[forgotpwtomain]

The increasingly plausible story of Uber failing is Google or other big players beating them by a large margin to self-driving cars (including for the kind of taxi-service Uber provides). None of these smaller players (aside from Didi which appears to be quite large and backed by internal Chinese interests) give the semblance of having even a minutia of a chance vs. Google.

[xiaoma]

In China, it's Google who doesn't have a chance. Their search, email, and app store are all blocked. There's no reason to think they'd have any more success as a car company.

[pdog]

This meme that transportation network companies are waiting for self-driving cars to eliminate drivers has been promulgated for years, but does anyone really know what will happen when self-driving cars are widely deployed? It's pure speculation.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

It's pure speculation as to how quickly it will even happen. I can imagine a forum similar to this one back in the 60's, 70's or 80's talking about how cold fusion will revolutionize the world. Uber's problems are in the immediate term, the idea that they will even exist when true self-driving cars actually make it to market is far-fetched already.

[Fricken]

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

[ithinkinstereo]

Perhaps Didi can ally themselves with Baidu.

Not sure how Baidu's self-driving program compares to its western rivals, but it's definitely the most advanced out of the Chinese tech giants.

[yeldarb]

Uber China (which Didi acquired) already was.

I recently listened to the Acuired podcast about the history of Didi/Uber in China and found it incredibly interesting: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/acquired-a-podcast-about...

[Danihan]

Even with $5B in capital?

I know building a self-driving car is hard, I don't think it's that hard though.

[argonaut]

Self-driving is not going to be solved by throwing money at it. If it was, Google would have "solved" it already and Apple wouldn't have abandoned their effort.

The obvious shortage is engineering talent. This is more debatable (many people, like Elon Musk, don't believe this to be the case), but the field also needs one or more research breakthroughs, especially in the realm of planning and reasoning. Most of the machine learning in self-driving cars goes towards perception / detection / mapping. The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.

[hkarthik]

Network and data infrastructure is also a challenge for self driving cars and has a ways to go. The data produced by a single self driving car can be pretty staggering (I've heard estimates as high as 5 TB/minute). Now think about transferring that much data around a fleet of cars over current LTE wireless data connections.

Even if someone gets it working in a small area, it will take years of investment in network infra to make it truly ubiquitious.

Barring some major technical breakthroughs, I just don't see the current tech that these companies are testing being scalable at the same level as GPS, cellular data, etc.

[chronic940]

> The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.

The planning system always be hard coded rules. Perception, fine, throw the latest CNN at it. Planning and control, better stick to the DMV/NHTSA traffic book.

[jessriedel]

Self-driving cars are going to produce >$100B/year in value (probably at least $1T/year worldwide). They are going to cost a lot more than $5B to develop. Google has >$80B of cash on hand and Apple has >$230B. Those companies would spend $5B to develop self-driving cars in a heartbeat if they could, but they can't.

[pizza]

Well.. it's been a long-sought dream

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars

[baybal2]

What a self driving car has to do with a taxi company?