# The Waymo v. Uber trial has shaken my confidence in self-driving cars



## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

Amid the avalanche of damning emails and embarrassing text messages that flowed out of the Waymo-Uber trial, what struck me the most was when ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski - Kalanick's onetime business partner who he described in court as his "brother from another mother" - described the race to build self-driving cars as a "zero sum game."

"We need to think through the strategy to take all the shortcuts we can," Levandowski told Kalanick. "I just see this as a race and we need to win, second place is the first looser [sic]."

This callous attitude toward a potentially game-changing, life-saving, and paradigm-shifting technology like autonomous vehicles is extremely troubling. *A pirate mentality has infected companies in the autonomous vehicle space*. "Move fast and break things" may have worked as an ethos for Uber when it was trying to overcome entrenched interests like the taxi industry, but it's exactly the opposite philosophy you want to hear from a company that wants you to ride in its driverless cars.

Rule-breaking is nothing new in the auto industry. From the Firestone tire scandal to Dieselgate to the massive Takata airbag recall, car companies have always skirted the law in their relentless drive to gain a competitive edge. But autonomous driving is being held up as a panacea by many of these same companies, the ultimate solution to all of our automotive woes. *That makes it much more fragile in terms of public perception*....

*...The idea that one of the companies that has already deployed autonomous cars was actively seeking "shortcuts" and "cheat codes" should scare the shit out of everyone*. These odious sentiments would never have come to light if not for the trial's discovery process that brought so many of Uber's underhanded tactics out into the open. Obviously, Uber's new leadership is aware that there are trust issues and is actively seeking to claw its way back into the good graces of its users. But the company is still on a very aggressive timeline. "We will have autonomous cars on the road, I believe within the next 18 months," new Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at a recent event in Davos. "And not as a test case, as a real [use] case out there."...

...Indeed, the race to build autonomous vehicles has set off a gold rush for talent: GM's $581 million purchase of Cruise, Uber's $680 million Otto acquisition, Ford's $1 billion Argo Aiproject, and Aptiv's $450 million NuTonomy acquisition. This, in turn, is fueling considerable salaries for the computer scientists and engineers who have the expertise to build cars that can drive themselves. As reported by _Forbes_ last year:

Salaries in the Bay Area, including annual bonuses and equity, currently average $295,000 a year for top self-driving car engineers, and range from $232,000 to as much as $405,000, based on data from Paysa, a Palo Alto firm that analyzes pay and job trends using an artificial intelligence-enabled data platform. The average is more than four times the California median household income of $64,500 in 2015 and over five times the U.S. average, based on Census figures.

But underlying these figures is a harsh reality in which the acquired talent fail to live up to their promises. Otto failed to meet the technical milestones outlined by Uber, which netted co-founder Lior Ron only $20,000 from the acquisition. Documents reviewed by Mark Harris at _IEEE Spectrum_ suggest that Otto's price tag was actually much lower than the reported $680 million figure.

It's worth mentioning that the information these companies choose to disclose publicly is often incomplete or sometimes misleading. California, which has some of the more robust reporting requirements for companies testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, recently released its annual disengagement reports. These reports are intended to quantify the extent of these companies' testing regiments, including the number of miles driven, frequency the vehicle disengages from autonomous mode, and the reasons why.

These reports don't tell the whole story, especially about companies like Waymo that has moved most of its testing to other states with less rigid regulations. Its definition of disengagement is pretty broad, as seen in GM's failure to report an encounter with a taco truck that caused one of its safety drivers to take control of the vehicle. But these reports take on outsized significance because they are practically the only data that companies are required to disclose publicly that doesn't end up becoming slick marketing opportunities like the vehicle safety reports issued by both Waymo and GM.

The little we do know about the self-driving tests that are underway is only based on what the companies choose to tell us through tightly controlled media tours. Local news outlets like _The Incline_ have taken to crowdsourcing the movements of the dozens of autonomous cars that are operating in Pittsburgh. We haven't seen any interviews with participants of Waymo's Early Rider program in Arizona, most likely because NDAs prevent those people from speaking out. Most recently, we learned, thanks to reporting by _The Information_, that Waymo's cars have trouble making left turns.

Legislation currently under consideration in the US Senate would more or less enshrine the voluntary guidelines outlined by Barack Obama and made even less burdensome under Donald Trump. (It's unclear how something that was entirely voluntary could have been burdensome in the first place, but I digress.) Policymakers have become overly fearful of upsetting the sacred act of innovation and of asking too much of the innovators. And *giant tech and car companies are taking advantage of the current regulation-averse environment to lobby for laws that wouldn't even mandate a minimum level of safety and security*.

Outwardly, these companies talk relentlessly about the life-saving potential of self-driving cars, *but behind closed doors, they are plotting ways to outmaneuver their rivals* - *often at the expense of an unsuspecting public*. It's telling that we learned more about the behind-the-scenes machinations to build self-driving cars from the Waymo-Uber trial than we did from any publicly disclosed safety report. To be sure, there are probably a lot of good people working on this technology, many with the desire to build something that can really change things. But the industry is still in an experimental phase, and the public deserves to know more before these experiments become our reality.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/13/...-trial-settlement-self-driving-car-confidence


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

i was wondering why no riders have talked about googles pathetic cars. google doesn't want them speaking about how shaky and unreliable they are. all it's going to take is one major high profile accident and/or a few deaths and this shit will all grind to a halt.


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

heynow321 said:


> i was wondering why no riders have talked about googles pathetic cars. google doesn't want them speaking about how shaky and unreliable they are. all it's going to take is one major high profile accident and/or a few deaths and this shit will all grind to a halt.


LOL!

Shaky and unreliable?

Yes, it's true, you've never read about their experiences, which is obvious. So how did you come to those conclusions?

You described them as shaky and unreliable and yet admit you have never read about their experiences?

How did you come to that conclusion? If they didn't write about it, how did you know this?

Guess what, great news! They HAVE, in fact, written about (Google) Waymo's cars and they are very impressed! You must be relieved.

They call them smooth and dependable. I'd be happy to share these reports with you when you set down the denial and open your mind.



heynow321 said:


> Incorrect ramz


Show me where.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

I don’t post sources of information. I learned that tactic from you!


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

RamzFanz said:


> It's the most expansive and well invested in undertaking in the history of mankind.
> 
> ?


ramz loves tossing this phrase around without any kind of explanation or numbers to back it up, so let's take a look.

it's safe to assume "well invested" refers to total capital invested in the industry. Simpletons and the under-educated like ramz are often dazzled by big numbers without any kind of context.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-self-driving-cars/
*
To date, there are no public estimates of how large this surge in investment in autonomous vehicle technology is in the aggregate*. PWC's 2016 Connected Car Study, its *fourth annual report on the sector, says the top five original equipment manufacturers spent $46 billion in research and development in 2015, and there are numerous reports that catalogue investments, acquisitions, and other activities in the growing ecosystem that supports self-driving cars. We set out to estimate the aggregate investment across this entire area.*
*

MORE THAN $80 BILLION INVESTED
The information below aggregates all the investment amounts from these public sources.

The data collected related to more than 160 separate deals, including investments, partnerships, and acquisitions. The announced figures for these deals approach $80 billion dollars. Given the limitations on available information discussed above, it is reasonable to presume that total global investment in autonomous vehicle technology is significantly more than this.

*

So lets assume it could be more than $80 billion of invested new capital. While we can't know exactly what private corporations are investing in nor how much, we can make reasonable assumptions based on the size of the corporation itself as well as where their capital is coming from. For example, a firm worth $100 million will not have access to billions and billions in capital. Only the largest companies with the best businesses and largest markets of customers can wield enormous amounts of capital. The point being that $80 billion is likely below the real number but the real number will not break a trillion (or anywhere near it). we'll be generous and assume somewhere around $150 billion at best depending on how you define what the SDC business and ecosystem is.

So what about other industries?

https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/...capital-investment-in-oil-and-gas-sector.html

Worldwide growth in energy demand and the emergence of new supplies have led to record inflows of capital into the energy and resources (E&R) industry since 2008. *A global study of 39,273 publicly listed companies in nonfinancial industries found that E&R has surpassed manufacturing to become the biggest issuer of net new capital,* defined as the sum of net equity and net debt issued. (For more details on the study, refer to the methodology discussion in the appendix.) *The E&R industry raised more than $1.5 trillion during the past five reported fiscal years-almost 50 percent of the total net new capital raised by all nonfinancial industries.* In the five-year period before that, it accounted for just 26 percent (figure 1).










Much of the increase came from the booming O&G sector. In fact, the O&G sector became a magnet for new capital: It raised about $850 billion from 2009 through 2013, accounting for 27 percent of all new capital raised during this period. Cash flowing out of other industries, such as the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) industry, reduced the competition for capital and encouraged the migration of capital into the O&G sector. The O&G sector benefited from this momentum, issuing more equity and reducing stock buybacks while taking advantage of low interest rates to issue debt.

This massive influx of capital, supported by high oil prices, transformed the O&G sector at its core, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors across all industries. Its revenue grew by 60 percent over the past five years, reaching $6.6 trillion in fiscal year 2013-14. In comparison, manufacturing revenues grew by 32 percent, life sciences and health care (LSHC) revenues grew by 27 percent, and TMT revenues grew by 21 percent.

well those are the big boys. SDC's are "new" tech, usually funded by VC's or VC arms of bigger players. How much VC capital is flowing around these days? as it turns out, not much. ICT is Information and Communication Technology.










or another way of looking at similar data: https://hackernoon.com/rising-trends-in-the-venture-capital-industry-e3bb973c5ed1

According to a 2016 report by Martin Prosperity Institute, VC funding is available across different industries. *In the U.S., software sector has around 36 percent of the VC investment with a value of about $12 billion*, whereas, bio-technology and media and entertainment comprise 17.3% and 9.5% respectively. *The top five industries consist of $25 billion investment constituting 76% of all VC investments.*

Software sector received the highest funding even in the last quarter of 2015, i.e, $4.5 billion with 369 closed deals. On the other hand, bio-technology collected $1.5 billion via 95 deals and media & entertainment sector managed to secure $881 million by closing 114 deals.

So, as you can see, SDC's (and, even broader, the entire ecosystem around them) are nowhere near "the most expansive and well invested undertaking in the history of mankind." Not even close.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

They can’t drive bc they’re human and not “talented “ at driving? 

Have humans lost the ability to learn and grow via practice? Wow I certainly hope not.


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

RamzFanz said:


> My wife and daughter are both half blind and easily distracted.


This is not about them, is about you, the "brilliant" entrepreneur that knowingly installed faulty products to his customers without telling them about the problems. Indirectly, your wife and daughter should be worried having you, the "responsible" individual opening doors for them. If you think you are some sort of prince charming, I am telling you, by your "exceptional" line of comments, you were the lead character in a certain Muppet's Show.


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