Uber Launches 'Uber Freight' Website To Prepare the World For Autonomous Delivery Trucks (inverse.com) 92
Uber has launched a website for a service called Uber Freight. While there are little details about the company's expansion from ride-hailing, Uber Freight is meant to prepare the world for autonomous delivery trucks, according to Inverse. From the report: Uber acquired a startup called Otto, which planned to bring the first self-driving trucks to market, in August. Since then the company has used its trucks to deliver 50,000 cans of beer and hundreds of Christmas trees in San Francisco. This new service won't use those trucks, at least not at the beginning. Instead it will function much like Uber's existing platform: Some people will sign up to drive items across the country, and others will join so they can send packages without having to sign a contract with established shipping companies. The service will likely bring "surge pricing" to trucking, too. Uber Freight could also help Otto's trucks by using data gathered from drivers on the platform. This would allow the self-driving vehicles to learn from experienced people while regulators figure out how to govern autonomous trucks and the technology catches up to all of the promises made by its creators. Uber Freight's launch coincides with growing interest in trucking from many tech companies. Nikola Motor Company wants to use tech to make trucking more environmentally friendly and appealing to millennials; Tesla's working on self-driving trucks; the list could go on. Uber told Inverse it's going to wait until the new year to elaborate on how the system works. "We don't have any new information to share at the moment," a spokesperson said, "but hope to in the new year so please do stay in touch." It looks like the future of trucking -- or at least one potential future -- is going to take a little while longer to make its debut.
is uber smart or stupid? (Score:5, Funny)
the way they have been behaving seems like they either
A) have a boatload of cash and dont know how to spend it
~or~
B) see the writing on the way and throwing shit at it, hoping it sticks to cover said writing up
Re: is uber smart or stupid? (Score:1)
Uber is projected to lose 2.6 billion next year. So, both.
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More is likely. They lost $800m in the last quarter, more actually if they hadn't gotten an injection from said sale of assets/asset merger in China. In other words, they're likely on track to blow through $4-7B next year. What absolutely blows my mind is that they have given uber a valuation of $70B. That's more then GM, Ford or Chrysler and they make physical products, have credit/banking divisions, and own subsidiary companies in everything from trains and planes to data management. Hell that's half
What are Uber's expenses? (Score:2)
What do they spend their money on?
The ride-sharing app, the database behind it, etc is a pretty decent project (I'm totally not dissing it, and I admire the idea too), but even one million dollars is a heaping mountain of money for that. Be super-pessimistic and call it ten million. But even then: what are the other millions spent on?
Re:is uber smart or stupid? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no expert in these things, but the best explanation I've seen for Uber's recent activities is that the company is over-valued for a taxi service (sorry, "ride-sharing service"), they KNOW they are over-valued, and are trying to justify that value by entering into other business areas. They are trying to position themselves not just as a transport company but instead as a tech start-up because once saner heads start looking at what their core business is, their price will drop like a stone. A taxi companies is not worth $20 billion, but a tech company that is developing its own auto-driving vehicles? The sky is the limit!
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Uber's recent activities is that the company is over-valued for a taxi service
Indeed. You nailed it. The problem for Uber is that they, and many investors, assumed that ride-sharing would be like auctions or social media where the network effect [wikipedia.org] would create a "winner-take-all" market like it did for eBay and Facebook. That didn't happen. Lyft is hanging in there, Didi clobbered Uber in China, there are several upstarts in India. There is little customer loyalty: I will gladly switch between Uber and Lyft to save a buck. There is not even any driver lock-in: many Uber drivers,
Re:is uber smart or stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pretty dim view. Perhaps you can say that people buying their stock on public markets are stupid rubes buying into hype, but before Uber was public, what was the compelling pitch to private investors that got them a $40b valuation in 2014?
Yes, yes, I know this is slashdot, so stupid VCs and dumb billionaires, etc etc. But let's get real. These firms ran numbers to get to $40b, and you think that pitch was competing with taxis, Lyft, and others?
You don't tell investors you're going to lose money for years without a pitch for an utterly transformative business plan. That's not: cheaper taxi! No, Uber was one of the first people publicly talking about autonomous vehicles being the next step. I remember, because it got them a ton of shit from Uber haters, who used the news to beat up on uber drivers. "Uber is telling you that you're a temporary inconvenience and they will get rid of drivers as soon as they can."
They bought Otto... out of desperation? Really? Doesn't it seem more likely that it is 100% in line with a transformative transportation story they've had from the beginning?
You know another hyped up story that lost money for years and years and years (and I think still is)? Amazon. Online bookstore. Then, f it, let's sell everything. We have some spare capacity in our servers, so let's rent that out too. How we shop is completely different now vs 10 years ago, and Amazon owns that. How we do infrastructure is completely different from what we did 5 years ago, and AWS owns that.
I think Uber saw an equally silly misuse of resources in transportation. You buy a $20k car so you can drive it for 90 mins a day, and the other 22.5 hours it is unused capacity. Trucking is massive, extremely complex, is very sensitive to efficiency and speed of delivery, and has some serious limitations from human drivers (so much so that laws had to be passed to force drivers to rest).
Now, almost no business sets a course and then powers straight ahead. It's fluid and involves reactions to market signals. But I think the narrative that Uber is lost and grasping at straws is really hard to swallow. No way do they get a $40b valuation in private funding rounds with a story limited to attacking taxis.
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Perhaps you can say that people buying their stock on public markets are stupid rubes buying into hype
Uber is a private company. The only investors (so far) are VCs. VCs may be stupid, but they are not rubes.
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Go look up how much VC/IPO money was poured into Pets.com. (Admittedly an order of magnitude or so less than Uber, but still a shitload.)
These are the type of people who believed that offering free shipping on 50 pound bags of cat litter and dog food was a good business model.
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"Uber is a private company. The only investors (so far) are VCs. VCs may be stupid, but they are not rubes"
I think that statement is almost making mattwarden's case, that Uber always had a plan beyond cab-driving-and-pizza-delivery for everyone.
Problem for them is that there's so much legislation & so many forces at play in freight & transport that you can lose years & huge amount of cash trying to be the disruptor. Look at the history of Amazon, who wasn't limited (much) by what they could sel
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They have either been ignoring that, buying their way around it or going for direct influence on politicians.
Remember last weeks story of them telling California to fuck off about licences for self-driving vehicles? They didn't win that one but they have won plenty of others.
You may have a point that with freight it will be harder to ignore the legislation as with taxis, but I doubt it. A lot of governments had a serious revenue stream from taxi licences
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Get ready for third world style "traffic safety". Overloading, low bridges, whatever, rules are for other people
My tired old adage is that nothing changes until someone dies. The 1st Uber robot-truck that takes out several lanes of cars will see them sued, legislated and reined in right fucking quick
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The bit to add to that is that consideration of safety fades over time so if nobody has died recently things slip. Sad, but I see it a lot.
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The 1st Uber robot-truck that takes out several lanes of cars will see them sued, legislated and reined in right fucking quick
Because that's what happened to Walmart after the Tracy Morgan crash?
In 2008: [legalinfo.com]
The robots just need to beat those numbers and it'll be the humans that fin
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The WalMart crash was caused by a human who dozed off and charged with several counts of vehicular assault and one of vehicular manslaughter.
And he & WalMart were blaming each other back & forth. With a robot truck, all blame falls on the company.
Also Tracy Morgan is not one to garner much public sympathy especially after his joke about jerking off to images of Sarah Palin.
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Also Tracy Morgan is not one to garner much public sympathy especially after his joke about jerking off to images of Sarah Palin.
And I forgot he pissed off the left with his remarks that if lesbians are only pretending to love women because they only really hate men and if had a gay son , he'd "stab the little ni***r to death"
Re: is uber smart or stupid? (Score:1)
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Something the people in politics care far less about until there is a high profile death or a large cluster of deaths.
Indeed, just like the taxi regulation bodies didn't, but Uber went around them. I think they'll try the same again and possibly even get away with it for long enough. I think the department of transportation will get overruled just l
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You are not speaking for Brazil (and for "general Latin America"): the legislation to achieve traffic safety is pretty good (European-like, I think...) - you are talking about region of India, right?
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You buy a $20k car so you can drive it for 90 mins a day, and the other 22.5 hours it is unused capacity.
A car isn't "unused" just because you're not driving it at the moment. Its presence represents your ability to go anywhere you want at a moment's notice, at a very low cost, and without any big corporations tracking you everywhere you go. It's like saying health insurance is 99.9% useless because you only spend a tiny fraction of your life in doctor's offices.
A shared fleet of self-driving cars owned by Uber will never offer that same freedom, let alone the price. Maybe it could work for people who only
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Your insurance example is a terrible one, as it misunderstands what insurance is buying you. But I agree with you 100% on the freedom issues. I think it is inevitable that we will eventually have certain AV-only roads, and this bothers me because it's harder to opt out. Same is true with smartphones. I want to opt out, but it is very difficult to do so as life increasingly assumes you have one, and there is little and shrinking incentive to serve the market segment that doesn't.
But I don't follow your logic
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Only after a several thousand dollar buy, right? And there's gas/ethanol/diesel/electric cost and parking fess (there's public transportation that "represents your ability to go anywhere you want at a moment's notice, at a very low cost", and for real low cost, in some cities though...)
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No, it's not (what a terrible analogy!)
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It's a gold rush mentality. It's a very long way from normal reality while the boom holds. Consider for example how Uber has gotten away with breaking laws all around the world which would have landed established taxi companies in court. Should those laws exist? Perhaps not, a lot of them are truly anti-capitalist purchased monopolies, but still Uber getting around it by influencing political figures directly is not going to help us in the long run even if they are in the right on a few
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Yes, yes, I know this is slashdot, so stupid VCs and dumb billionaires, etc etc. But let's get real. These firms ran numbers to get to $40b, and you think that pitch was competing with taxis, Lyft, and others?
Yes, *let's* be real. Let's take the case of Theranos as an example. They raked in a huge amount of VC funding on the back of promises. One VC (google ventures as it happened) thought to do some due diligence and send in some blood to Theranos and another company simultaneously to see if their magical
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What a your argument, exactly? That a majority of VC deals look like Theranos? Your example of stupid VC investment isn't even responsive to the point of discussion, which is whether these investors wrote checks at a $40b valuation purely in the "better, cheaper taxi" pitch. Your example is about an impressive pitch that wasn't real. If anything, this seems to support my view that VCs got excited about something else in Uber's pitch, something much bigger than "better, cheaper taxi".
I am not making an argum
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My question is: are they turning a profit yet?
No? Rather, 600M$ in the red over 2016? Well, I'm not waiting for their IPO.
Re:is uber smart or stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
My question is: are they turning a profit yet?
Pushing for profitability now would be foolish. Uber has plenty of cash, and plenty of runway. They need to push for growth. Profit can come later. The VCs didn't invest billions to get a small mildly profitable mom-and-pop business. They are looking for another Amazon or Google (which both endured years of little or no profit).
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Thing is, with subsidies to the drivers making up a majority of the 1.2B$ (I was wrong, 600M$ was just one Q of 2016!) deficit, once Uber hits market dominance it'll get antitrusted to the ground in all the countries where it hasn't bought the politicians. Or have to give up on those subsidies, thereby driving their drivers out of business.
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Yeah, there are four quarters in a year. Uber loses money at the rate of over $2 billion and has done for several years.
It's nigh on impossible to see how they can convert that into a profit: they sarge nothing more than a taxi company with an app.
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It's almost as though traditional taxi business had the business part down, so that there's no more cream to be had off the top. So Uber is left trying to undercut the existing, profitable, business and its non-employee drivers at the same time, shouting "disruption! disruption!" into the sunset like so many noisy startup wankers used to do.
So I wonder how many countries they can take in this way in the coming two to three years.
Winner take all (Score:2)
Uber's planning on being that last man standing in the world of transportation. So is Google. And Amazon. And hell maybe even Faceboo
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600m in the red with 2.something billion in projected losses
that's why I ask, is it party town before the burning of Rome, or do they have something really worth while
Outsourcing 2.0 !? (Score:1)
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just wondering (Score:5, Interesting)
How exactly does it deliver the package
Does it have an onboard robot to carry it to your front door?
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Air cannon :)
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How exactly does it deliver the package
Does it have an onboard robot to carry it to your front door?
TFA is not very informative, but judging by the accompanying photos, it looks like they will initially be doing long and short haul commercial trucking, and not to-the-home deliveries.
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I'm sure we are talking dock-to-dock trucking. Humans (for now) on the loading end, and humans (for now) on the unloading end. Autonomous 24/7 operation in between.
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I'm not saying it's Drones (Score:3)
Here's the thing: whatever else the future economy has in store for us, it's not employment. Not unless you're a member of the ruling class of investors, one of their (very few) slaves/lackies or one of the (even fewer) engineers who runs their machines. Remember, they don't need you to buy their
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it poops it out from a slow convener belt in the back (in order to not damage fragile items)
Oh, great - just great (Score:3)
I'm not sure what scares me more - the thought of Uber self-driving trucks cruising through red lights in major cities, or the thought of Uber long-haul freight trucks cruising down the highway with completely untrained drivers behind the wheel.
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the thought of Uber self-driving trucks cruising through red lights in major cities
To be fair, the Uber SDC recorded running a red light was under fully human control at the time. According the Uber, the driver has been fired.
Re:Oh, great - just great (Score:4, Informative)
We really are not talking about city driving here. In fact, they could take a huge leap by limiting AV trucks to interstate only, and requiring trained commercial drivers to take it the last x miles from the interstate to the dock site. The long haul in between is where 24/7 operation is a big gain.
Old Men Yell at Cloud (Score:4, Funny)
"No one is going to replace my Horse. These cars are nothing but death traps".
Re: Old Men Yell at Cloud (Score:2)
Say that to the thousands of people killed in the 1890s by horse & buggy accidents. One example:
North Adams, Mass., Aug. 30--Charles Davis, aged 41, a milk dealer, was thrown from his wagon, when his horse ran away today, and died three hours later from a fractured skull. He leaves a widow and three children.
Boston Journal, Boston, MA 31 Aug 1898
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is filled with all kinds of rules.
A robot can be programmed to follow rules a lot more strictly than a human.
Some rules shouldn't apply to SDTs, such as the 11 hours per day driving limit. Robots don't need sleep.
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
With Uber's complete disrespect for the law and their unwillingness to abide by licensing and regulation in mind, I wonder how long they will last under the iron fist of the US DOT. The rules for freight make the rules around taxis rather simplistic. Freight isn't simple. It's not like letters where the most you can worry about is the occasional envelope filled with poison or box bomb and for the most part paper is getting moved from one spot to the next. Freight has restrictions. Some things are temperature controlled. Some are not. Some things are incompatible with other things. Some things are poisonous or corrosive, or both. It's a lot more complicated than simply showing up at Joe's Warehouse with a couple of buddies and a U-haul. There is a lot more to freight and logistics than having a truck and driver in the right spot at the right time. And when things are done wrong, the results can wind up on the news - in a bad way. I'm not sure that a robot can provide the proper information to first responders when the truck has an accident. And the driver has to be commercially licensed - not just some dude who shows up with his pickup truck. I really think that Uber trying to disrupt the freight industry in the same way they disrupted the taxi industry is a disaster for Uber, and for the unfortunate fatalities to come.
Of course, this could be Uber management scamming investors with vaporware.
insurance and liability isses who is going pay? (Score:2)
insurance and liability issues who is going pay? when state property is damaged? And it's not like the courts will holdup an uber EULA.
Who needs to respect law (Score:2)
Seriously, I got stuck on the highway here in blinding rain once and kept getting overtaken by asshats going 80. Found out their Audis and BMWs have lane assist that keeps them in the lanes even when they can't see. Like one of 'em once told me: "Let'em hit me, I'm older and better insured".
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A lot of what you list has to do with what goes on which truck. This is already highly computerized, and anyway not at all what Uber is making autonomous. As for your first responders example, there is huge potential for much more information to be much more quickly available to first responders than a human driver sifting through discarded cheeseburger wrappers for their printed document.
Getting an autonomous truck to negotiate interstates has got to be easier than getting a car to negotiate city streets.
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You have to do both. The cities are where the products are going. So a truck has to be able to navigate New York City as well as I70 through western Kansas.
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This is a highly unimaginative view. AV truck stops at designated points (let's just use rest areas for now to keep it simple) closest to the destination city. Driver takes over the truck and negotiates the city to the destination point.
You are 100% wrong when you say AV trucks need to negotiate city streets. It would be expensive to get an AV truck to do this, and it's pretty damn cheap to have a human take it the last 30 minutes of the trip. To me this is clearly how AV trucking will work initially.
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The rules for freight make the rules around taxis rather simplistic.
Truth. And people don't even know how much they don't know. For instance: Did you know that makeup and perfume are classified as hazmat? Do you know what the laws are for allowable weight per axle? Are there any guidelines for load balance front-to-rear or side-to-side? If current regulations limit how many hours a driver may be on the road continuously, how would you apply those limits to a "driver" sleeping in the back while the truck drives down the highway?
This shit ain't easy. And sure, some of it may
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Haven't you heard? Travis Kalanick and Donald Trump are buds now. Kalanick signed went all-in and even kissed enough jaundiced ass to score himself an appointment to Trump's unofficial (And nicely exempt from Senate confirmation.) "Strategic and Policy Forum" shadow cabinet. Any DoT policies that inconvenience Uber ought to be gone in a year; along with federal highway funds for any state that doesn't play along.
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There are systems that do logistics and understand all these rules [trackensure.com], there is plenty of automation in the trucking business already, nothing wrong with adding a few more bells and whistles.
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That was my thought too... Taking on the odd city, county, or state is one thing. Taking on the feds is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
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I think Uber cracked the hard one first.
Either way I think Uber is going to cuddle up to politicians again but this time convince them that all those "tedious safety laws" just do not matter and are getting in the way of jobs (or hookers and blow for the politicians). The truly scary thing is that Banana Republic corruption shit that Uber has been pulling has worked just about everywhere with taxis and it probably will with freight as wel
Good (Score:2)
A delivery truck arrives with no driver. Self service, help yourself to what you want. What could go wrong?
Sure saves me the trouble of having to capture those pesky delivery drones.
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A delivery truck arrives with no driver. Self service, help yourself to what you want. What could go wrong?
Unlocking and opening the cargo door will require a PIN and a fingerprint scan, and there will be multiple cameras in the trailer, recording the unloading from several angles, so I don't think this will be a big problem.
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cell jammier or just stop the truck in a rural dead zone.
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how do they get the fingerprint anyway?
They just record whatever is on your finger when you make your pickup. If you have nothing extra on your finger and you don't find it an invasion of privacy to let a private company have a scan of your fingerprint then they have a record of it and can use that when they try to take you to court for being involved in an enhanced delivery. Personally I know a lot of people who would object to them scanning their fingerprint. Which will be interesting if the company i
When Sheriff Buford T. Justice hauling CEO to jail (Score:2)
When will Sheriff Buford T. Justice be hauling the uber CEO to jail
They're in a race with Amazon (Score:3)
Like I said here: [slashdot.org]
This is Step 1
What is Uber for regular Uber doing right now? That's right, self-driving cars.
This "Uber for Trucks" is just Amazon getting all the shippers into their system so they'll be in the database with contracts already signed as soon as the self-driving trucks are ready.
I got the name wrong, but the play was right.
It's been done. Uber are miles behind (Score:3)
By the time Uber can do that, the truck manufacturers will have moved on, and Uber will be left behind again.
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Uber is off mission (Score:2)
I don't think people really want the future Uber is trying to push. They should stop the self-driving car research, today. That future will happen anyway but