Uber may have to pay Waymo or redesign its self-driving software

[rileymat2]

I have not completely understood why Uber is spending money researching self driving cars when they could buy them later from a mass producer with a competitive advantage in car manufacturing.

[austhrow743]

A self driving car manufacturer could refuse to sell to them and just enter the rides market. A self driving car manufacturer could sell to them at prices that keep almost all of the extra margin from using the technology over drivers for themselves.

My understanding is that Waymo is doing option one in Pheonix right now.

[QuixoticQuibit]

I have not completely understood why Uber is at all a reasonable investment nor why it ever received so much VC funding.

There is no business model. Uber doesn’t have anything unique, least of all self-driving tech. There won’t be any sort of sticky network effect since consumers can simply switch to a different ride hailing app with the lowest price. When (if?) AVs become reality, the car manufacturers themselves can become their own Ubers or AV-subscription service with no need for a middle man.

[tyingq]

Interesting that the identified software isn't in the list of what Levandowski was accused of stealing.

[Traster]

The Levandowski case is focused on just nailing him on the things they're super confident about, so I don't think it's surprising that the software in this case is part of that list - not least because they had no way of knowing Levandowski stole it until this independent expert verified it.

[fstuff]

I just had a thought, wasn't this accident after the Levandowski thing? I wonder if Uber pulled a bunch of code for fear of infringing on waymo and put in this crappy hacky code. They probably didn't want the Levandowski case to appear to slow down their progress.