from Hacker News

Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

by oflordal on 5/23/23, 12:28 PM with 373 comments

• by elromulous on 5/23/23, 5:25 PM

  I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next time.

  With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.

• by SilverBirch on 5/23/23, 12:55 PM

  This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.

• by zodzedzi on 5/23/23, 7:26 PM

  Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch.

  They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available.

  This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth.

  On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare.

  Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.

• by ra7 on 5/23/23, 1:15 PM

  From the TechCrunch news story [1]:

  > The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology.

  Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.

  [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...

• by lchengify on 5/23/23, 7:32 PM

  I expected this deal to happen right after Dara became CEO, and definitely after Uber sold off their self-driving division. This is why I've owned Uber stock since the IPO, despite the ongoing volatility.

  Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber).

  There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one.

  The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable.

  From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.

• by xnx on 5/23/23, 2:49 PM

  Amazing headline given that someone tried to previously bring(/steal) Waymo's autonomous driving technology to Uber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

• by mdale on 5/23/23, 1:38 PM

  Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow.

  It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well.

  But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.

  Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.

  For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.

  All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.

  I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.

• by bertil on 5/23/23, 6:24 PM

  Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while.

  If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:

  - Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.

  - Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.

  - Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.

  Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.

• by yalogin on 5/23/23, 1:55 PM

  I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.

• by mduggles on 5/23/23, 1:10 PM

  I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles. Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious approach seems to be the last real contender standing.

• by fairity on 5/23/23, 6:19 PM

  People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware that Google has already done this.

  Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ.

  Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.

• by wg0 on 5/23/23, 1:49 PM

  At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't.

  Isn't it or something has changed lately?

• by boh on 5/23/23, 2:17 PM

  One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.

• by AndrewDucker on 5/23/23, 2:23 PM

  So they're going to make the cars they're already running in Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then expand into other areas without having to spend money on advertising/operations? What's the game plan?

• by hahaxdxd123 on 5/23/23, 1:29 PM

  This doesn't really make sense to me.

  What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.

  Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.

• by hardware2win on 5/23/23, 1:41 PM

  I guess Anthony didnt have to steal Waymos secrets after all

• by hnburnsy on 5/23/23, 3:11 PM

  Amazing that they can both get past the 245 million dollar lawsuit settlement over IP and trade secret theft.

• by Animats on 5/23/23, 5:11 PM

  This may just mean that Waymo is outsourcing its Chandler AZ self-driving operations to Uber. That makes sense for Waymo. Have details come out about which way the money is flowing?

  For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.

• by honeybadger1 on 5/23/23, 7:39 PM

  I am happy to see movement from any big player on autonomous driving. I still believe Tesla will win this war but I am happy to see healthy competition in this space, happy that partnerships forming to make it happen.

• by summerlight on 5/23/23, 7:30 PM

  I think this makes sense for the both. Waymo's technological advantage won't last forever. Unless they can overtake the entire automaker industry in a foreseeable future (which is extremely challenging goal even with Google's money), it's probably better to put path dependencies on your potential future customers and make it much harder to change. Uber desperately want to reduce its spend on drivers, so this also aligns well with their goal.

• by KETpXDDzR on 5/24/23, 3:43 PM

  I'm delighted to read these news. Uber finally found someone to partner with/get bought by. They offered their complete self-driving department for sale more than two years ago (I was part of a group to assess the deal with a possible buyer). I think Waymo also realized that Uber's self-driving devision is no competition to the big players. So I guess Waymo is mainly interested in their user base.

• by voz_ on 5/23/23, 8:23 PM

  I was a founding engineer on the first uber platform for third party autonomous vehicles. It was just ~4 people and we got a ton done, growing to ~60 people and onboarding a lot of partners before I left. It was a really interesting time, and I wonder how much of that original code is still running here, or if the marketplace team (where the project eventually transferred) ended up replacing it all.

• by mikeortman on 5/23/23, 1:56 PM

  On a side note, I don't think anything screams big company enterprise more than contracts being announced with a horizontal bar between logos

• by omneity on 5/23/23, 1:17 PM

  Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game. Interesting times.

  I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.

• by cco on 5/23/23, 8:46 PM

  Well...my prediction was off just a bit[1]. Waymo and Uber are partnering, not Cruise buying Lyft.

  imo the thesis is the same though, I would expect to see Cruise and Lyft partner and/or similar sometime in the near future.

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929710

• by haxton on 5/23/23, 2:12 PM

  I had interviewed with Uber's ATG years ago and their pitch, even then, was that they were building a platform for whoever won the autonomous game to be available on uber, not just their own cars.

  Interesting they kept that strategy even after spinning out that group. Curious if they managed to keep anyone from that team to help with this product.

• by ackbar03 on 5/23/23, 1:16 PM

  So now Uber is going to be a gazillion dollar company? Wasn't that sort of their value hypothesis?

• by boringg on 5/23/23, 1:19 PM

  After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now they are going to go the route they should have always gone since they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off.. partnership.

• by dicroce on 5/23/23, 3:31 PM

  I bet Alphabet has calculated that of all of the rides a typical ridesharing service offers only a subset is currently serviceable by autonomous vehicles. A deal (or buying) Uber allows them to offer the service on only the rides they are confident they can fulfill.

• by deepzn on 5/23/23, 5:00 PM

  I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta- one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it, which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets better and is able to prove better driving than a human, which seems possible in certain metros at least as Waymo is doing, then they can do an autonomous Uber network of their Teslas.

  But I think this is a smart move to join forces, and will give the consumer healthy competition in this space.

• by justinzollars on 5/23/23, 5:50 PM

  Exciting! Now Uber can drive to the wrong GPS location - and never be able to course correct.

  (For whatever reason my apartment building is NP-impossible to deliver to)

• by nerdchum on 5/23/23, 1:56 PM

  Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving?

  Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?

• by borissk on 5/23/23, 7:24 PM

  Uber had a lot of data scientists and AI engineers working on their autonomous driving technology. Wonder if they all left.

• by lopkeny12ko on 5/23/23, 3:41 PM

  Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective?

  * Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.

  * Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo.

  * Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber.

  * And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.

  What's going on here?

• by AnishLaddha on 5/23/23, 7:22 PM

  its probably the best way to approach this. Waymo doesn't need to waste its time on all the complicated regulations and technology around just ridesharing + Uber gets a foot back in the door to AVs.

• by realjohng on 5/23/23, 8:53 PM

  Lol remember when Uber stole Wayne code? Now they’re buds. True settlement

• by shmatt on 5/23/23, 1:31 PM

  The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad

  "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside"

  Now it's going to be a lot more interesting

• by mattlondon on 5/23/23, 1:08 PM

  Shame Uber and to kill someone before just licensing the tech.

• by rafaelero on 5/23/23, 1:41 PM

  Sounds like a great deal for Uber and a meh deal for Waymo.

• by tamade on 5/23/23, 8:40 PM

  Ironic given the legal saga between the two

• by edgefield on 5/23/23, 12:56 PM

  This seems to leave Lyft in a bad spot?

• by fnord77 on 5/23/23, 2:09 PM

  ironic since Uber tried to steal Waymo's industrial secrets

• by DSingularity on 5/23/23, 12:55 PM

  Alphabet investment synergy potential is high.

• by propogandist on 5/23/23, 12:57 PM

  old enemies coming together, they must be out of options

  https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/anthony-levandowski-former...

• by xyst on 5/23/23, 3:17 PM

  Yea let’s just kick people to the streets and let the “autonomous drivers” take over. Any “value” spent on humans is then gobbled up by a mega corporation. The ultra wealthy get wealthier. Will anybody please think of the shareholders!!!!1

  The optics on this are totally not absolute dog shit.

• by kornhole on 5/23/23, 1:05 PM

  If I can't bike or bus it, taxis paid with cash is still my first preference.