of their costs out of passenger fares.”
For the big rigs shipping and receiving, I’m betting you’ll also see increased automation at the loading docks.
I’ll be interested to see how Amazon works out security on the local wheeled drone deliveries. Probably separate compartments locked with a code.
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That would work for home deliveries when people are home. I was actually thinking of wholesalers - my dad is one, sells to restaurants. That seems to me particularly hard to automate.
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I don’t really know what Uber’s long term plans are, but I don’t see how it could compete long term with GM if GM also figured it wanted to do self driving ride share cars…unless Uber decided it should manufacture cars, or at least get closer to manufacturing.
It could maybe compliment, if they convinced GM to do a join venture or something, but to do that they have to convince GM that GM needs Uber at least as much as Uber needs GM…and I don’t see that happening.
So long term Uber needs to build cars, or count on the existing car builders somehow failing to share rides… (or they pivot and sell self driving car software to GM and ride share software and they bow out on taking the huge chunk of profit they appear to actually be aiming at!)
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I wonder though, if there will be unforeseen negative consequences that make such automation baby-sitters worse than just paying a decent driver. Wouldn’t the task of attending to the automated truck be so painfully boring that people will just stop paying attention? Wouldn’t they be just as likely to fall asleep? If an alarm goes off, could the attendant react in time? It might be that the automation would avoid 95% of problems, but if the co-pilot is groggy or asleep for the other 5%, they aren’t really helping… And with their lack of driving they might become so unskilled as to be unhelpful in difficult situations anyway.
I just heard about how airplane auto-pilot can land in the majority of circumstances, but they choose not to use it because then pilots would become unskilled and incapable of landing in the complex situations that the auto-pilot can’t handle (It’s in this book).
Or how they are starting to remove automated check-outs in some supermarkets because it just leads to higher theft… It could be that self-driving tech that only gets to 95% wont be all it’s cracked up to be.
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Yeah, this is why “not-entirely-autonomous” vehicles are really a non-starter for a lot of people. This is already a recognized problem with aircraft - when, in an emergency, the autopilot system switches over to manual control, pilots are apparently highly likely to do something dumb that then causes a crash.
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Sounds like a scheme the frat boys at Uber would dream up.
I’ve been reading stories about how various startups want to put autonomous delivery vehicles on sidewalks, which as a frequent pedestrian I have to say no way! If you can’t make your vehicle use the ample space provided for vehicles , too bad – you don’t get to steal sidewalks away. When the Segway came out I remember cities making a point of outlawing them on sidewalks – hopefully the same will happen with autonomous delivery vehicles.
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“Or just like other inventions that flopped. Jet packs etc.”
You take that back.
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Right. I meant to say truly comfortable spike heels.
Where’s your super science now?
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I’d like to like this more than once. Let’s get long haul trucking routes (Alaska, Canada, Australia) driverless first. Anyone borrowing money to get a fleet of driverless cabs in place is just slightly less stupid than the people doing the lending.
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I just had a double IPA, so I could talk at lengths about my next super science project, but it is very off topic 
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I guess you’d better have a third so you can spill the beans.
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Solved problem: you just need to engineer your society in order to ensure that the person expected to wear the uncomfortable shoes isn’t you.
/s
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Outback Australian roads feature constant roadkill obstacles, up to and including camels and buffalo. Out in the centre, there’s a corpse on the road every couple of minutes.
And that’s just on the bitumen; once you’re off into the bulldust, the driving gets a lot trickier.
Given that one of Uber’s main disadvantages(aside from the self-inflicted ones) is that what they do has relatively low barriers to entry(particularly if you, purely hypothetically, already have a fairly well regarded mapping apparatus, real-time traffic data aggregation, your apps preinstalled on a commanding majority of smartphones, etc.) I would be inclined to suspect that Google would be OK with Uber bleeding out and being replaced by Google Apps Ride or Waze Ways or something of the sort.
Yes, they have a stake in Uber; but since Uber’s business model only works if the winner takes all, and they win, and Team Travis appears to be largely ungovernable even by the VCs whose cash he is burning for warmth, they aren’t the sort of investment you make in the hope of future synergies, a good future relationship, or similar warm and fuzzy stuff.
If they also have good reason to believe that they are being straightforwardly industrial-espionaged; it’s hard to imagine how Uber could make themselves valuable enough to Google to be worth that. It’s not a secret that the technology to get rid of the filthy cost-centers is considered the real holy grail, above and beyond the current GPS hailing stuff; and If these allegations are true, Uber is fairly shamelessly attempting to beat Google to it by stealing their stuff. That isn’t going to go over at all well.
Isn’t that exactly the situation where the (probably not actually attributable to him) Gould Gambit comes into play?
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Good to know! I had seen that driverless trucks could/should be a thing there for those long hauls. Guess they didn’t know about this either.
I don’t think it’ll be trucks. I think you’ll see driverless tech in places where you have a lot of control over the environment and people - warehouses and farming
Uber is done no matter what, they’ll be gone by next year, the only thing that could possibly save them (for a small time) is getting rid of Travis. I found there were far too many sexual assaults for me so I always stayed with taxis. I use the taxi app E-HAIl (www.goehail.com) same convenience but real taxis.
