
Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact - smaili
https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-investing-500-million-in-uber-in-driverless-car-pact-1535393774
======
drenvuk
I don't know if this is a fair point of view but from an outsider's
perspective it seems like any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning
money. What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable
autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't
kill the driver while on the highway? Anyone have a list of real contenders
free of the marketing bs?

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

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

~~~
patrickaljord
> Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone

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

~~~
dzdt
Once a self-driving car has a breakout success, everyone will quickly know
what kind of sensor package it has, what kinds of compute hardware, and
general features of the machine learning approach and tradeoffs like mapping
vs on-the-fly interpretation. Knowing these things will make it much quicker
to catch up compared to when everyone is still exploring for a solution.

~~~
Fricken
The hardware/software demands are well known. Best practices have been
established. The secret sauce is in getting the whole orchestra to harmonize,
and in optimizing to get through the insane workload.

The biggest hurdles are at the start, but any company that can demo an
autonomous vehicle that can, on average, drive a few miles in urban traffic
without getting hung up is off and running. After those initial big hurdles,
it's small hurdles stretching off further than the eye can see.

Uber had never really learned the first big hurdles. They scaled too big, too
fast, and the whole operation was a clusterfuck. The rumour is that Uber was
having trouble getting simulation working for them. So early on with Uber,
driving around Philly, they were disengaging every block or two, and 2 years
later they weren't doing much better.

In the wake of their accident they've had some time to reevaluate everything,
and we'll see if they've actually managed to sort out their problems.

~~~
autonomygirl
Hi Fricken, I'm a reporter doing some research on self-driving cars, in
particular some of the lingering technical and safety challenges to commercial
deployment. I've enjoyed many of your posts on the topic. I was hoping to talk
with you on-background, and I'd really appreciate your help. Happy to explain
more if you wouldn't mind connecting. heather.somerville@thomsonreuters.com.
Thank you.

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

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

~~~
schaefer
Link to the report from Uber's fatal accident:
[https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf)

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

So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases.

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

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

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

\--

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

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

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

Because the inefficiencies of government are catching up with them as they'd
rather right each other (different parties) rather than be productive and move
the country forward.

~~~
kartan
> inefficiencies of government

You misspelled lobbing.

~~~
hammeiam
> You misspelled lobbing.

You misspelled lobbying.

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

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1094517/000119312518...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1094517/000119312518201591/d549954d20f.htm)

> As filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 25, 2018

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

So not their first rodeo, Toyota sells cars after all

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

~~~
ghaff
Toyota also has a joint research center with MIT CSAIL.
[https://toyota.csail.mit.edu/](https://toyota.csail.mit.edu/)

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az123zaz
Many of the posts here assume Toyota is investing in Uber to get access Uber's
self-driving tech.

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

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

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

[https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/05/24/toyota-
inv...](https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/05/24/toyota-invests-uber-
ride-sharing-lease-vehicles-drivers/84863156/)

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

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

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

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

~~~
lgbr
> you'll still be wasting your time if you need LIDAR

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

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

~~~
ProblemFactory
> The problem that needs to be solved is vision.

"Solving vision" is a 10x more harder problem than building a practical self-
driving car with LIDAR. We might get it working with LIDAR in 2-5 years, but
without LIDAR in 20-50 years.

Arguably Alphabet (Google + Waymo + Deepmind + co) is the largest group of AI
and ML experts in the world. If someone is going to figure out general
computer vision, then it's likely to be them - and if they are working on
LIDAR first then there must be a good reason why.

I believe Tesla is promoting LIDAR-less systems just because it's expensive
bulky hardware, and they can't possibly sell cars with it at a reasonable
cost. Calling cameras and radars "full self-driving hardware" is a good
marketing tactic, but without any guarantees that they can build the software
for it in the next 20 years.

~~~
deepnotderp
The issue from my (admittedly little) experience is that it's all about edge
cases and reliability.

It's easy to make a demo with cameras only but to deal with the countless
unimaginable edge cases, you need LIDAR.

The other factor is that you need damn near six sigma accuracy for ML algos
for robust SDCs, and while it's theoretically possible to match LIDAR with
cameras and current DL, it's impossible to do so with the needed 99.99 percent
accuracy for autonomy.

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

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

~~~
ORioN63
I am actually stunned how there was no displacement of the current input
devices.

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

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

~~~
pasabagi
I think there's some interesting work done around natural-user-interfaces
(using a kinect to control software, etc). I think this is probably a more
promising direction than new custom hardware - because hardware is expensive,
and quality hardware is far more so.

I mean, if you could use a pen and paper to interface with a computer, you're
standing on the shoulders of centuries of experience about how to produce a
nice pen-paper experience, at a really cheap price. A newcomer in the world of
interface hardware has to overcome the fact that everybody finds a new
interface horrible for years, aside from the crazy technical and industrial
challenges of producing something at a price/performance ratio that's better
than entrenched technologies.

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

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

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

~~~
kart23
I think people underrate human drivers. When you take into account the massive
amount of miles driven each day, the amount of crashes isnt that bad, and
currently self driving cars have much more fatalities per mile than humans.

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

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clu1590
This makes no sense to me. They already have TRI which has billions in funding
and poached the former head of the DARPA challenge. Why do they need Uber?

~~~
debt
They want to win.

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

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

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thrwjddi893
This is quite strange. Toyota has a research center in SC and Boston (TRI) and
has invested about 100M in PFN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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neonate
[http://archive.is/RQtYT](http://archive.is/RQtYT)

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

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cityzen
Jam Pad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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true_tuna
I have no idea what this article says.

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beerlord
Where are Toyota's electric cars?

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PunchTornado
Seems like a bad deal to me.

Uber looks like it is behind it's competitors.

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

