I genuinely do not get Uber's strategy here. Even once self-driving cars are mature, they'll occasionally screw up and sometimes kill someone. And Uber's cars are so incredibly far from mature that operating without legal cover is... just insane. If they kill and hit someone, Kalanick is easily portrayed as a ready-made movie villain. Wantonly ignoring state and local laws in the hopes of getting ahead of the pack, sacrificing the life of cute little toddler Adam to the altar of Mammon?

And it's really not just portrayed: Uber'll deserve any and all punishment thrown at them for this, up to and possibly including the shut down of the company and criminal charges for the people who did this. And Uber'll be setting the cause of self-driving cars back years, maybe even a decade.

This is all incredibly obvious too, and I don't think Uber folks are idiots. Maybe they're getting desperate, and they're willing to eat the risk of the company being destroyed because their business strategy for survival is sensitive to getting to production-ready self-driving cars a year earlier than they would have otherwise?

Uber's is laying the groundwork to make the legal case that Tesla owners using autopilot are in fact 'testers', presumably in hopes of tangling Tesla up.

'Levandowski compared Uber’s technology to Tesla’s autopilot feature, saying: “It’s hard to understand why the DMV would seek to require self-driving Ubers to get permits when it accepts that Tesla’s autopilot technology does not need them."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-defi...

That's interesting, if it's actually the case. It seems a bit of a stretch to me--Uber is still opening itself up to existential risk--but if by doing so it can plausibly kneecap Tesla and if it views Tesla similarly as an existential risk, this move might make sense.

ETA: That is, from a business perspective. The fact that you might kill a couple people in the meantime is kind of a deal breaker from a moral point of view.

How many people does delaying the progress of self driving cars kill?

Interesting point. Let's guesstimate it. I'll focus on the USA.

Let's assume that after the full transition, 0 people will die from automotive accidents. This isn't the case, but it's close enough. Naively, that would save roughly around 30k lives a year: in other words, every single day self-driving cars are delayed kills a bit under 100 people. The dynamics of the transition don't matter too much, assuming everything is simply shifted forward a year: you just move one year from the totally untransitioned state to the totally transitioned state.

That's huge. Anyone who does something that delays the transition one day is basically pretty much committing the Pulse night club shooting and the Sandy Hook shooting.

Now, another question: if a self-driving Uber slams into a group of children crossing the street, how much do you anticipate that to delay the transition to self-driving cars?

There's also a hidden assumption that getting inferior products on the road as quickly as possible is a necessary step in order to start iterating as quickly as possible. A day of clean room testing is worth some small fraction of a day of real world testing. I don't quite dispute that point, but just stating it explicitly.

Safety standards that delay the transition by a week might also save one person per day from being hit by a beta car during the transition period. You can't just tally deaths on one side and ignore the other.

> That is, from a business perspective. The fact that you might kill a couple people in the meantime is kind of a deal breaker from a moral point of view.

Since when does Uber care? They never refilled their morality tank since the first time it was reported running empty.

Ironically, if the Tesla scenario is true, this pretty much looks like Good vs Evil battle, SV edition.

I could be wrong, but I haven't heard a better theory. I doubt they're just being cowboys, Uber's lawyers and stratgists are demonstrably skilled in the dark arts, I suspect they've calculated their outs.

Except Tesla has a permit to operate autonomous vehicles in California and Uber does not. What am I missing here? How does Uber not complying with a state law tangle up Tesla?

Tesla has a permit, but private Tesla owners don't. Uber may be able put a judge in a position where he/she either has to require Tesla owners all get testing permits to use autopilot, or let Uber operate more or less unchecked. A win/win for Uber.

Ah I see, that makes sense.

>I genuinely do not get Uber's strategy here

Simple: distract investors long enough to somehow make ride sharing profitable.

Is this even possible with human drivers? I thought every ride was subsidized by Uber because at "market rate" the service is too expensive.

Short answer, no

Totally agree.

I also think Uber's move is advancing its own lead at the risk of slowing down the overall self-driving car transition. Their move, as you described, when go wrong, not only damage the company, but also general public's acceptance of self-driving technology. That damage could be more profound and harmful in the long run.

This has nothing to do with self driving cars. What is likely gking go happen in the future though is fines will be substantially higher.

Genius? If you hurt someone on the road by doing something explicitly illegal which you have been explicitly warned against doing, you are looking at massive financial liability to victims and potential involuntary manslaughter charges against executives.

TechCrunch's suggestion that this is the thin edge of a wedge to get to do self-driving without regulation is preposterous. There is no future reality in which the Department of Transportation does not strictly regulate self-driving vehicles.

Yeah, either Techcrunch doesn't understand this or I don't.

I can't believe they can find engineers that want to "drive" the car.

It's about the public's perception as well though.

Public perception:

In the first day their cars were caught running red lights on film. Either the cars are faulty, or cars and the human drivers for 'just in case' are faulty.

Oh, yeah, they've been turning across bike lanes illegally too, the kind of turn that causes most bike accidents with cars in California. They were told about this problem before launch and LAUNCHED ANYWAY. That's another thing they've asked their human drivers to take over for (you know, the ones who ran the light).

Honestly, if someone's job is to sit in an Uber for 6 hours and watch for the car to make a driving mistake... that's a lot of fatigue. They're going to get comfortable and miss A LOT of stuff.

Uber needs a huge slap for this whole thing. They're being very reckless.

Although to me there's a big difference between "innovating" on bureaucracy and ignoring "public safety"

Plus, not all penalties are necessarily financial.

Given that Uber is perceived as a symbol of 'Silicon Valley greed' to some politicians/constituents, a few high profile accidents would present a witch hunt opportunity for someone.

Not sure how much practical damage politicians could do but at a $50B-ish valuation there's little room for fatal error. Even a 1-2 year delay in getting self-drivers on the road would cost Uber billions.

Yea the laws uber broke were mostly bad regulations that nobody cared about and ultimately didn't harm anyone (other than in a competition harms incumbents).

But beta testing their cars on real streets could lead to disaster. Even from a non-legal PR risk perspective, it's dicey.

If one of these things runs over a cute kid, the attempt to skirt the law will backfire. That said challenging the law isn't necessarily skirting the law, but that's how techcrunch is portraying it. I'm too lazy to read the docket of the case.

Like minimum wage laws. Right.

There they just followed the existing model of taxis.

Or proper insurance.

Not really. The CA DMV can suspend or revoke a self-driving permit for bad driving, as with any other driver's license.

§ 227.36. Refusal, Suspension, Revocation of Manufacturer’s Testing Permit

The department may refuse an application for a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit, or for the renewal of a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit, and may suspend or revoke a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit:

(a) For a violation of Vehicle Code section 38750 or this Article.

(b) For any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.

It's pretty straightforward. This works just like regular bad driving enforcement. There are now two reports of Uber self-driving cars running red lights and complaints about bad turns through bike lanes, so DMV can reasonably deny a permit. Google doesn't seem to have those problems.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e...

Exactly this.

A friend of mine is a reckless driver, who think of himself as a rally pilot. He often drives at twice the speed limit, passes other cars when there’s a continuous line, etc. After a wedding dinner, (where he drunk more than enough) he announced he was driving home. I had to ask:

- Are you sure you should be doing this?

- Yeah, even with a glass or two (I counted a good half-dozen) I’m a better driver than 90% on the road anyway…

- I mean, that might get points off your license. [He had mentioned losing some during the dinner.]

- Nah, it’s OK: I don’t have a license anymore, so I have no points to lose. I’m smart like that, you see?

I agree with TechCrunch: Uber is smart like that too.

So Uber are on course to make a huge (multi-billion dollar) loss this year, and on top of that they choose a course of action which could lead to jail-time, might kill someone, and result in massive civil liability. They also make autonomous vehicles look like a half-baked kludge with no real place on the roads and might even cause some regulators to ban them indefinitely. Brilliant.

They're on course for having a car pulled over, the cop asks for their self-driving permit (SFPD probably has briefed their people on this by now), they don't have it, the driver is arrested and the car gets towed to the impound. Routine enforcement.

If it's an accident, it's much worse for Uber.

This is ridiculous analysis. If Uber loses (or wins) this DMV "permission" battle they don't magically win the "existence" battle. The state never forfeits its right to challenge whatever it wants to challenge, whenever it wants to challenge it. And if the state loses in court it can even change the law and fight again - no private entity has that power.

To the extent Uber is doing something clever, it probably has something to do with avoiding having to spend $150 for every entity or person that wants to buy a self-driving car and rent it out through Uber. It is certainly not that they have found a brilliant way to sidestep a legal battle with regulators.

> And if the state loses in court it can even change the law and fight again - no private entity has that power.

Sadly, not at all – Uber will just sue in some court of some trade deal, and find a way to get around that. Just like so many companies have done before.

This sort of behaviour by Uber seems to signal an internal desperation. High risk gambles are what you take when you are a scrapy startup with nothing much to lose, not a multi-billion dollar business.

Wall Street did this for decades. Don't underestimate the human factor.

...and didn't that end well in 2008.

Human drivers can feel relatively safe around other cars because of mutually assured destruction. You are both afraid of dying if you make a significant mistake.

Self-driving cars will never have this fear holding them back from making mistakes. They don't care if they die. How can you feel safe around that? You could argue there is actually an incentive to let them crash once in awhile, because the valuable real world data will be phoned home and used to improve the product for the small price of a human life.

Once corruption sets in down the road, cars with autopilot capabilities will simplify kidnapping and assassination. Simply activate the backdoor remote piloting feature and crash your target's car (or the Uber car they're a passenger in) into a tree at 70 mph, or lock the doors and drive to a pickup location to complete the kidnapping.

Driving in a traditional car wouldn't protect the target, because a group with ubiquitous optional remote control over self-driving cars could also force surrounding cars to enter kamikaze mode and ram the target off the road.

Governments will demand some kind of backdoor like this at some point. It's not a question of if, but when. At that point, we'll have to trust that they'll never abuse it (lol) and that no third parties will ever be able to hack it remotely.

Even if you think the government is your friend, the first worm using a remote code execution exploit that hops from car to car via Bluetooth and activates its payload on a specific date will be able to kill tens of millions of people.

I won't comment on the apocalypse scenarios you described, because the possibility is obviously there. But regarding the MAD scenario on roads, I believe with self-driving cars you're trading off ability to survive in very rare cases (like split-second decision after reading the face of the driver about to crash into you) for having the usual accident causes (speeding, distracted driving) not happen.

My hope in the transition period is that the presence of self-driving cars on roads will finally force the drivers to start obeying traffic laws - which should pretty much eliminate the MAD consideration altogether.

I genuinely hope someone at their HQ has an explanation. This doesn't make sense on any level at all from my PoV, but i'm not valued at 50bn$.

I would love to see some super smart twist on this, incompetence and hubris becomes boring to watch fast.

uber. i have nothing against improving these services, but doing it with such blatant disregard to the law.

if this was just some guy on the street, or even most businesses the authorities would come down on them like a ton of bricks... but its a silicon valley posterchild so we don't.

its so difficult to see and not feel anger about it. if i don't do my due diligence or act intelligently i feel uncomfortable like i'm taking a stupid risk... why don't they?

Maybe Uber is secretly in legislative pentesting business - working to probe just how much laws they can break and still get away with it.

Cycling and pedestrian advocates are speaking against self driving cars [1].

It's so much easier to fix software for "right hooks" then it is to fix human drivers, who drive terribly in SF.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...

Every time Uber is mentioned, it blows my mind how many people care about the law at the expense of innovation.

According to google, 3,287 seem to die everyday on the road. I honestly don't see those numbers happening when humans are taken out of the equation.

I've asked this before, but will ask it again:

Why be apart of tech if you want to follow the rules?

The vast majority of Uber's activities have nothing to do with safety.

And the very basic laws around self-driving cars don't slow innovation in any way I can see. Not everything is a dichotomy.