
Lyft Self-Driving - gwintrob
https://www.lyft.com/self-driving-vehicles
======
em3rgent0rdr
I recently read a couple (long) articles basically arguing that the simple
answer to transportation woes is not about self-driving cars and hyperloops,
but basic simple steps to make cities more pedestrian friendly and
improvements to mass transit:

[http://www.kevinklinkenberg.com/blog/autonomous-vehicles-
a-v...](http://www.kevinklinkenberg.com/blog/autonomous-vehicles-a-very-
american-obsession) [https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-
mus...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-musk-doesnt-
get-about-urban-transit/548843/)

So I tend to not get excited about Lyft/Uber and autonomous vehicles when
presented as a solution for transportation. Whether they will be successful
companies is a separate question.

~~~
smt88
Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese,
disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with
bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in
dense, central urban environments.

Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far
cheaper, since they use existing roads.

~~~
sandworm101
And anyone with more than a handbag to carry. Many workers travel with tools.
Im going to training next month and have to bring about 80lbs of various stuff
with me. Hauling that in and out of busses, not to mention finding places to
secure it while i sleep/eat, wouldnt be much fun. But it all fits in my car
nicely. And no, i cannot send it by courier.

~~~
kelnos
No one is suggesting that there aren't special cases where using a car is the
right move. But the vast majority of cases where people take cars, replacing
that experience with better public transit is entirely reasonable. Hell,
improving public transit would improve your use-case as well; you'd have less
traffic to compete with while driving.

~~~
sandworm101
Unless the goal is to pay for public transit by making car travel more
expensive/painful. Then it is unfair to force all the carpenters to cover the
costs for the office workers.

~~~
losteric
That's an incomplete view of the problem.

Public transportation is used by people from all walks of life. Not just
office workers - cooks, nurses, artists, school teachers, police officers,
even employees of trade companies... and every citizen benefits from reduced
traffic, lower infrastructure costs, and better health.

Using car taxes to fund public transportation would not materially impact the
carpenter. They'd just charge a little more. An absurdly high $1000/year tax
spread across 50 clients is merely $20 per job - a more realistic $200/y tax
would add $4 per job. Considering that public transportation increase average
disposable income, the market can easily absorb that cost.

~~~
sandworm101
>> They'd just charge a little more.

And so too can the office workers. To charge one group for the benefit of
another, based solely on the manner of their employ, is the definition of
unfair. This is what progressive taxation is for, not use taxes.

~~~
losteric
What? You either selectively read my response, or you're being deliberately
obtuse with your focus on office workers. Car taxes ensure the market
accurately captures negative externalities. There is no discrimination - if a
doctor, CEO, and a plumber use cars equally, they are taxed equally. In
contrast, low/absent car taxes are discriminatory subsidies.

For businesses that require car usage, the tax is merely an operating cost.
There is no impact on profit as operating costs are passed on to the consumer.

Of course, allocating that revenue is still subject to local voters' wishes.

------
Game_Ender
Based on their job openings [0] it looks like Level 5 is going head to head
with Google, Cruise, and Uber and building a full autonomy software solution.
Looks like they are close to square one though since they are hiring leads for
essentially everything: localization, perception, prediction, and controls.

It's an interesting to see all the players trying to have an out if someone
withholds either the transportation network, or self driving tech.

0 - [https://www.lyft.com/jobs#job-openings](https://www.lyft.com/jobs#job-
openings)

------
xandar11
I'm skeptical about all this.

Hubert Horan [1] has done a great job exposing Uber's failed business model in
11 part series on NakedCapitalism ("Can Uber Ever Deliver?"). Same goes for
Lyft.

When it comes to self driving cars, why should Uber or Lyft have any massive
advantage over other players and what makes us think it won't turn into
something like an airline industry which has been unprofitable for most of
their history?

[1] [http://horanaviation.com/Uber.html](http://horanaviation.com/Uber.html)

~~~
tlb
The airline industry is unprofitable mainly because the pilots capture most of
the money. Their union gives them nearly unlimited pricing power.

It's possibly that self-driving cars won't be profitable, but it certainly
won't be for the same reason.

There's reason to believe it'll be a winner-take-all market, because more data
leads to lower crash rate which (in a world of rational consumers) will make
them more popular, in a self-reinforcing cycle.

~~~
alasdair_
>The airline industry is unprofitable mainly because the pilots capture most
of the money. Their union gives them nearly unlimited pricing power.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average salary of a
Commercial Pilot is $73,490 per year.

This seems low given the sheer number of hours of training involved.

~~~
nradov
The average is meaningless. New regional airline co-pilots barely earn enough
to eat. Senior captains for major airlines are paid very, very well.

~~~
Pyxl101
Why would that be? Is there a difference in competence significant enough to
warrant such a difference in pay?

~~~
Robotbeat
Consider that senior pilots are flying the biggest, most expensive planes with
the most passengers and the most revenue. Even slight improvements in
competency or safety look pretty good when you're talking about a 747 which
costs the airline $400 million.

~~~
nradov
Competency and safety are relatively minor factors. The real reason is that
senior pilots control the unions and airlines have to stop operating if pilots
strike.

~~~
prakster
Solution: Self driving planes.

------
skywhopper
To the extent this works anytime soon it will be so slow and inconsistent that
it won’t be economically successful. Any driving service that works worse at
night, in bad weather, or outside small well-mapped neighborhoods will not be
comprehensive or reliable enough to be economically viable.

Also the idea that self driving cars will end traffic is a dangerous lie to
tell. Self driving cars will do nothing to reduce traffic. If anything, self
driving cars will increase car trips. And in fact in order to serve people
with reasonable service times there will need to be _more_ cars on the road at
all times which will more than soak up any additional capacity gained from
tighter traffic patterns on restricted access highways.

~~~
TYPE_FASTER
I think self driving cars will increase safety, and decrease accidents. I've
read that accidents contribute for 25% of traffic congestion that exists
today, so self driving cars could have a noticeable impact on decreasing drive
times.

~~~
bennettfeely
The only noticable impact will be as you watch fellow human drivers speed past
you on the road.

Self-driving cars must follow the speed limit at all times.

How can a company program a car to break the law?

~~~
Saaster
Passengers won't care, they'll be busy playing with their phones or working.
All that useless time spent driving is suddenly productive, as if you were in
a nice private train car. If a car passes the train on the highway outside, do
you even notice as a passenger?

I think following the laws and driving calmly is a great benefit. Never once I
have thought, "I'm so happy that Uber driver drove like a maniac weaving
between lanes, and got me to my destination all of 4 minutes earlier. Yay".

------
omarforgotpwd
GM owns 9% of Lyft, and also acquired Cruise, a YC company working on self
driving tech. Since you can't invest in Lyft or Uber today, I would advise
people to buy GM. I own about 5 times more Tesla stock than GM but I think GM
is a really great value today trading at a P/E of less than 7. With the
economics of this business transforming fundamentally over the next decade,
making cars more of a "tech" business, I think you could see both revenue and
earnings multiples increase dramatically. But who knows I could be wrong.

~~~
sidcool
Having recently watched the 'the big short', this is understandable and
terrifying at the same time.

------
ukulele
This really is the endgame for both Uber and Lyft. IIRC, Uber did $16B last
year in revenue and paid something like $13B to drivers. Self driving vehicles
will turn their current breakeven/loser business models into massive cash
cows.

~~~
melvinmt
> This really is the endgame for both Uber and Lyft.

I believe so too, but from a slightly different angle: I believe self-driving
vehicles will literally mean the _end_ for both Uber & Lyft (and they only
accelerate their fate by investing into it).

To understand why: their inherent value is their ability to match human
drivers with customers. They both do such a good job at it, that the switching
costs between the 2 apps are quite low (first sign of weak competitive
advantage).

Now, take away the difficult problem of finding human drivers at the right
place and the right time. You now have self-driving cars that make no
mistakes, have no scheduling issues, do not get tired etc. It’s way easier to
fullfil demand. But, you’re not the only one working on this problem. Google,
Tesla, (probably Apple too) are all actively working on the same problem. And
they probably have 10X the computing/engineering/cash/data resources to solve
this problem.

What are Uber/Lyft left with? A fancy app with a button (which they have
already proven to easily clone). Not only that, they also have to compete with
the _native_ operating systems (and future devices) that the big corps
control. They don’t even own their maps!

So yes, in 2023, you will probably be able to order a Level-5 self driving
vehicle to your doorstep with a wink of your half robotic eye, but it will not
be Uber or Lyft.

~~~
nemothekid
Tesla has 10x the computing/engineering/cash/data resources to solve the self
driving car problem than Uber? In revenue/market cap/profit Uber and Tesla are
nearly equal in size.

The way I see it, Lyft and Uber are already "big corps", and there are likely
several logistic concerns that give Lyft/Uber a major head start on Google
despite Google's alleged software superiority. However, I don't see Google
releasing a massive self driving fleet in San Francisco and simultaneously
capturing significant market share overnight.

~~~
bendauphinee
Tesla already has a fleet of cars mining driving data for it, putting them way
ahead of Uber.

~~~
greentrust
The amount of data collected by your average Goog/Cruise/Uber autonomous
vehicle is on the order of gigabytes per minute. I highly doubt Tesla is
phoning home data at that level of detail.

~~~
jsjohnst
Correct, but how many cars does Goog/Cruise/Uber have on the road daily
collecting this high data rate? 1k? Let’s be overly optimistic and say 10k.
Remember, normal driver driven cars don’t apply here generally, just the
research cars.

Tesla on the other hand has hundreds of thousands of cars on the road and is
rapidly on their way to 1M cars. Data won’t be as raw and abundant, but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially very useful none the less.

~~~
visarga
The kind of data Tesla collects is useful for general self driving, less so
for solving hard cases. For that we need simulations and real life enactment,
like Google does. We already have the basic data, we need the special case
data now, or we could use the driving data from Tesla to discover new special
cases.

Simply putting more SDCs on the road does not guarantee they will focus on the
data they need.

~~~
jsjohnst
> Simply putting more SDCs on the road does not guarantee they will focus on
> the data they need.

Agree completely

------
dorianm
Looks like it's LIDAR-based, and it's a partnership with nuTonomy[1].

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/lyfts-self-driving-
pilot-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/lyfts-self-driving-pilot-with-
nutonomy-begins-rolling-out-in-boston/)

~~~
deepnotderp
Source for LIDAR based?

~~~
augustt
There's a big spinning LIDAR on the 'engineers' page

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elvinyung
It's a Christmas miracle!

In more seriousness, I'm curious how well this is supposed to play with the
other partnerships that Lyft already has? i.e. all together, is this suppose
to represent one coherent effort to build L5 autonomous, or multiple parallel
ones?

------
KKKKkkkk1
Could someone explain what we're seeing here? I've seen self-driving startups
do staged demos of self-driving cars, but this seems to be the unveiling of a
self-driving car web page.

------
sidcool
Why can't Lyft just partner with Waymo? Supposedly they have the best solution
right now.

~~~
adjkant
They are.

[https://outline.com/qMtpFx](https://outline.com/qMtpFx)

~~~
sidcool
This is cool! I somehow missed this part. Uber's in dock if this takes off
well.

------
kbos87
Today, the competitive advantage in this market goes to whoever has the
largest network of drivers and can summon a vehicle quickly and at a low cost
to a waiting passenger. The tech is marginally better or worse from Lyft to
Uber to competitor X, and the ride quality is similar enough.

When self driving cars become a reality, I don’t see the technology or the
data becoming a real sustainable competitive advantage for any one player.
Once the last technical hurdles have been overcome and society has adapted in
whatever way it needs to, it just won’t be that difficult for every auto
manufacturer to figure out how to get in on the game.

Fragmentation across local markets also has to come into play at some point.
It’s only a matter of time before cities and towns get their acts together and
figure out how to extract revenue to at the very least cover the real but
indirect costs they are incurring as a result of ridesharing. They could
pretty easily make it next to impossible for their non preferred vendor
partners to operate in a city.

------
tonyquart
I've just read [https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-
accid...](https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-
injury-lawyers-attorneys/). Since few years ago, the only thing that made me
interested to these autonomous cars is the laws that regulate these cars. I
think the government haven't fixed the laws, so it's still an interesting
topic to be discussed next year.

------
jordache
The traffic elimination claim is disingenuous. Surely they anticipate that as
the avg traffic goes down, that just opens up for more volume of vehicles,
thus reintroduces traffic problems

------
simonjgreen
I envisage the manufacturers bypassing third party's entirely. Rather than
buying or leasing car, you subscribe to your manufacturer of choices plan for
a car as a service. Eg subscribe to Tesla. Quick trip, model 3 appears and
drives you there. Longer trip? Model s does the job. Family holiday? Model x
picks you all up. At the end of the day the car returns itself to the pool.

------
michalnaka
"Last year, nearly 6 million Americans sold their cars and switched to ride
sharing. This year, almost 6 million plan to do the same thing."

No source citied on this or any of the other assertions made on the landing
page.

------
andy_ppp
Has anyone seen anything to suggest this will happen for sure in 10 years? I’m
sure there will be improvements in safety with these features but there are
basically zero AI demos out there that are what I’d call good. For example
Siri and even Google Assistant quickly show how limited they are after years
and years of real world use. If these rely on the same Deep Learning
technology won’t it just be the same limits apply to this much harder problem?

~~~
alexbeloi
Siri/Alexa/GoogleAssist etc. work well in constrained situations (e.g.
changing music, turning stuff on/off, pop culture quiz questions), they have
trouble parsing more general/complex questions.

Many researchers I've talked to believe the initial self-driving car
deployments to the public will be have to be very constrained: fixed routes,
possibly isolated self-driving car lanes, only allowed in clear/daytime
conditions.

~~~
nojvek
And its probably going to be here earlier than we think.

Essentially train carriages on tarmac :)

------
mherdeg
If there's a 90% reduction in accidents, who will be providing the donor
organs? What will happen to the average lifespan of people with certain
chronic illnesses?

~~~
lanna
Are you truly suggesting we allow young, healthy individuals to die in car
accidents to harvest their organs?

You should be asking yourself what will happen to the average lifespan of
those who won't die prematurely in a car accident.

~~~
mherdeg
Heavens no -- I don't think society should allow anyone die in car accidents,
young and healthy or otherwise. It's abundantly clear that driving is too
dangerous by far.

But that doesn't stop me from wanting to know what the US will look like in a
future with self-driving cars. Will we, for example, find such a severe
shortage of donor hearts that certain unlucky people live less long? Will we
prioritize research that could improve treatment diseases which, untreated,
lead to organ transplants? Or will we consider changing laws to allow donors
to be compensated for organ transplants? (which have all kinds of icky side
effects but could help avert a crisis if there were one).

I genuinely don't know what the effects of fewer road deaths will be on
transplant wait times and wonder how this externality (if there is one) will
be handled.

~~~
kelnos
I would expect more research into organ cloning/regrowth and artificial
replacements. It's an interesting question, to be sure.

