Narrative: Tech Disrupts Transportation
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
GM to More than Triple Cruise Autonomous Tech Employees in California Over 5 Years (Apr 12, 2017)
GM has filed for and received a tax credit in the sum of $8 million from the state of California in return for investing $14 million in office space and related items this year and committing to hire 1163 employees over the next five years for its self-driving tech subsidiary Cruise. Given how the importance of autonomous driving technology will grow in the coming years and the fact that California is the hub of much of the testing, it’s logical that GM would want to increase its base there significantly. However, these 1163 employees represent a more than three-fold increase in its employee base in the state, and the average salary GM is projecting for those employees is $116,000, so my guess is they’ll mostly be skilled engineers.
via Axios (the filing from which I pulled the data above is here)
Cadillac takes aim at Tesla’s Autopilot with ‘hands-free’ Super Cruise technology – The Verge (Apr 10, 2017)
One of my big objections to Tesla’s Autopilot technology has always been the name, which connotes a level of autonomy the system doesn’t actually aspire to and which it certainly doesn’t deliver. Tesla has partly dealt with that issue by updating its software to require users to keep their hands on the wheel, but does little else to ensure attention, which means that even when the system performs as it should, there’s little guarantee that the human driver will. Cadillac today announced a new Autopilot-like feature but very sensibly named it in a way much more likely to give buyers and users an accurate impression of what it does, tying it to the very familiar cruise control already in almost all new cars. However, the more important thing in my view is that the system also comes with lots of protections designed to ensure that the driver does actually pay attention, which is a huge issue in situations where attention but not activity is required, such as driving a car with this kind of intelligent cruise control running. There’s a long history of scientific research in this area, and it all says that paying attention in a passive way like this is something human beings aren’t good at, and Cadillac’s new system is designed to help the driver stay attentive. The big question about this new system, though, is that although it’s being billed as LIDAR-based, it’s not using a LIDAR in the car but instead using mapping data previously generated by LIDAR, which means it’s non-real-time. That, in turn, means that if anything has changed in the road environment since the map was generated, the car won’t know about it, and GM doesn’t seem to have talked much about how frequently it’s going to update its maps of US and Canadian highways to mitigate this.
via The Verge
Uber responds to Google lawsuit over self-driving cars – Business Insider (Apr 7, 2017)
We finally have a fleshed-out response from Uber to the Waymo lawsuit over stealing of LIDAR technology, and it doesn’t do much more than muddy the water over this issue. The biggest sticking point here is that Anthony Levandowski, who is alleged to have stolen files from Waymo before he left and used these to develop LIDAR technology at Otto and then Uber, refuses to cooperate with the investigation, and Uber refuses to compel him as an employee to cough up the files. Uber also argues that its LIDAR design is different in key respects from Waymo’s and therefore that it clearly hasn’t been copied from it. The judge seems to be highly skeptical of Uber’s claimed inability to do anything with regard to the Levandowski files, and seems minded to grant at least a temporary injunction against Uber’s LIDAR technology. Uber’s claims that such an injunction would significantly harm its business seem like nonsense – this technology has nothing to do with its core business today and is merely being tested in a few cities. A longer-term injunction would obviously be more damaging because it would stop Uber from advancing the technology, but in and of itself that’s not a valid argument against such an injunction should the judge determine that the design was copied. Lots more to come on this, no doubt.
via Business Insider
Lyft raises more than $500m, giving it a new valuation of $6.9bn – Financial Times (Apr 6, 2017)
There were reports about new fundraising for Lyft a while back, and it looks like it’s now completed a decent-sized round at a significantly higher valuation than its last round a year ago. The FT article also suggests that Lyft has been benefiting from Uber’s recent troubles, though there’s actually been little evidence of that and some to the contrary. It’s still smart for Lyft to raise funding and fuel its rapid expansion in the US during this time, but there’s no guarantee that it’ll be able to gain meaningful share as a result given that it seems to have been able to do little of that even in what’s been a disastrous period for Uber on the PR front.
via Financial Times
Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving – The Economist (Apr 5, 2017)
This isn’t a particularly new idea, and in fact it’s one that ride sharing companies have used for some time now in trying to convince regulators to allow them to operate. But it’s always good to see real data behind an idea, and in this case it seems to back it up pretty well, at least in New York City. The data isn’t consistent across the boroughs, but there’s certainly a clear trend suggesting the introduction of Uber in the City did indeed reduce drink driving, which is obviously a good thing. That’s a nice counterpoint to all the negative news stories recently about Uber in particular and ride sharing in general (including the one I just shared about driver vetting).
via The Economist
8,000 Uber, Lyft, ride-hailing drivers fail new background checks in Massachusetts – The Boston Globe (Apr 5, 2017)
Massachusetts put in place a new law requiring drivers for ride sharing services to acquire a license, which in turn requires passing an extensive background check. Of the 71,000 existing drivers who applied, a little over 11% failed these background checks, in many cases because of issues with driver’s licenses, at least some of which should have been caught by Uber and Lyft. Those companies, in turn, countered that they either don’t have access to longer criminal histories or that they have deliberately ignored older offenses as a way to help people with troubled pasts move on. Though there’s some truth to the former point, the latter is at least partly spin. Sex offenders, of whom 51 were rejected by Massachusetts, have to register, and presumably blocking them from becoming drivers would be both easy and desirable, no matter how long ago the offenses. The Massachusetts law is stricter than in other states and as such helps highlight how the background checks the companies themselves conduct can miss potentially serious issues in drivers’ histories.
via Boston Globe
Tesla is now worth more than Ford after delivering a record number of cars for the quarter – Recode (Apr 3, 2017)
There are two things here: firstly, Tesla’s Q1 delivery number, and secondly what’s happened to its share price since it was announced. Stock valuations are interesting, but far from definitive as indications of what companies are worth or who’s “winning” in any meaningful sense. Tesla’s stock price is all about trajectory, and an unusual (perhaps even unwarranted) amount of investor confidence and enthusiasm that the company which is currently very small and unprofitable compared to its legacy peers will quickly catch up on both fronts. That, in turn, requires believing in Tesla’s manufacturing projections, which require a massive increase in its growth rate, from 56% annual growth in the past year to something much faster to hit its 500k target for 2018, which would be a six-fold increase over its 2016 numbers. Long-term, it seems very likely Tesla will reach that kind of scale, but given its track record, there’s every reason to believe it will hit this and other related targets later than it has projected. On that basis, then, the valuation seems that much less justifiable on the basis of any near-to-medium-term results.
via Recode
Ford leads self-driving tech pack, outpacing Waymo, Tesla, Uber: study – USA Today (Apr 3, 2017)
This article is based on a study by a company called Navigant Research, and it seems to be an evaluating of companies’ strategic assets rather than any actual capabilities today, so it’s worth noting that context for their rankings of companies here. Notably, they rank traditional carmakers in the first six spots, with Waymo apparently the first non-traditional / tech company in the rankings. That’s notable, because all the numbers suggest Waymo is out in front in testing of autonomous driving technology in California by a long way, and although we don’t have equivalent data for Michigan, where Ford does much of its testing, I’d be surprised if it had done many more miles. So this is mostly an evaluation of the benefits the big automakers derive from their existing massive scale and capabilities in building vehicles and bringing them to market, something none of the pure tech companies has (Tesla, of course, has some small-scale manufacturing capability and is looking to ramp fast, but comes in 12th in the rankings nonetheless). This jives with my perception that, even as these tech companies do increasingly well in developing their own technology, they’re very unlikely in most cases to build the cars, and as such the traditional car companies are still in a position of strength and potential leadership when it comes to actually building and deploying the technology.
via USA Today
Uber Crash Shows Human Traits in Self-Driving Software – Bloomberg (Mar 29, 2017)
I think the headline here would more appropriately read “Uber crash shows bystanders see human traits in self-driving software” because there’s no evidence that the car actually gunned a light turning yellow in this case, but that’s how witnesses perceived it. (I joked on Twitter earlier that perhaps Uber’s autonomy software had been taught the company’s values, one of which is “always be hustlin'”.) The reality is that self-driving cars are often taught to emulate human behavior rather than driving in some idealized perfect way, because that’s what makes human passengers feel comfortable and ultimately trust the technology. But I very much doubt that Uber’s cars are taught to accelerate through lights in the process of turning yellow or red. It appears that police concluded Uber’s technology was not at fault in this crash, and after a brief break over the weekend, its cars are back on the roads in the various cities where they’re operating. But given Uber’s failure rates relative to Waymo’s, and the fact that Uber cars are carrying paying customers, there’s certainly potential for a lot more crashes, some of them actually Uber’s fault.
via Bloomberg
Lyft tests Shuttle, a commuter service that’s basically a bus – Mashable (Mar 29, 2017)
Though I think we tend to think of services like Uber and Lyft as disrupting the status quo in transportation, it’s sometimes amusing to watch them instead recreate existing models, as in this case, where Lyft appears to be creating what’s essentially a bus service. Now, it’s still different in that it’s not tied to set routes, the drivers aren’t professionals or employed by any municipality as most bus services are, and the pricing is unpredictable, so there may be both pros and cons to this approach. But the more adoption of ride sharing services grows, the more they’re going to emulate existing modes of mass transportation like buses, because those continue to be the most efficient and cost effective ways to get people from A to B, especially during commuting times. Whether they end up being better than traditional mass transit in the same way as the original ride sharing services were better than traditional taxis remains to be seen.
via Mashable