Emails show Kalanick's suspicions about Google's self-driving cars | Hacker News Reader

Emails show Kalanick's suspicions about Google's self-driving cars

businessinsider.com

13 pointsmalandrew21 comments

Kalanick was absolutely right to be panicking about self driving cars. The reason we pay a little more for taxis and ubers is that we have to pay for the person driving the cars. With a self driving taxi service, and no need to pay for a driver, the cost of hiring a ride would become much cheaper disrupting uber's business.

* This post was Edited in reply to comment with an edit deleting criticism about intellectual property

Could you please keep your statements truthful. There is no proof that Kalanick or Uber stole anything from Waymo. There is an ongoing and unresolved court case to determine that. It's only appropriate to make such a statement, if it's proven that Uber stole anything. This is HN not reddit.

Thus far, all we know is that Levandowsky alledgedly took files as leverage to make sure Google paid him the bonuses Google was late on, but he was expressively forbidden by Kalanick from bringing any of those files to Uber. All the discovery performed so far has turned up zero evidence that any files from Waymo ended up at Uber.

It's not uncommon for legacy companies to sue newer, more nimble and more promising companies over IP issues when they lose star performers. It also happened to Google when Paypal sued them for trade secret theft when promising senior talent left Paypal to join Google Wallet:

https://techcrunch.com/2011/05/26/paypal-lawsuit-google/

It's perfectly okay to recruit promising talent from other companies with better offers so long as the recruiting company keeps everything kosher via due diligence that ensures the talent does not bring intellectual property from the previous employer to the new company. All evidence made public thus far suggests the Uber did its due diligence here and made sure nothing belonging to Waymo made its way to Uber.

That's a fair point, I edited my comment to get rid of the part about intellectual property violations in response to your comment.

Are you a bot? The comment you replied to made no mention of Waymo or stealing.

No, not a bot. The original comment made allegations of IP theft by Kalanick. It has since been edited.

Are you an Uber employee?

I've read the comment you're replying to a few times, and I'm curious why it matters if they are or not. For the purpose of contributing to this discussion, have they stated anything false or misrepresented anything? If so, you should present that as a retort instead, instead of questioning their identity.

Furthermore, for authors of comments critical of Uber, do you also go out of your way to ask if they work for a competing company like Waymo, Google, Tesla or Lyft?

Let's ask you that same question. Are you a Waymo, Google, Tesla or Lyft employee or shareholder?

Nevermind. I can answer that question for you. You're a Tesla shareholder.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354703

No he's not a bot, I deleted the part he criticized because I thought his criticism was fair, I indicated that in my reply to him.

sure sure Uber sock puppet...

I thought the file theft by Levandowsky was first uncovered when a supplier was found to be working on an Uber circuitboard that was copied from a Waymo circuitboard. Not so?

How unusual is it for venture units like this to collect data from the companies they've invested in and then scale up competitors to the successful ones?

Travis also tried to partner with Tesla on this by using Tesla as a source for the vehicles (not sure who was responsible in this case for the software -- prolly uber), and Musk declined. Soon thereafter, Musk published his grand plan part 2 for Tesla, which included a home grown ride-sharing network where in grand Musk style they are going to do everything themselves.

If you have the vehicles, why partner with someone who just wrote a platform you can replicate yourself? Uber has no value to those doing the actual self-driving work. They are the MBA in your startup to the CTO building the actual product.

That's like saying, if you make cars, why let Avis take the profits from renting them out? In both cases, because that car related business (rentals or ride hailing apps) is outside your core specialty.

May the most efficient vertically integrated conglomerate win then.

So to play devil's advocate if that's how you believe things will play out... what happens to the existing car companies once new car sales start dropping precipitously? There are more car manufacturers that will be fighting over the same shrinking pie of new car sales than there are global TNCs. Their valuations will likely drop to the point where they could become an acquisition target for Uber. The only competitive advantage Tesla has is in batteries, and that will likely become a commodity insofar as TNCs are concerned far before it's a competitive advantage. The daily driving distances a battery needs to support for TNC use is a lot lower than an individual looking to do long road trips.

Uber won't last long enough to acquire a traditional automaker before technology creates a death spiral for those automakers. I'm wrong if they can find additional investors willing to gamble on the expected duration of time till that happens (~5 years at least).

Tesla has a product people will buy today (with ~25% margins!), as well as a team to transition to ridesharing in the future. They're collecting millions of miles per day of autopilot data and that'll only increase with the model 3 rollout.

I'm a fan and investor in Tesla, but there's 3 parts to winning the ridesharing, autonomous, BEV future and the most important part is the role that Uber has right now which is the customer-ridesharing-relationship. The platform technology is going to largely escalate in multiple places simultaneously and thus be the commodity bit. It is definitely an advantage to Tesla if they manage to get the hardware\software right via Tesla Network with a 2-3 year headstart, but the capital required to expand is so high that this head-start is less substantial than say a Facebook style adoption curve. It'll be a battle. We'll see.

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