Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021"<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-driving-car-prediction-2021-john-zimmer" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin...</a><p><a href="https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...</a>
Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora.<p>Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1]<p>Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020.<p>No pricing yet, so this is still a demo.<p>[1] <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-an-actual-public-driverless-taxi-service/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...</a>
In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.
I feel like all these self-driving companies aren't actually in it to achieve the success. They know it's a long way off, they're just trying to hit enough milestones to get scooped up by somebody bigger. Perhaps with the exception of Tesla, who I have no explanation for. Self-driving cars are so far down the totem-pole in my opinion--if we're going to have to rework our roadways in order to accommodate self-driving cars, why not just innovate there?<p>A roadway can be MUCH smarter than a car. Each segment of smart road is unique, and only has to worry about itself and whatever cars are present in the area. Smart roads could be managed by a few operators (in fact one operator could shepherd many road segments).<p>Each smart car has to be able to account for all possible kinds of roads. Smart cars each require an operator who is essentially just sitting there waiting for the car to fail (and therefore the failures become more catastrophic as the tech gets better, since trust rises and attention spans fail).<p>Put the tech into the ROADS, and just let the cars listen.
Well...<p>"In December 2020, Lyft announced that it will launch a multi-city U.S. robotaxi service in 2023 with Motional."<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSKBN28Q2H2" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSK...</a>
Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with no reasonable end in sight.<p>I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too damn expensive and uncertain as to when the breakthrough/development will happen
I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how different things were when trying to get my driver's license in US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained in a world of rules and order and are then thrown into complete chaos in other places.<p>What does training look like? Do self-driving cars only work in certain countries where they have been trained?
I've seen some directors recently leave Lyft's "Level 5" division recently, in the last couple of months. I guess there were a lot of warning signs.
How long will this game of musical chairs go on? Technologically we are not there yet. What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching".
Can the current technology have its use cases? Sure. But calling it self-driving is laughable at best and deceptive at worst.
Toyota / Woven Planet also just announced it was picking Apex.AI as their software platform:<p><a href="https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-to-develop-autonomous-platform/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-...</a>
100m a year, 0 roi expense gone. Also no more shared rides due to COVID (which I expect will never come back to Uber or Lyft since they were gigantic money sinks). Assuming ridership is bouncing back from COVID I wouldn't be surprised if their first profitable quarter was this year.
Most ride-hailing companies that invested in self-driving cars are giving up on these projects. Most of these startups struggle to sustain their business.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Prop 22. At least in California there's no risk of losing margin to "employees" anymore. Maybe FSD is not required anymore for long-term viability of transportation network companies.
Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated.<p>Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months?<p>The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, because Google isn’t trying to juice their stock price all the damn time, and they have operable robotaxis in AZ. I don’t think Waymo claims L5 capability either.
I have been saying this for at least 4 years now that Uber and Lyft shouldn't be doing FSD tech at all. Finally it materialized. After Uber sold their unit, Lyft selling theirs is just a matter of when, not if.
10 or 20 years down the line, perhaps we will have semi-autonomous vehicles (full self-driving is a pipe dream, IMV). But I still feel it is a waste of time and resources. A better use of them would be to improve current driving conditions for a driver, such as reducing the amount of human energy required for an average drive, or developing more efficient vehicles for single / two passengers.<p>There is a large portion of the world that uses cars for daily commutes to office. If we can make that fleet much more efficient than current day, a lot of carbon output would be saved.<p>Edit:<p>Also, how about making cars safe and mesh enabled to drive further distances, faster and with less stress, so that cities and infrastructure can expand.<p>100 years down the line, what will survive is our infrastructure, the ability to move from A to B quickly and easily. Roads, bridges, highways, etc. Just look at the economic benefits of the German Auto Bahn.<p>Imagine special highways, that connect major cities to spread out urban areas. Highways that are automated, where the cars on the highway know about each other and can drive as a swarm. Collectively, they can achieve much higher speeds. It maybe the time to divert investments to such projects and build autonomous driving from that base.
The thing is, there probably wasn't anyway anyone could convince lyft not to spend money on this. In 2016 investors were writing big checks that self-driving cars were around the corner based on vague demos.<p>If anyone said it couldn't be done they'd simply be viewed as not AI enough.
So Uber and Lyft are out. It seems only Didi Chuxing left as the ride hailing services with self driving development.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOz275b_X4</a>
Maybe we can finally lay self driving prophecies to rest. Self driven cars will never share the road with human drivers. There's no legal framework for liability. And AI is far from understanding human intentions and speech.<p>One day we'll have purpose built lanes for robots, maybe. Boring highway routes between big cities will be first.<p>I think tech wizards will take the easy road and automate planes and ships. There's too much crap and unpredictability on the ground. That's why all the automated military stuff flies or floats, or dives. Skittering along the ground is best left to meat control
I think the appeal of self-driving to car manufacturers is that if it can be made to work, the households who actually buy <i>new</i> vehicles, affluent suburbanites, will buy <i>more</i> of them.<p>Instead of just one car per adult in the household (and maybe recreational vehicles as well), these households will buy one per adult and up to one per child over six years old (plus recreational vehicles as before).
I loved my time working at Level 5, there were some really top notch folks there. But this isn't necessarily surprising news, a little sad, but not surprising.