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by iaw 3423 days ago
You are completely right. Shipping automation has a lot of potential.

I don't think Uber has any strong competitive advantage in the self-driving space relative to all of the other players. I've been wrong about these things before. The thing that may put them at a disadvantage is their history of ignoring regulations compared to companies like Google. Even if they develop the technology quickly enough they may be screwed because a competitive technology is the one that gets licensed by the DOT because other companies play by the rules.
1 comments
jayjay71 3423 days ago
I'm biased because I used to work with many of the people Uber hired for self-driving cars, but they bought really great engineering talent. Great talent doesn't mean much though if the management is bad, and after their whole illegal testing in California debacle it makes me cautious.

That said, I didn't realize just how far ahead Google/Waymo is with regards to self-driving cars. If you check out the report of autonomous vehicles (HN "discussion" here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13554796) they are already operating on highways with zero problems! The data is limited, but that is promising.

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iaw 3423 days ago
> I'm biased because I used to work with many of the people Uber hired for self-driving cars, but they bought really great engineering talent

I think that's a fair perspective and I don't discount the capabilities and talents of the people working at Uber, it's the people running Uber that I don't believe are capable of steering the ship.

A friend of mine who has been an executive at a couple tech companies have chatted about the "no grown-up" phenomenon. Essentially, you can have a ton of super-talented people but if there isn't a 'grown-up' (irrespective of age) providing the managerial/fiduciary discipline (think Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as the epitome of this) then the challenges of running a successful business will quickly outpace the efforts of the talented engineers working there.

The number of teams/engineers that unilaterally work on overlapping projects or projects that don't serve any purpose can rapidly drown the needed forward progress.

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FabHK 3422 days ago
FWIW, I think highway driving is the easy part (very controlled environment, no sudden cross traffic, etc). City driving is the hard part.
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