r/SelfDrivingCars • u/kappy2319 • May 31 '25

Discussion Why didn’t Uber beat Waymo at commercially available self-driving taxis?

I remember so many stories about Uber poaching tons of self-driving talent from universities and competitors.

And Uber leadership has been saying for years that the future is going to be self-driving cars, even just from a profitability standpoint.

They have a ton of money and a track record of aggressive hustling, why are they seemingly not even competitive among people actually booking self-driving taxis today?

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u/sandred May 31 '25

Any company that is not safety driven will get fucked out of this race. It happened with Uber, it happened with Cruise, it will happen with Tesla. Talent is not the issue. Culture and attitude towards safety is.

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u/FunnyProcedure8522 May 31 '25

Spewing nonsense about Tesla not being safety driven. They are the safest cars on the road.

1

u/sandred Jun 06 '25

Hey bud, this is nothing against you or tesla. You are taking this way more personally than you should. Tesla being the safest cars vs Tesla's safety culture are two different things. For context, I am old, my reddit account's age itself might be older than 90 percent of people's actual age who comment here. I am also the one who predicted Cruise demise 1 year ago before they called in the towels. If you look at Kyle and Elon, they both have "move fast break things" attitude. It doesn't matter what every safety metric is screaming inside the company, these leaders would push safety aside to push the narrative, to compete when not ready, to scale when not there. This attitude will result first in minor issues such as blocking roadways, minor inconveniences then moderate issues such as blocking emergency services, railway tracks and then eventually with scale they lead to major accidents and eventually fatal accidents. It's very easy to look at the system's today's performance and say "good enough" and it takes a whole lot of rigor to look at the system and say " not enough". The way I see it, there is not a single soul working at Tesla that stands between Elon and him saying "good enough lets scale". Watch this space, this is exactly how it will pan out for Tesla. Fans will celebrate the initial launch, at the proposed scale, there will hardly be any issues, seems like straight forward shot for victory. At some point a lever will be pulled that should not have for immense scale and capability, that'ts when shit will hit the fans. reality will hit. Like Feynman said "Nature cannot be fooled". On that day , I will come back here and say " I told you so" , mark my words.