from the that-is-a-lot-bigger-than-a-car dept.
From MotorAuthority.com:
Ride-sharing giant Uber sees a future where it not only has a fleet of self-driving cars offering rides to the public, but also self-driving trucks transporting goods on the highway.
Uber on Thursday announced the acquisition of Otto, an American startup with around 90 staff working on developing self-driving trucks. The announcement was made on the same day Uber announced a deal with Volvo to source additional test cars for its growing fleet of self-driving cars.
Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski has been put in charge of all autonomous driving efforts at the combined firms and will report to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Early last decade Levandowski developed the Ghostrider, a self-driving motorcycle that now sits in the Smithsonian. He was also on Google's self-driving car team.
Otto was only founded in January but much of its staff comes from more established firms including Apple, Google, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] and Cruise Automation. Otto's goal isn't to start selling self-driving trucks but rather to develop technology that can be licensed to truck manufacturers or turned into kits that can be retrofitted to existing trucks to make them autonomous.
Also at theverge.com
Related Stories
The Fall of Travis Kalanick Was a Lot Weirder and Darker Than You Thought
A year ago, before the investor lawsuits and the federal investigations, before the mass resignations, and before the connotation of the word "Uber" shifted from "world's most valuable startup" to "world's most dysfunctional," Uber's executives sat around a hotel conference room table in San Francisco, trying to convince their chief executive officer, Travis Kalanick, that the company had a major problem: him.
[...] [A] top executive excused herself to answer a phone call. A minute later, she reappeared and asked Kalanick to step into the hallway. Another executive joined them. They hunched over a laptop to watch a video that had just been posted online by Bloomberg News: grainy, black-and-white dashcam footage of Kalanick in the back seat of an UberBlack on Super Bowl weekend, heatedly arguing over fares with a driver named Fawzi Kamel. "Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit!" Kalanick can be heard yelling at Kamel. "They blame everything in their life on somebody else!"
As the clip ended, the three stood in stunned silence. Kalanick seemed to understand that his behavior required some form of contrition. According to a person who was there, he literally got down on his hands and knees and began squirming on the floor. "This is bad," he muttered. "I'm terrible." Then, contrition period over, he got up, called a board member, demanded a new PR strategy, and embarked on a yearlong starring role as the villain who gets his comeuppance in the most gripping startup drama since the dot-com bubble. It's a story that, until now, has never been fully told.
The article discusses a number of Uber and Kalanick scandals/events, including:
- The #DeleteUber movement following Uber being accused of breaking up an airport taxi strike (which was in protest of President Trump's executive order restricting travel from Muslim countries), as well as Kalanick's decision to join President Trump's business advisory council (and later leave it).
- Susan Fowler's blog post recounting sexual harassment at Uber, and the hiring of former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to investigate the claims.
- The revelation of Uber's Greyball system, which was used to avoid picking up law enforcement and taxi inspectors.
- Uber's purchase of self-driving truck startup Otto, which eventually led key Uber investor Google (Waymo) to sue Uber, seeking billions in damages.
- Kalanick's "inexplicable" support of Anthony Levandowski, who he called his "brother from another mother", even after Levandowski stopped defending Uber in the Waymo v. Uber case.
- Kalanick's apology to the taxi driver Fawzi Kamel, which amounted to a $200,000 payoff.
- A visit to a Seoul escort-karaoke bar that resulted in an HR complaint and a report in The Information.
- Uber's president for Asia-Pacific Eric Alexander obtaining a confidential medical record of passenger who was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi, India. Alexander, Kalanick, and others discussed a theory that their Indian competitor Ola faked/orchestrated the rape.
- Kalanick making his presence known during a "leave of absence" by trying to maintain control over the company and its board.
- Arianna Huffington promoting her wellness company's products while acting as Kalanick's apparent proxy on the board.
- The new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's response to the city of London revoking Uber's operating license.
Uber's controversial self-driving truck division shuts down
Uber is shutting down its self-driving truck program, the company acknowledged on Monday. It's the latest example of Uber scaling back its self-driving technology efforts in the wake of a deadly Uber self-driving car crash in March.
Uber's self-driving truck program has been embroiled in controversy since Uber acquired the unit two years ago. The acquisition price was reportedly $680 million, though the actual cost may have been much less than that. Previously, it had been a startup called Otto, led by controversial ex-Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski. Waymo sued Uber, arguing that Levandowski had taken Waymo trade secrets with him on the way out the door.
[...] "We've decided to stop development on our self-driving truck program and move forward exclusively with cars," said Eric Meyhofer, the leader of Uber's self-driving technology program, in a statement to The Verge. Personnel from the truck division will be folded into the company's self-driving car efforts.
Previously: Uber Buys Autonomous Truck Startup Otto
The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Uber Pulls Self-Driving Cars After First Fatal Crash of Autonomous Vehicle
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:58AM
So this is how hipster startups really work. Sell their companies to each other while producing nothing of value. Oh yeah the self-driving dingus gonna self-drive itself any day now.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:16AM
I had trouble viewing this story, but it was reported elsewhere that
Uber announced Thursday that it will soon offer rides in self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, a significant step toward rides without a human driver.
-- https://www.ksl.com/?sid=41134431&nid=157 [ksl.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:21AM
Good to see Uber is headed by a lying sociopath.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:06AM
Was there an outfit that planned to make a humanoid driving robot? Or did I leave the furnace turned up too high when going to sleep?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:16AM
Babylon 5 had a minor plot arc about retrofitting self-flying spaceships with alien tech. Plundering dead civilizations for their technology was a recurring theme. It's such a fucking shame that in real life wealthy American morons have to employ foreign slave labor to invent shit for them instead of just outright stealing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @10:34AM
Does the inflatable Otto doll have to pull over or can it continue driving while I have gay buttsexx with it?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @12:41PM
The hardest part about self-driving is the negotiation of complicated roads in urban areas. Highway miles are by far the easiest part of the job because they are limited-access, straight, with ideal visibility and no pedestrians. Because of that interstate trucking is going to be automated before taxis, home delivery or any other industry. Imagine land-trains of 20 trucks with one driver in the lead and all the others just auto-following the truck in front of them. Cars have been shipping with the tech to do that for years already (lane-keeping and adaptive cruise-control). Deploying it in trucks is not a technical problem, just a logistical problem.
There are going to be a ton of unemployed truckers really soon. And its going to painful. Right now there are 2.4 million registered class 8 trucks (semis) [trucking.org] and 1.8 million people are employed as heavy truck drivers [bls.gov] with a median annual pay of $40K. That's good money for a job that is basically unskilled labor. Compare that to job losses in the coal mining industry - they've only lost 150K jobs over the last 30 years in just a handful of states and that's caused a collective freakout. We are going to see 10x that job loss in one third the time spread across nearly the entire country. [npr.org]
Trump might not win this election, but holy shit are there going to be a lot of really angry trumpkins in the next couple of election cycles.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:54PM
Truck stops too: https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 [medium.com]
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/3/12342764/autonomous-trucks-employment [vox.com]
When the automobiles arrived the buggy whip makers switched to making something else. BUT did most of the horses get new jobs?
Do you think those drivers are the buggy whip makers or horses in this scenario? How many of those millions of truck drivers will get new jobs that are about as good as or better than their current jobs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU#t=3m30s [youtube.com]