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Uber may be looking to purchase thousands of autonomous cars, but it seems that no deal has been finalized:
Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around."
Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet. Volkswagen's Audi, Daimler's Mercedes-Benz, BMW and car industry suppliers Bosch and Continental are all working on technologies for autonomous or semi-autonomous cars.
Earlier on Friday, Germany's Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality.
Another source familiar with the matter said no order had been placed with Mercedes-Benz. Daimler and Uber declined to comment.
Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable...then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber. [...] Earlier this week Mercedes rival BMW said it was considering launching its own ride hailing service in what would amount to a rival business to Uber.
An order of 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars would cost billions, even with a steep discount. Reuters hasn't removed the reference to the 100,000 Mercedes-Benz cars, as seen above.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zz9zZ on Monday March 21 2016, @06:29AM
Agreed, all the taxi cabs need to do is make their own app / web portals and be competitive on price. Also, eventually the government will step in and regulate Uber more heavily. If they are serious about this move I will be glad when they get an axe to come down on them. Selling out the very people who have literally made their company succeed is such a large sellout it will put all the previous offshoring to shame. There really wasn't much genius to the Uber business plan. Create an app that uses the government sponsored GPS system and Google's map services to let people hail cabs. A technical hurdle that could be solved by any group of coders. The smartest move was making it easy for just about anyone to get a job by putting up their own vehicle as a company asset, who needs venture capitalists?
So basically they sold out their own investors, the working people.
/tangent: We need a resurgence of ethics, choosing the difficult options over the convenient ones. Eschew Uber, Facebook, Google, Yelp. They all sell out the people in various ways. Most of those services can be replaced by personally owned or open source software and subscription based servers. The SaaS and Cloud based ecosystem is going to crash and burn, there are too many coders and eventually projects will evolve that are easy to deploy on any server. Then who needs these centralized systems that abuse their power for increased personal gain?
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 21 2016, @07:01AM
Taxi cab companies lobbied long and hard to get cab hailing apps outlawed (for one bogus reason or another). So it will be interesting to see how they wiggle out of that trap.
But you got all these different parties, cab companies, car manufacturers, Uber, Rental companies, Google each one missing one thing or another. Maint depots, hailing apps, autonomous technology...
Pay attention folks, and keep your pantry stocked with pop corn, this is going to be a 6 or 8 party Jump Ball, and its all going to happen before our eyes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Monday March 21 2016, @07:08AM
No more points or I'd mod you up, time for bed anyway :D
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2016, @01:38PM
They dont even have to do it 'right away' either.
They can leave their human guys for the more difficult areas. Then use the auto taxis in areas where they are just regulated as a taxi service or it is easy to drive in.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Monday March 21 2016, @09:43PM
Have we had the year of Linux on the desktop yet? Your faith in the ability of open-source to take over markets is touching. Servers is about it.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!