What's the story behind Otto? There are exactly two blog posts on the Otto blog- Otto launches and Otto sells to Uber.
The line 'When we started Otto we committed to rethinking transportation' - what, three months ago?
I hadn't heard of these guys before, but a business designed to be quick flipped? Was this business ever not part of Uber? What kind of three month old startup has a team that size?
There doesn't seem to actually be even an MVP product there. How do businesses like this end up getting built and sold so quickly?
This is from the big Bloomberg article/interview that came out today:
'Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors. They’d grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city’s Ferry Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company’s trucks to market faster.'
Which implies to me that the plan was for Uber to acquire Otto all along.
"Okay, Travis, but I don't want to just get hired on as another employee, I want to be cool like Kyle Vogt. Give me a few months to buy some trucks, rig them up with sensors, put splashy logos on them and get some press, and then you can acquire me using some of those Saudi gigabucks you picked up in your series F."
The author is an investor - from reading it probably pretty early - in Uber. It's probably not, but I do wonder whether as an investor he encourages Travis to maintain his Wii Tennis position or not :)
I see nothing wrong with it. Otto takes on the risk of developing a new business, and gets acquired if the risk pays off. Uber gets to benefit from Otto's efforts without taking the risk, but they have to pay for it in order to make it theirs. It's mutually beneficial, and risks get taken that probably wouldn't be taken otherwise, which is good for innovation.
This kind of thing is pretty common at Adobe and Cisco as well. There is a bit of a revolving door of executives and senior engineers leaving to start companies, intending from the beginning of being acquired by their former employer if their business pans out.
Many companies could not take the risk of running an innovative new business internally -- their board wouldn't let them, or their investors wouldn't. This kind of thing probably results in more research and innovation taking place that would have otherwise.
Probably deliberate; probably sensible too. Package up a group of people capable, as scientists, of making auto-trucks work. And seek a company with deeper pockets that wanted to get into the auto-truck business, and that could take them on as a ready-to-go modular truck department.
Is it just me or has there been a proliferation of "strategic startups" lately? They never intend to turn a profit but rather seek to become a pawn in the larger game between e.g. Google and Apple. Of course, in a winner-take-all market, it should be the easiest way to "win". Go Big or Go Home is now Go Big or Get Acquired...
IMO, it's just good positioning (as in market positioning) for getting hired through an alternative process, with a higher (presumably) payoff.
You prove you can build the prototype, de-risking the hirer's decision to pay you more than a normal hire. This reasoning presumes that the 'normal' hiring process and market resembles a lemon market. This is my IMHO. Bad hires drag down all participant's perceived value and compensation.
This is pretty common in the biotech start-up world as well. Do an analysis of what the big biotechs (Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, BMS) are investing in and go out and start a company in that space. A few years later, you either get a big investment from them, an in-licensing deal or outright acquisition. I think it's a pretty smart way to do things.
Of course, what's "hot" can change pretty fast, so you have to be lucky as well.
Funny enough, I was recently working with a startup that wanted to buy the ot.to domain. It looked like it was being used for directions to an event or someone's house no longer than a month ago.
We were also thinking of branding as Otto, and had a hard time finding anything about a company named Otto -- stealth mode indeed.
And the logos are eerily similar as well. I was thrown off track shortly and wondered what this traditional company was doing with uber until I realized, that someone would probably not have done enough research into the potential dangers of this branding.
I think you are assuming the worst without any information. It's not surprising in the least if you take a minute to find the back story:
The founder started a company called 510 systems which was sold to Google, and years later he left Google to create another company focused on self-driving trucks. They obviously have deep experience in the area, and Uber obviously wants that expertise.
Uber could be buying the company not for the founder's experience, but for that of the team that said founder assembled. In real estate parlance this is called "land assemblage": a developer spends years buying up enough adjacent plots of land to build something useful, then he sells it at a substantial premium to someone with enough local political connections and/or capital to make that happen. There should be a subcategory of tech exits that's called "talent assemblage" where the CEO hires the right people to develop a product and sells it to someone with sufficient resources to see it through. While this isn't remotely as valuable as actually seeing the project through, it does still have considerable value.
EDIT: this would be a subcategory of the acquihire
I wonder whether they were upfront during recruiting all those team members that the intention was to "sell them" to Uber?
(You know, just like that real estate developer is always scrupulously honest when negotiating for that last plot of land, they always say something like "This is the last piece I need to make my seven digit profit! How much did you say you wanted for it?", and would _never_ try to tell the owner of that plot "This is exactly the same house design that my alzheimer's affected mother has lived in all her life - it'd make her last few years _so_ much more comfortable. Would you accept $market_rate*0.8?"...)
Probably these people if they knew they were going to work for Uber, they wouldn't have signed on. But Otto, sure, why not. Otto really was, at the face of it, a recruiting agency for Uber. (An expensive one, I'm sure..)
Acquihires are interesting in that they might seem expensive, but might actually be cheap from the standpoint of mitigating the risk of an unknown and unproven team.
This case might be a little different given the short time this team existed though.
> Acquihires are interesting in that they might seem expensive, but might actually be cheap from the standpoint of mitigating the risk of an unknown and unproven team.
Considering that, IMO, Valley companies severely overestimate that risk I think acquihires are a really expensive way to acquire people.
Exactly; given Uber's history of squeezing their drivers, minimizing their take home pay in an attempt to get the lowest ride rates in the market, I wouldn't be too quick to sign up either..
I had the exact same reaction. My other thought was how can a brand new start up founder in SF have the time to take 10 mile walks? Consider the average walking speed is 3 miles an hour. It all feels very press-release ready - two car-based start up guys walking ...
"stealth mode" is a thing. just because they launched their website a couple months ago doesn't mean they haven't been working on this stuff for while longer.
"Stealth mode" may not even be the reason they had minimal web presence. Maybe it wasn't a priority. I personally help off doing a proper website for three years and it launched last week. Mind you, I don't run a startup, so web marketing is the least of my concerns.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's some big mis-information by Otto.
They quote: " It’s no surprise that trucking companies see over 90% of their drivers quit every year in search of better opportunities. " That was in 2014, and it was due to (from the link they provide) “larger fleets raising pay, offering bonuses and attracting more and more drivers from smaller fleets to fill seats.” They were still truckers, just different companies.
The Otto piece made it sound like they were leaving trucking all together.
The whole tone of the article of "making lives better for truckers" just falls flat. Not sure why they're trying to suger-coat it.
They are reframing as "making lives better for truckers" so that truckers don't resist the change and boycott their employer through their unions. Eventually plan IS to get rid of the truckers.
If Otto takes the 11-hour highway stints out of trucker's days, and instead they work shift-work in major hubs, it is entirely possible that they will do both. The winners will get predictable, stable hours, the losers out of a job.
Probably with gradually reduced overall pay, because there will be a fraction of the jobs with the same number of potential truckers. I'm sure investors will see a solid return though.
Wouldn't people who can put up with and perhaps even enjoy the truck-driving lifestyle be the people who are currently the primary demographic of truckers?
I love how SV thinks everyone wants and needs their "help."
Large swaths of unemployed unskilled workers are already doing wonders for American politics so far, I can't wait to see what happens when 2.8 million more Americans play musical chairs/jobs.
Commercial long-haul freight belongs on railroads for both environmental and economic reasons because it is so much more efficient. It doesn't make sense that in our glorious free market freight on highways is taxpayer subsidized while freight on rail is mostly private.
Just in case you're thinking of France as an example of how public rail should work, you should know that our public rail company SNCF is 50 billions euros in debt (that's 56 billions dollars as of today). We pay a very high price for it in taxes, if you think it's cheap. Think again. It may be cheap for tourists though because they don't see the taxes and bottomless debt behind it.
That's because of the high speed passenger rail which even got extra infrastructure in France.
In Germany the public railway company Deutsche Bahn makes more than 1 billion in profits. All the profits come from freight, transporting people is done at a loss. The problem is that not enough money gets invested into upgrading lines highly frequented by freight.
Do you not think that French rail has generated at least 50 billion for the economy? After Japan, France is the highest user of rail (km per person per year).
It's fine for public transportation to not make back the investment if the advantages to the public are high enough (though with the Franc that's easier to deal with than the Euro)
You can't apply that to infrastructure spending. Passenger and freight rail improves the overall efficiency of an economy, it's absolutely reasonable to attempt to determine the net benefit from it.
Given that the French economy has been stagnent for the last 15+ years and given that many countries seem to be doing well or even better without such a money wasting machine of a rail system, allow me to think that leaving those 50+ and growing billions euros in the pocket of tax payers would have been nicer and better spent. Besides, I never use trains for anything crucial because they are always on strike, happened to me once for an important meeting, never using it again. Also, because of our communist unions, they also close early at night so it's useless to go visit friends and come back at night, still need to get an Uber.
The US already has the best freight railways in the world [0] and one of the highest rates of rail utilization (44%), with the lowest costs on a PPP basis. The last thing that would help is the government getting involved in them again.
This is a common misinterpretation of who pays for roads. Effectively roads are paid for by gas tax. Gas used to be a great proxy for how many miles you drive and where you drive those miles.
Now, freight and commercial trucks are effectively the biggest contributor to this tax plus they have to pay for weight. Consumers are the ones getting freebies (especially electric, hybrid etc.)
> Now, freight and commercial trucks are effectively the biggest contributor to this tax plus they have to pay for weight. Consumers are the ones getting freebies (especially electric, hybrid etc.)
I couldn't disagree more! Wear on roads is to the fourth power of pressure. And while trucks might have 10x the contact patch your car does, they might weigh 30x as much. So the pressure might be 3x and thus the wear 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 81 times as much.
If you look at road costs as largely maintenance then cars are subsidizing trucks because one truck could do orders of magnitude more damage, but have to buy orders of magnitude more fuel. Why is that? Because past a certain point fuel consumption is dominated by drag, and thus, frontal area. 8-10 MPG for an 18-wheeler is reasonable. That's not 81 times worse fuel consumption, perhaps only 2x or 3x compared to modern cars.
> Wear on roads is to the fourth power of pressure.
The rule of thumb in civil engineering is actually fourth power of axle load, per axle.
> So the pressure might be 3x and thus the wear 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 81 times as much.
Considering the rule of thumb is by axle load (not pressure density) you're off by about two orders of magnitude when comparing a large sedan to an 18-wheeler:
* A Model S is 2T over 2 axles, or 2 * 1T/axle
* A fully loaded 18-wheeler can go up to 36T (legal limit) over 5 axles, or 5 * 7.2T/axle[0]
That means the road wear per mile of an 18-wheeler is up to 2.5 (number of axles) * 7.2 (axle load) ^ 4 (4th power), or 6700 times the road wear of a Model S.
Now that's a worst case scenario (unloaded model s versus fully loaded 18-wheeler), but you get the point.
[0] on average, the front axle is usually ~5.5T with the rear axles being in the 7.5~8T range which increases the road wear difference quite a bit, to about 7500
Trucks pay fuel tax on diesel fuel (can be higher rate than gasoline), surcharges on fuel tax in some states, weight-distance tax in some states, and heavy vehicle use tax.
The federal weight limit for a truck--including the weight of the truck and trailer--is 80,000 pounds (without special permits), but they rarely haul that much.
8-10 MPG for a truck under real-world conditions is extremely uncommon. Typical efficiency falls in the 5-8 range, depending on the type of cargo + weight, geographic area, etc.
Comparing MPG between cars and trucks is not appropriate. It should be weight per mile per gallon or something accounting for the massive amount of supplies the truck is carrying.
In this case MPG is being used as a proxy for the amount of tax paid. Since weight was already accounted for during the analysis of the road wear per truck, it isn't meaningful for this comparison.
> Wear on roads is to the fourth power of pressure.
This isn't quite right. The pressure on the outside of the tire is the same as the pressure on the inside, and truck tires aren't inflated to 3x the psi of car tires - they might be 55 psi instead of 35. If pressure were really the issue, bicycles would be much more damaging to the road. Racing bikes are typically inflated to 100-150 psi.
As your link points out, the correct relationship is linear in the fourth power of the weight per axle. Your conclusion is correct of course.
(Doesn't change your assertion materially, of course. Your comment didn't scan correctly to me because I've seen video of arm injury caused when someone punctured a truck tyre with a knife. Meanwhile, I've deliberately punctured motorcycle tyres by hand at 36psi while performing a repair (boring out a hole for a plug).)
> What does the tyre inflation pressure have to do with the pressure applied to the road due to the gross vehicle mass?
>
> Nothing.
Well, the "pressure applied to the road" is approximately the same as the tire "inflation pressure"... It's not exactly the same because you need to take into account that the pressure in the tires increases (a bit) when you load the truck, and you have to be clear that you're talking about "overpressure", i.e. the relative pressure difference between the inside of the tire and the atmosphere.
What I think you meant to say is "What does the tyre inflation pressure have to do with the force applied to the road due to the gross vehicle mass?" Then your conclusion ("Nothing") is correct.
Tyre inflation pressure is irrelevant. We could assume the tyres were solid rubber for the purposes of this conversation and the wear on the road would be the same due to the gross vehicle mass devided by the number of tyres.
As another commenter pointed out, I've ridden my bike with 150psi tyre inflation pressure but the weight per wheel is my weight + bike weight devided by contact area of each tyre. Sure, higher pressure tyres typically have less contact area, but the gross weight of the bike is tiny compared to a truck the road wear from cycling is pretty much zero.
> I couldn't disagree more! Wear on roads is to the fourth power of pressure.
No, it's probably to the fourth power of force, not pressure. These are distinct and separate concepts in physics.
> We could assume the tyres were solid rubber for the purposes of this conversation and the wear on the road would be the same due to the gross vehicle mass devided by the number of tyres.
Ok, but in that case we must be talking about force, not pressure. Because the pressure is force divided by contact area...
> As another commenter pointed out, I've ridden my bike with 150psi tyre inflation pressure but the weight per wheel is my weight + bike weight devided by contact area of each tyre. Sure, higher pressure tyres typically have less contact area, but the gross weight of the bike is tiny compared to a truck the road wear from cycling is pretty much zero.
Now you're mixing pressure and force in a way that doesn't make any sense to me...
So dmurray is saying that "correct relationship is linear in the fourth power of the weight per axle" which IMHO is correct (but to fit with my argument above I would use the words "force exerted by tire on road" rather than "weight per axle", it's the same).
You (TheSpiceIsLife) are talking about something else... I don't know what... I can't say if you're right or wrong, but I feel quite certain that what you say is beside the point.
My (only) point was that the force that a wheel can exert on the road (what Newton called "action") is
A = [current "overpressure" inside tire] * [contact surface area]
and the force that the road exerts on the tire (what Newton called "reaction") is
R = [pressure on road] * [contact surface area]
Since [contact surface area] is one and the same in both expressions and Newton says R = A it must follow that [pressure on road] = [current "overpressure" in tire].
EDIT: Extended to better explain context of my argument.
They're right. Civil engineering estimates of road wear for wheeled vehicles[0] is the fourth power of axle load (the weight borne by the axle) per axle, tire pressure does not enter the equation.
[0] following extensive testing in the 60s, repeated a few decades later, the exact exponent is variable but 4 has proven pretty good for a rule of thumb.
> They're right. Civil engineering estimates of road wear for wheeled vehicles[0] is the fourth power of axle load (the weight borne by the axle) per axle
Ehuu... So why didn't you/they just upvote dmurray who said that 10 hours ago...?
Inflation pressure isn't the same as running pressure!
Once a vehicle is loaded the air pressure of the tires can go up substantially relative to what they're inflated to. Like you said, action and reaction.
That's why under-inflated tires will have a very large contact patch; increasing the contact patch increases the area in the area * pressure equation. But it also reduces the volume of air inside the tire/tube and that raises the pressure, also.
True. I was talking about [current "overpressure" inside tire] (see my other answer) and not "inflation pressure", so I have taken that effect into account. :P
Pressure on two sides of a surface don't have to be equal. The overall forces do, but there's an additional component being applied by the surface itself. An alternate way of looking at it : consider how the space station internal pressure differs from space.
> Pressure on two sides of a surface don't have to be equal.
Absolutely, and Newton surely didn't say so. :P
(A more close to home example is that the pressure inside a tire surely doesn't have to be the same as the pressure outside the tire. In fact, if it is then we call that a "flat tire". :P)
But the force that the tire exerts on the road (=the "action" as Newton called it) has to be equal to the force that the road exerts on the tire (=the "reaction" as Newton called it). Since the contact surface between tire and road is the same that means that the "overpressure" in the tire (=the pressure the tire exerts on the road) has to be the same as the pressure that the road exerts on the tire.
> Now, freight and commercial trucks are effectively the biggest contributor to this tax plus they have to pay for weight.
That makes sense, since the road wear increases superlinearly with the vehicle weight - so commercial trucks are also the one generating most road maintenance costs.
They contribute more to the tax because they are bigger, more powerful, potentially less efficient.
They have to pay for weight because the increased weight has a direct correlation in actively shortening the life of the road, above and beyond "vehicle-miles covered".
> This is a common misinterpretation of who pays for roads. Effectively roads are paid for by gas tax. Gas used to be a great proxy for how many miles you drive and where you drive those miles.
Except the number of miles driven (or where you drive them) has very little relation to how much damage you do to the road, and thus how much of the maintenance costs you generate.
In many countries gas taxes cover most or all of the expense of maintaining the roadway. However, within the USA gas taxes are comparatively small, so no, it does not.
I agree with you that long-haul freight is best served by rail. However, I would hardly call the railroads unsubsidized. They received free land, cheap loans and government guaranteed business to develop the rail system.
The eventual beneficiary of cheap transportation is the consumer. I suppose this should considered a regressive tax.
I think this is true in a world without self driving cars but I'm not so sure about a world with them. The key thing that roads give you over railways is flexibility. Roads require comparatively less planning and allow goods to be shipped point to point without having to change vehicles. Until now they've come with the huge costs of requiring a person to sit at the wheel and a lot of liability because that person might crash the truck and kill someone. If both of those costs go away I think roads might be better infrastructure than railroads.
On the one hand, rail is much cheaper per-mile than traditional roads, for both construction and maintenance.
Rail is also more efficient in terms of goods hauled per unit of fuel spent, and controlling carbon emissions from rail is massively easier than doing so from individual trucks.
However, rail itself is fundamentally... unegalitarian, maybe? Rail lines can only be used by those with the capital to run rolling stock between well-specified endpoints (typically large urban centers), and on specified timetables.
The system as it exists in the US right now is less efficient, but opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, I live in Japan and don't own a car right now, which means that I basically can't go backpacking. But if I rent a car, then I can go out to more remote places that are less frequented by the non-hiking masses, and actually enjoy some of the sheer beauty of the Japanese countryside.
Self-driving cars and trucks really do seem to bridge the gap between "cheap rail transport" and "private vehicles for everything", but I worry that they will continue just to be a convenience for the well-off (which is what Uber and Lyft currently are, frankly), rather than a means by which to make transportation available to everybody.
It's not about subsidies, that's just not true. You have to realize that the amount of cargo being hauled by trains is somewhere in low units of percent, say 3% of the total in a land-locked country. The capacity is not there, the costs/efficiency are not there. I would love to see all cargo on the rails, but it has so far not proven economically viable. All around the world.
Did you just make up the figure "3%"? It took me literally one google to get the true figures for USA: by ton-mile, 39.5% by rail vs. 28.6% by truck. [0] Of course, this somewhat undercuts thread parent's lament, but after driving a few miles on the interstates I drive most frequently, one might share that point of view. In many locations at many times, the majority of traffic is trucks, and they clearly are more dangerous to automobiles and more damaging to the road.
Is it really possible to have an "observer" of a self driving vehicle step in to save it in the event of an emergency? If you trust the vehicle for thousands of hours, and it never has a problem, you would of course start sleeping, reading, watching movies, etc. while it drives. The act of driving keeps you engaged, watching a car drive itself would be beyond boring.
I'm not concerned about bugs that happen here and there. The occurrence is probably lower than human-made driving errors. The biggest fear is that since the control may be centralized, one failure or bug could potentially be pushed out to millions of cars, instead of being isolated to just one car in the case of human error
this is a great point. currently millions of individual errors are made by people that cause accidents. the future is 1 software exploited bug can cause millions of accidents. I am assuming overall software will have less fatalities but it would be interesting to see predictions on how the two would compare.
In the Otto model, no. The driver would be asleep or otherwise not at the controls. Operators for long-haul trucking are essential. Performing maintenance, safety checks, and loading/unloading assistance will have to be done by humans in the near future. I would not be surprised if this was something that was not automated away in my lifetime.
The goal seems to be fully autonomous driving for the easy parts (highway driving, which automatic systems are already quite good at) and a human driver just along for the ride to handle the hard part (city streets) at the ends.
A driver could meet the truck at the freeway off-ramp to take over or supervise for the last few miles. Truck depots are already close to freeways, so depot-to-depot transfers could be completely unmanned.
A trucker's job would be to ride out to the edge of town and back again. Life would be like that of a UPS driver (though driving a big truck is real skill so it might command better pay). No more weeks away from home.
Today's truck stops could actually become where drivers start their drive. Do a local delivery, pick up new freight and drop the rig back off at the truck stop to send it on its way to wherever.
Could there be the next step where the self driving ubers cars which just relay to and fro on the highway and human driven uber on the riskier areas inside the city?
Too cumbersome to switch cars probably for an end user..
> Is it really possible to have an "observer" of a self driving vehicle step in to save it in the event of an emergency? If you trust the vehicle for thousands of hours, and it never has a problem, you would of course start sleeping, reading, watching movies, etc. while it drives. The act of driving keeps you engaged, watching a car drive itself would be beyond boring.
"BEEP! BEEP! Wake up Jim! Our simulation predicts we'll be getting into an accident after we turn the upcoming bend."
> "BEEP! BEEP! Wake up Jim! Our simulation predicts we'll be getting into an accident after we turn the upcoming bend."
This seems highly unrealistic. If the vehicle can run a simulation and know that it's going to get into an accident it can slow down, stop, pull over or simply avoid the accident all together.
No if there is an emergency it's going to be an "oh shit" moment and the trucker is going to have to grab the wheel and try to correct for a situation they're already in.
They certainly mention safety, but don't seem to suggest that the safety is due to the driver overriding the auto-pilot in emergencies. I do agree with your point, but they could be making the argument that the danger prevented from when the system is operating nominally will be much greater than the danger caused by the driver handoff in low confidence scenarios.
And even if the driver is totally alert. It's unclear to me why a human would be able to handle the situation that the machine couldn't. The only way I could see this making sense is if there were just certain conditions the car couldn't self drive in such as if it was too rainy.
It is a data flywheel. There are scenarios that the autopilot can't handle yet. So, having a human behind the wheel enables the transition between where we are now (computers driving 95% of the time) to where we need to get (computers driving 100%).
Im not so sure of that. The hardest part of trucking is the first 1% of the trip and the last 1% of the trip. I envision that the robotic trucks will leave and enter into designated facilities at the outskirts of town, from there a trucker can take the truck to the client to unload and sign the paper work, bring it back and set it on its new course. I think it will allow truckers a more specialized role of client service and trickier city driving, and to work in one city every day, instead of travelling.
This is how harbors work. Ports employee pilots, who board ships, get them through busy waterways, and dock them. The regular crew on a large ship just sits back when coming into port.
The regular crew doesn't sit back at all. They are busier than ever, it's just that they take orders from the pilot instead of a regular ship's officer for a few hours.
Sounds like that would greatly decrease the demand for drivers. Since they're now not needed for 99% of the trip. And also greatly increase the supply of labor. Since trucking no longer entails travel and people can live close to their families. Both things that generally lead to decrease in price.
You may well be right, but that doesn't change the fact that it would justify the original statement regarding truckers being paid more. The part that was left out of the original statement was demand for truck drivers, which is generally accepted will drop with increased automation.
It's true in the same way that we can say that "factory workers" in the US get paid much more than they used to. This is because they are more likely to be technicians now, who service the robotic assembly line. The nature of the job has changed with automation, and truck driving will be similar.
With 98% of truckers suddenly on the job market, you think trucker pay would rise?
The last-mile drivers aren't debugging robot trucks. In the worst case the robot truck just turns back into a regular truck. No new skills required for a trucker.
If we assume navigating a city is the harder part of trucking (and I believe that, I've seen some crazy trucking maneuvers on city streets), and that truckers of the future are going to be largely navigating the city over and over, then we are quickly going to see which truckers can do that well without problems. The number of truckers available on the market will increase, but the job will be fundamentally different in the composition of skills required. It's possible that those that can quickly and reliably navigate city roads without problem will rise to the top and be able to command higher wages. It's not guaranteed and it wouldn't be immediate, but I'm not sure it's unlikely.
It is of course possible that this technology could influence a rise in the number of trucks by creating new opportunities through a lower cost and more efficient infrastructure.
But obviously I am not smart enough to back it up with anything or I would probably be getting acquired by Uber too.
I don't think the number would rise, at least not for a long time. Trucks would be utilized a lot more hours per day, which is what matters. There are currently pretty strict rules for how many hours a driver can work, but if you can sleep while the truck drives itself all of a sudden you have an asset that can work nearly 24/7.
Obviously, but by working more hours a day supply increases even though there aren't more trucks. The same thing will happen with large pools of shared autonomous cars--each car doing more work per day even though there are less cars.
More hours per day equates to more trucks total. If the transit between San Fransisco and Nashville suddenly takes half as long, we can reasonably assume that the number of trucks between San Francisco and Nashville will rise (maybe not double, but certainly a lot, and with reduced costs, who knows, maybe double or more).
So, eliminating 98% of the work. Which, even with halving the per-trucker hours, means eliminating 96% of the truckers. I'd call that putting truckers out of work...
Truckers are paid per mile and have a driving limit of 11 hours per day and 70 hours per week. Having an autopilot take over for part of the trip could substantially increase the ground they can cover in a day.
Would it though? If the truck can drive hundreds of miles on the highway then initially maybe you're right because they'll just sit in the cab but, eventually, they won't be in the cabs anymore. If they're being paid by the mile then that's a significant cut of the miles and therefore pay.
Not to ask a silly question, but how does an auto-pilot truck (w/ no driver) get fuel? If there will be a service that provides fuel to driverless trucks, how will the business (who owns the truck) verify the PPG and gallons loaded?
That's an easy problem to solve. Either using fully automated pumps, or truck stops with employees. Truck presents billing info/company credit card to pump/employee, they verify card, fill up truck with N gallons, truck also measures gallons loaded, pump bills truck with specification of gallons loaded. If the pump and truck numbers disagree, handle it like any other billing discrepancy.
If you are a large fleet with many trucks, it would probably be cheaper to hire employees at the truck stops (or manage your own fuel depots) to just pump fuel all day for the automated trucks on the automated routes.
Then you could have a small number of vehicles, or small companies could pop up to serve this role, that refuel automated trucks that run out and stop driving outside those automated routes (if this is even a concern).
If you are eliminating 80%+ of trucker salaries, you have a lot of money to work with.
Then that is a matter of technical progress. But Otto can still offer the drivers some value in the meantime. Who knows how many yrs it will be until it is fully automated?
Or do you think they will benefit from resisting all forms of automation? I doubt it will slow down the eventual outcome, which is pretty much set in stone already. But maybe I'm wrong.
Although the idea of self driving trucks and truckers getting paid more is juxtaposed, I think the premise stems from their network and load matching system rather than the self driving trucks.
My understanding was that the trucking industry had taken huge strides towards improving their network and load matching years ago. Uber's technology may have been revolutionary in the taxi industry but are you sure there's a lot of room for improvement in trucking? I would have guessed the trucking industry was actually more efficient than Uber in these areas.
This is the same spin that Über employs themselves. It's clear the ultimate goal is to remove human drivers completely. Their rhetoric otherwise is so transparent it's insulting.
After 2 years the original Otto product failed to get a footing in the market. Simultaneously, all attempts to integrate Otto technology into the core uber product failed due to internal politics and the fundamental impedance mismatch between self-driving AI for trucks and urban transportation. Additionally all original core Otto staff have left, and some are pursuing a new company that will revolutionize the future of truck driving.
There is additional context in the Bloomberg article posted this morning. [1, 2]
Based on the timestamps, kinda looks like the Otto blogpost was prompted by the Bloomberg article -- even though the "agreements were reached" in July according to Bloomberg.
Maybe it's just me, but name collisions seem to be happening a lot lately. My association with "Otto" is Hashicorp's tool.[1] This announcement makes more sense than the one I expected to read.
I was thinking of the Otto Cycle, which occurs in most internal combustion engines (except the Prius and some Mazdas, which use the Atkinson cycle). I suspect that's where they get the name but they don't seem to have an About page.
Wait, so this link isn't to a parable about a former school bus driver who "loves to get blotto" becoming an Uber driver? Um, well, uh, good for Otto, but I must admit I'm a wee bit disappointed for purely selfish reasons.
The first few flaming wrecks with self-driving trucks involving particularly ugly (complete crushing, burn-out, etc.) passenger car deaths are going to trigger a massive backlash. I don't think at that point that any arguments about how the overall accident rates are being cut, etc., will hold much water for most people.
Logistics and transport, human or material, isn't a good job. It is a good paying job. One of the last good paying jobs you could obtain without any higher education.
Nobody really wants to do these jobs, except maybe a bike messenger, and that only last so long.
I'm surprised this started as autonomous trucking. It's a HUGE industry with a massive and unionized workforce that isn't going to go quietly. I wonder why the Uber approach of starting with human drivers wasn't chosen. There are lots of trucks out there with dedicated career drivers who make a life out of it. They often return home without a trailer or load and having an uber-for-cargo would be a great way to take advantage of those empty legs (this term is from the airplane industry but I think it applies here)
Going from zero to self-driving seems a little advantageous.
Uber already has plenty with its ATC in Pittsburgh (the core engineers were hired from CMU's robotics lab). I'm guessing Otto has expertise specific to the trucking domain. At supposedly $680M, it seems like a high price.
I interviewed last year for a company called Walkboard Technologies[1] that billed themselves as "Uber for truck drivers." Their goal was the "new way to connect drivers and shippers" part of Otto's business model.
Looks like they got beat to the punch big time here.
There's not a fancy acronym for it, but it's what most current lane centering tech uses (e.g. Tesla Autopilot). It's actually pretty off the shelf kit from Mobileye.
I was reading one major issue with lidar is bad weather. Microwave can apparently do that OK but the wavelength is a trade off between accuracy, object size and weather/interference avoidance.
In fairness, bad weather is a big challenge for human drivers as well. Largely because we don't realize how much more difficult it is to drive with limited visibility/traction and don't slow down enough.
The line 'When we started Otto we committed to rethinking transportation' - what, three months ago?
I hadn't heard of these guys before, but a business designed to be quick flipped? Was this business ever not part of Uber? What kind of three month old startup has a team that size?
There doesn't seem to actually be even an MVP product there. How do businesses like this end up getting built and sold so quickly?