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Intel tested its self-driving car software on fatal Uber crash footage and says it would’ve had 1-second warning

Intel tested its self-driving car software on fatal Uber crash footage and says it would’ve had 1-second warning 0

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Intel's Mobileye shows how its response system would have evaluated the moment right before the Uber crash, detecting different shapes and distances.
Image: intel

After a self-driving Uber crashed and killed a woman walking her bike across a Tempe, Arizona, road last week, the technology behind autonomous vehicles has been questioned and scrutinized.

Intel, the company behind the driver-assistance software Mobileye — which is used in certain autonomous cars, but not in Uber — took the footage Tempe police released from the crash and ran their software through the fatal incident. 

Mobileye CEO and CFO Amnon Shashua wrote in a editorial Monday that “despite the suboptimal conditions, where much of the high dynamic range data that would be present in the actual scene was likely lost, clear detection was achieved approximately one second before impact.” 

How the system would have classified the scene with the pedestrian and bicycle in the road is shown above, based on the exterior video police released last week.

SEE ALSO: Here’s the math that Intel claims proves self-driving cars are safe

So Intel, which also announced this year it was working on autonomous cars with BMW, Nissan, and Volkswagen, claims it would have detected and classified the situation accurately. But even if the vehicle had a one-second warning about 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in the road, would that have done anything to spare her life? Shashua, who has written about the safety of autonomous vehicles before, doesn’t go so far as to say his technology would have saved Herzberg, but he does point out that the sensors and software they used on the low-quality video is a “basic build block” for autonomous driving.

“It is the high-accuracy sensing systems inside [advanced driver assistance systems] that are saving lives today, proven over billions of miles driven. It is this same technology that is required, before tackling even tougher challenges, as a foundational element of fully autonomous vehicles of the future,” he wrote. “The video released by the police seems to demonstrate that even the most basic building block of an autonomous vehicle system, the ability to detect and classify objects, is a challenging task.”

An Intel spokesperson responded to further questions about the post asking, “If you don’t have the basics to understand the environment with high accuracy, how can you make driving decisions such as to stop, swerve, or speed up?”

This seems to question the technology used in Uber’s self-driving program and how it works, for example, in a situation with a pedestrian suddenly in the roadway. A New York Times report from last week revealed problems within Uber’s self-driving operation and its struggle to keep up with competitors.

Uber didn’t respond to request for comment about Intel’s post and its software analysis of the crash.

UPDATE: March 27, 2018, 1:05 p.m. PDT Uber said it wasn’t able to comment on Intel’s post.

WATCH: The future of self-driving taxis may be closer than you think

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/26/intel-mobileye-uber-fatal-crash/

New video shows self-driving Uber seconds before fatally crashing into pedestrian

New video shows self-driving Uber seconds before fatally crashing into pedestrian 0

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Warning: The video below contains footage which some readers may find disturbing.

Police released a video Wednesday of the self-driving Uber vehicle that struck and killed a woman Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona.

The video, below, shows Uber’s self-driving vehicle’s exterior view right before the crash. A quick glimpse of the woman killed, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, walking her bike can be seen. The moment she was hit is not shown because of what Tempe police called “the graphic nature of the impact.”

SEE ALSO: Uber suspends self-driving program after driverless car hits and kills pedestrian

The video then shows an inside view of the operator — identified as 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez — sitting behind the driver’s seat, looking around and down, and then abruptly opening his mouth and eyes wide in what looks like surprise and shock as the car hits the woman.

Police said the Volvo XC90 was in autonomous mode while traveling close to 40 mph in a 35 mph zone. The woman, who is believed to have been homeless, was apparently walking outside the crosswalk mid-block when she was struck.

Uber is cooperating with the police and National Transportation Safety Board investigations. Its self-driving car programs in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto, and the Phoenix area remain suspended. After the crash, a company spokesperson said, “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with authorities in their investigation of this incident.”

Police said they plan to submit the case to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Mashable has reached out to Uber for comment on the video, and we’ll update if and when we hear back.

WATCH: Japan is testing out self-driving cars and new ‘Uber’ app

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/21/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash-video/

MIT study shows how much driving for Uber or Lyft sucks

MIT study shows how much driving for Uber or Lyft sucks 0

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Ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft are delivering pitiful levels of take-home pay to the hundreds of thousands of US independent contractors providing their own vehicles and driving skills to deliver the core service, according to an MIT CEEPR study examining the economics of the two app platforms.

The report catalyses the debate about conditions for workers on gig economy platforms, and raises serious questions about the wider societal impacts of tax avoiding, VC-funded tech giants.

The study, entitled The Economics of Ride-Hailing: Driver Revenue, Expenses and Taxes, and which was carried out by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, surveyed more than 1,100 Uber and Lyft ride-hailing drivers combined with detailed vehicle cost information — factoring in costs such as fuel, insurance, maintenance and repairs — to come up with a median profit per hour worked.

The upshot? The researchers found profit from ride-hail driving to be “very low”. On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour, with 74% of drivers earning less than the minimum wage in the state where they operate.

They also found a median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving but incurs costs of $0.30 per mile; and almost a third (30 per cent) of drivers were found to incur expenses exceeding their revenue or to be losing money for every mile they drive.

The research also looked at how ride-hailing profits are taxed, and suggests that in the US a majority of driver profits are going untaxed owing to how mileage deduction is handled for tax purposes — suggesting Uber and Lyft’s business are denuding the public purse too.

From the study:

On a monthly basis, mean profit is $661/month (median $310). Drivers are eligible to use a Standard Mileage Deduction for tax purposes ($0.54/mile in 2016) which far exceeds median costs per mile of $0.30/mile. Because of this deduction, most ridehailing drivers are able to declare profits that are substantially lower. Mean drivers who use a Standard Mileage Deduction would declare taxable profit of $175 rather than the $661 earned. These numbers suggest that approximately 74% of driver profit is untaxed.

The authors add that if their $661/month mean profit is representative then the US’ Standard Mileage Deduction facilitates “several billion in untaxed income for hundreds of thousands of ride-hailing drivers nationwide”.

So what does the study tell us about the ride-hailing business model? “It tells us that it’s a shitty place to work,” says Mark Tluszcz, co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners who has described the gig economy model as the modern day sweatshop, and says his VC firm made a conscious decision not to invest in gig economy companies because the model is exploitative.

“It tells you that it’s a great place if you’re a company. It’s really a poor place to be an employee or be a worker.”

The exploitative asymmetry of ride-hailing platforms comes because workers have a certain amount of fixed costs but the platform intermediary can just hike its commission at will and lower the service cost to the end user whenever it wants to increase competitiveness vs a rival business.

“At the end of the day there are a certain amount of fixed costs [for drivers],” says Tluszcz. “You have to buy a car, you have to get insurance, you have to pay for gas… And if you as an intermediary, which those platforms are, are taking an increasing amount of commission — 10%, 15%, now 20 in most of their markets — and then you’re using the price of the trip as a way of beating your competitor… then you as a driver are sitting there with basically all of your fixed costs and your income is going down and frankly the only way to cover your costs is to spend more hours in the car.

“Which is frankly what’s clearly illustrated by this study. These people have to spend so much time to cover their costs when you break it down to an hourly revenue, it’s a pitiful amount. And by the way you have no social coverage because you’ve got to take care of that yourself.”

At the time of writing neither Uber not Lyft had responded to a request for comment on the MIT study. But an Uber spokesperson told The Guardian the company believes the research methodology and findings are “deeply flawed”, adding: “We’ve reached out to the paper’s authors to share our concerns and suggest ways we might work together to refine their approach.”

Tluszcz was quick to dispatch that critique. “MIT is not some second tier organization that did this study,” he points out. “For me that’s a reference moment when MIT says look, there’s an issue here… There’s something wrong in the model and we can tolerate it for a period of time but ultimately we’re creating this lost generation of people.”

“These business are built on situations in the market that are not realistic,” he tells TechCrunch. “They took advantage of a hole in legislation… Governments let that happen. And it made all of sudden services cheaper. But people have to eat. People have to live. And ultimately there’s only 100% of a cake.

“Cabbies in the UK are not millionaires; they make a decent living. But they make a decent living because there’s a certain price-point to offer the service. And in every industry you have that. There is a certain fair price point to be able to live in that industry… And clearly right now, in the ride-sharing businesses, you don’t have it.”

In Europe, where Uber’s business has faced a series of legal challenges, the company has begun offering some subsidized insurance products for platform workers — including one for Uber Eats couriers across Europe and a personal injury and insurance product for drivers in the UK.

In January in the UK it also announced a safety cap on the number of consecutive hours drivers on its platform can accept trips, after coming under rising political and legal pressure on safety and working conditions.

Last year Uber also lost its first appeal against an employment tribunal that judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers, not self-employed contractors as it had claimed — meaning they are entitled to workers rights such as holiday and sick pay.

Uber also had its license to operate in London withdrawn last fall, with the local transport regulator citing concerns about safety and corporate responsibility as key considerations for not renewing the company’s private hire vehicle license.

Tluszcz’s view is that such moves prefigure a more major shift incoming in Europe that could cement permanent roadblocks to business models that function via intentional worker exploitation.

“The flaw in the [gig economy] model as a worker is so big that it seems to be quite clear that European governments are going to be looking at this and saying this is just not the European ethos. It’s just not,” he argues. “There’s going to be a moment when all these things are clashing. And I think it’s a cultural clash that we have really, between European values of equity and American values of just pure market capitalism.

“You can’t expect somebody making $3.37 an hour to take a part of that to contribute to retirement and social coverage. What the hell do you live on?” he adds.

“We’re creating the next lost generation of people who simply don’t have enough money to live and those companies are fundamentally enabling it under the premise that they’re offering a cheaper service to consumers… And I just don’t think Europe will put up with this.”

Last month the UK government confirmed its intent to act on this area by announcing a package of labor market reforms intended to respond to changes driven by the rise of gig economy platforms. It dubbed the strategy a ‘Good Work Plan’ — billing it as an expansion of workers rights and saying “millions” more workers would get new day-one rights, coupled with a tighter enforcement regime on platforms and companies to ensure they are providing sick and holiday pay rights.

“We are proud to have record levels of employment in this country but we must also ensure that workers’ rights are always upheld,” said the UK prime minister, also emphasizing that her goal was to build “an economy that works for everyone”.

It’s likely to publish more detail on the employment law reform later this year. But the direction of travel for gig economy platforms in Europe looks clear: Away from being freely able to exploit legal loopholes and towards a much more tightly managed framework of employment and workforce welfare regulations to ensure that underlying support structures (such as the UK’s national minimum wage) aren’t just being circumvented by clever engineering and legal positioning.

“This for me is an inherent dilemma one has between capitalism and some level of socialism which we have in Europe,” adds Tluszcz. “This is a clash of two fundamentally different views of the world and ultimately as a company you have to be a company that views your role in society as one of being a contributor — and tech companies can’t hide behind the fact; they must do the same.

“And unfortunately all these ride-sharing businesses, and including most of these gig economy companies, are just trying to take advantage of holes and frankly I don’t see them at all looking at their reason to be as at least having a component of ‘I’m good for the society in which I operate’. They don’t. They just simply don’t care.

“That’s a dilemma we have as consumers, because on the one hand we like the fact that it’s cheap. But we wish that people could all have a decent living.”

Whether US companies will be forced into a less exploitative relationship with their US workers remains to be seen.

Tluszcz’s view is that it will need some kind of government intervention for these types of companies to rethink how their models operate and who they are impacting.

“Tech companies frankly have an equal amount of responsibility to be great corporate citizens. And right now it feels — particularly because many of these tech companies are born in the US — it almost feels like this Americanism about them says I don’t have to be a good corporate citizen. I’m going to take advantage of the world for me and my shareholders,” he says.

“I’m a capitalist but I do think there’s some moral guidance you have to have about the business you’re building. And the US tech companies, around the world — certainly in Europe — are being highly criticized… Where is your moral compass? And unfortunately, today, sitting here, you have to say they lost it.”

Update: A Lyft spokesperson has now emailed the following statement in response to our request for comment: “Drivers are an integral part of Lyft’s success. An ever-growing number of individuals around the country are using Lyft as a flexible way to earn income, and we will continue to engage with our driver community to help them succeed. We have not yet reviewed this study in detail, but an initial review shows some questionable assumptions.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-driving-for-uber-or-lyft-sucks/

Drunk man accidentally takes $1,600 Uber ride

Drunk man accidentally takes $1,600 Uber ride 0

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Image: Getty Images

Kenneth, my greatest friend whom I have never met, drunkenly took a $1,635.93 Uber ride from West Virginia to New Jersey last weekend.

After a night of partying with friends near West Virginia University, Kenneth ordered an UberXL to his home over 300 miles away — a decision that, according to a Philadelphia CBS affiliate, he “doesn’t quite recall” making.

SEE ALSO: Uber driver has a Spotify playlist for every kind of passenger he picks up

“Basically, I kinda just blacked out,” Kenneth explained. “The last thing I remember was being at the bar and then I just woke up in the Uber next to an older dude telling me I was an hour out from Jersey.” 

From there, Kenneth completed the $1,635.93 journey home.

One small silver lining: it was a five hour trip, so at least my dude Kenneth enjoyed a much-needed nap. Other than that, it’s like, Kenneth, come on. What else is there to say? Oh my god.

WATCH: Watch a bunch of drones carry designer purses down the runway

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/01/uber-ride-kenneth-1600-dollars/

The End of <em>Waymo v. Uber</em> Marks a New Era for Self-Driving Cars: Reality

The End of Waymo v. Uber Marks a New Era for Self-Driving Cars: Reality

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The sun had only just come up Friday, but the young self-driving car industry had already moved into a new era. From the bench, federal Judge William Alsup, recovering from a sore throat, called it: “This case is now ancient history.”

Waymo v. Uber, the first great legal fight over autonomous vehicles, ended in a peace treaty Friday morning: Uber gave Google’s sister company a 0.34 percent stake in its business (worth $245 million or $163 million, depending on how you count Uber’s worth), and pledged not to use any of Waymo’s software or hardware in its vehicles. “I want to express regret for the actions that have caused me to write this letter,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a statement posted on the ride-hailing company's website.

Waymo had alleged that when longtime Google engineer Anthony Levandowski resigned to start his own company, he took thousands of vital technical documents with him, including blueprints for the lidar laser sensor he had helped develop. Uber bought Levandowski’s startup a few months later for almost $600 million in equity and put Levandowski in charge of its struggling self-driving R&D effort. In Waymo’s telling, Levandowski and Uber used Waymo trade secrets to accelerate their efforts.

In large part, the lawsuit encapsulated the stakes in the early days of an industry that’s now booming. Back then, a good lidar system was so rare and coveted that it might be worth stealing. A single engineer like Levandowski, who helped found Google’s self-driving car team a decade ago, could merit a palace coup. And just two companies—Google, the progenitor of self-driving tech, and Uber, the virile challenger eager to convert its millions of human-operated cars into much more profitable robots—command nearly all the headlines and attention of anyone eager for a world where human drivers are a lol-worthy memory.

That world looks different now. More than 20 companies are currently developing lidar, making the sensor more necessary commodity than secret sauce. A pedigree like Levandowski’s loses its luster as a new generation of engineers, trained in robotics and machine learning, emerges. At least half a dozen companies not involved in this brouhaha have proven they can make cars drive about without human help. Waymo v. Uber was a fight over a once jealously guarded technology that today verges on commonplace. And now that the suit is settled, everyone can turn to the next chapter in the textbook, the one where all the companies grow up and figure out how to deploy the thing they’ve all created.

“This is evidence that the autonomous driving problem is not going to be solved by a single silver bullet,” says Shahin Farshchi, a partner at the venture capital firm Lux. “It’s a matter of building many things and getting many things to work together.”

As any good historian will tell you, a moment like the Visigoth-induced fall of Rome in 476 or Judge Alsup’s decree that “there’s nothing more for me to do here” doesn’t really trigger an epochal shift. It’s just a convenient marker. The transition from developing self-driving technology to actually deploying it happened independent of this case. Even before Waymo filed its lawsuit, others were turning a horse race into a stampede: General Motors acquired self-driving startup Cruise. The mysterious startup Zoox started testing in San Francisco. Waymo alum Bryan Salesky decamped for Argo AI and partnered with Ford. Former Google self-driving chief Chris Urmson founded Aurora and is now working with Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Chinese automaker Byton.

Of course, the settlement has tangible effects. First, Uber lives. The threat of a billion-dollar penalty or an injunction that could shut down its entire self-driving program has evaporated. As Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick testified, the company sees autonomous vehicle tech as vital to its existence. If someone else figures out how to run a taxi service without a driver before Uber does, then Uber loses.

Uber wins that second life pretty cheaply, too. No money changes hands as part of this deal; Waymo receives a mere 0.34 percent stake in the ride-hailing company. Each party in the lawsuit will pay its own lawyers. And with that, Khosrowshahi ticks another box off his lengthy Fix Uber list, which also included a house cleaning after the company revealed it had paid off hackers following a 54-million-account security breach and an apology tour in London for safety infractions.

Waymo, meanwhile, maintains its position at the head of the self-driving pack, and shows competitors it’s willing to bleed a bit to stay there. “It was great from Waymo’s perspective to put everyone on notice: ‘We take our leadership position seriously and we will go hammer and tong after anyone who will upset that,”’ says Reilly Brennan, cofounder of the transportation-focused venture capital firm Trucks.

That goes for its own engineers, too. Pierre-Yves Droz, Waymo’s current lidar technical head, testified Thursday that, OK, yes, he had taken an outdated version of one lidar setup to Burning Man. And yes, he had taken two other versions home (with his bosses’ permission). Uber lawyers seemed prepared to argue that this wanton toting-about of self-driving tech proved that Waymo’s lidar wasn’t a trade secret after all. You have to hide stuff for it to be a secret.

So expect no more lidar shows at Burning Man, and no more carelessly protected servers. It’s time for the self-driving space, Waymo included, to grow up and be diligent about keeping their tech in-house. This is a real industry now. The money is still theoretical, but the autonomous vehicle market could be worth $7 trillion by 2050, according to a 2017 Intel report.

Protecting intellectual property means telling employees what is and what isn’t secret—especially if they’re about to leave. “The critical juncture to reinforce those expectations is in the exit interview,” says John Marsh, a lawyer with the firm Bailey Cavalieri. “The employer says, “Hey, by the way, you signed this agreement about trade secrets when you started here; if you have questions, come see me. I expect you’re going to abide by this.’”

In the abridged trial, an Uber lawyer asked Waymo hardware engineer Sasha Zbrozek whether anyone at Google looked for activity that signaled someone was downloading huge numbers of files.

“No,” Zbrozek responded. “But nobody monitors when you get water from the fridge either.”

The time for such freedom could be ending. As autonomous driving technology approaches reality—the you give someone money to ride in this thing kind of reality—expect better defined policies and lots more rules. And maybe a camera watching the water dispenser, too.

Waymo’ Autonomy

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All About Lidar, The Laser-Shooting Wonder Box That Could Make Self-Driving Cars Real

Also known as the spinning thing atop self-driving cars, lidar is the technology that could unlock autonomy for everybody.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/uber-waymo-trial-settlement-self-driving-cars/

Cargo raises $5.5M to let Uber drivers sell snacks and essentials nationwide

Cargo raises $5.5M to let Uber drivers sell snacks and essentials nationwide

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Cargo, a startup that wants to let every rideshare driver open their own convenience store in their car, has just raised $5.5 million in a round it’s calling seed preferred financing.

Over the summer we covered the company’s $1.75 million seed round, at which point they were just getting started. Now they have 2,500 cars on the road in NYC, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis, with 20,000 driver signups from all 50 states.

The funding comes from CRCM Ventures and eighteen94 capital, which is Kellogg’s venture capital fund. Kellogg is also an early customer of Cargo, which, along with companies like Mars Wrigley and Red Bull, uses the startup as a marketing and distribution channel to push free products to Cargo passengers. In return for providing the free products and paying a marketing fee, these CPG companies get anonymous data about when their products are given away, so they can figure things out like what time of they day their products would sell best.

“Cargo represents eighteen94 capital fund’s first channel investment. We see huge potential in the new consumer touchpoint within the passenger economy that Cargo is developing,” explained Simon Burton, managing director of eighteen94 capital in a statement. “Cargo provides brands with innovative opportunities to connect to the consumer in their moment of need.”

These free samples also help Cargo sell its paid goods — about 30 percent of all transactions come after someone had first tried a free transaction to get one of the sponsored items available. Drivers get a 25 percent commission on each paid order plus a $1 base commission for each order (including free products), with the average driver earning around $100-$115 per month. However the top 10 percent of drivers are converting somewhere between 30-60 percent of riders into customers and making up to $275 per month.

So far it’s about a 50-50 revenue breakdown between Cargo selling products directly to riders and receiving distribution deals from product manufacturers. The startup plans to deploy its hardware and software solution in about 20,000 cars and open in one new city each month for the next six months before trying to raise a Series A to propel them to 100,000 cars and beyond.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/22/cargo-raises-5-5m-to-let-uber-drivers-sell-snacks-and-essentials-nationwide/

Uber announces safety cap on UK driver hours

Uber announces safety cap on UK driver hours

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Uber has confirmed it will cap the amount of hours drivers on its platform in the UK can be logged in to accept trips. After ten hours the new policy will require drivers take an uninterrupted six-hour break before they can log back into the app again.

Uber says the new UK driver hours policy will come into force next week.

A spokesman told us it’s making the change to “enhance driver and passenger safety” — though in truth the company has faced rising political pressure on safety issues and working conditions for many months now, including facing a grilling in October from a parliamentary committee that’s running an enquiry into the gig economy.

Safety was also one of the issues cited by London’s transport regulator for withdrawing Uber’s license to operate in the city in September.

In a statement on the new driver hours policy, Andrew Byrne, Uber’s head of policy, told us: “While drivers only spend an average of 30 hours a week logged into our app, we want to do our part to ensure they don’t drive tired. That’s why we’ve been sending drivers regular reminders to take rest breaks and why we’re now bringing in these new limits.”

“We continue to listen to feedback and plan to make other changes and improvements over the coming months,” he added.

An Uber spokesman declined to answer when we asked whether the company will be bringing in driver caps elsewhere in Europe.

Back in October Uber told UK MPs running an enquiry into gig economy working conditions that it was working on a mechanism to cap the amount of time a driver could be logged into the app over a rolling 24 hour period. At the time it said it was testing a cap of between 12 and 10 hours.

During the committee session UK parliamentarians pressed Uber on its attitude to safety — raising concerns about the long hours being clocked up by drivers on the platform, including citing stories of drivers sleeping in their cars to work for longer.

Uber told the committee that the average number of hours worked per week by Uber drivers across the UK is “just under 30″. It also said a quarter of Uber drivers work fewer than 10 hours per week; another quarter works more than 40 hours; and “about 25 per cent” work more than 40 hours per week.

Though it has since corrected these figures — saying that the median number of hours is 30; and that 16 per cent of drivers in the UK are logged into the app for fewer than 10 hours per week; and just under a third (31%) are logged in to the app for more than 40 hours per week.

The committee asked Uber to send breakdowns for percentages of drivers working more than 50, 60, 70 and 80 hours per week — and Uber initially told it “fewer than 6% of drivers spend more than 60 hours logged into the app per week”.

Again, Uber has since corrected the figures it provided — and in a letter to the committee dated December 13 it now states that “fewer than 8% of drivers spend more than 60 hours logged in to the app per week”.

It also said that 2.6% of Uber drivers are logged in for more than 70 hours per week, and 0.8% are logged in for more than 80 hours per week.

Given that the company claims to have around 50,000 drivers on its UK platform that suggests up to 4,000 Uber driver are routinely logged into the app for more than 60 hours per week. Of those, 1,300 are logged in for more than 70 hours per week, and 400 are logged in for more than 80 hours per week.

Though in the letter Uber claims that “an hour logged into the Uber app is not the same as an hour of work” — suggesting for example that “drivers can log in while on a break or doing other things”.

From next week, those 4,000 UK Uber drivers will face a hard cap of ten hours on the number of consecutive hours they can be logged in to ply their driving trade on the platform.

But the fact it’s taken legal challenges and public pressure from parliamentarians to push Uber to install a safety cap on driver working hours hardly reflects well on the company’s attitude to driver and passenger safety.

Rising legal and political pressure is clearly having an impact on how Uber does business in Europe though. In November the company lost its first appeal against a 2016 UK employment tribunal verdict that had judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers, rather than self-employed contractors — as the company had argued.

Last April, in the wake of the October 2016 tribunal decision, it announced it was launching a subsidized personal injury and illness insurance product for drivers in the UK — responding to rising legal liabilities related to working conditions on its platform.

Uber has said that if it has to fund workers’ rights for all ~50k UK Uber drivers it would cost the business “tens of millions” of pounds. (Though, in December, it announced that from January it would fund a free personal accident and sickness insurance package for all couriers on its UberEats business, across Europe.)

The UK government has been actively eyeing how gig economy platforms mesh with current employment — commissioning an independent review into the issue which reported last summer. Though it’s still not clear how exactly it might move forward with legislative changes.

Responding to Uber’s new driver hours policy, the IWGB union, which campaigns for gig economy workers rights in the UK, welcomed the cap but argued that it fails to address the root cause of driver fatigue — which it says is a result of low rates of pay (it claims UK Uber drivers need to work for 34 hours a week just to break even).

“If Uber forces drivers to work less without paying more it is just going depress hourly earnings even further below the minimum wage and push drivers to the brink. The solution is simple: Uber has to abide by what two separate tribunals have ruled and pay its drivers at least the minimum wage and holiday pay,” said IWGB UPHD branch chair James Farrar in a statement.

“[Transport for London] and licensing authorities around the country have also contributed to the problem of driver fatigue and exploitation by over supplying the market with licenses and failing to make provision to protect drivers. Once again, drivers are being made to pay for the consequences of corporate greed and regulatory failure.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/16/uber-announces-safety-cap-on-uk-driver-hours/

Uber Refuses To Refund Passenger Who Got Cheated By The Driver, So He Shares His Shocking Photos Online

Uber Refuses To Refund Passenger Who Got Cheated By The Driver, So He Shares His Shocking Photos Online

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Uber has become a phenomenon is the last few years, revolutionizing the ways many of us travel and shaking up the entire local transport industry. However despite its conveniences there are inevitably drawbacks, as this passenger found out to their cost.

Taking an Uber ride in Las Vegas, things turned from bad to worse for the user, who later uploaded snippets of a conversation with the company on Imgur.

The incident shows that while Uber is great for quick and easy trips around town at an unbeatable price, it does seem quite easy for drivers to charge a cleaning fee on their word and a blurry photo or two. While it is of course possible that the user did indeed have some incontinence issues, the accusation and the evidence provided leave plenty of room for dispute and put the user at risk of a dishonest or just plain grumpy driver taking them quite literally to the cleaners.

Scroll down below to check out how the incident unfolded, and feel free to join the discussion in the comments!

Buckle up for a memorable Uber ride in Las Vegas that turned from bad to worse in mere minutes

Naturally, after receiving a receipt like this the rider contacted customer service about the mix-up

Here’s how it all went down from the rider’s point of view

Had a memorable Uber ride yourself? Share your experience in the comments!

Read more: http://www.boredpanda.com/this-is-why-uber-need-to-background-check-their-drivers/

Blow to Uber in Europe as top court rules its a transport service

Blow to Uber in Europe as top court rules its a transport service

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Europe’s top court has provided the final verdict on a multi-years legal challenge brought by EU taxi associations to Uber’s claim that it’s just a technology platform — with the CJEU today ruling it’s a transport service.

The judgement means Uber must comply with individual Member States’ transportation regulations, and cannot claim its p2p ride-hailing services are only governed by less restrictive EU-wide ecommerce rules.

In its ruling the court writes that Uber’s “intermediation service… must be regarded as being inherently linked to a transport service and, accordingly, must be classified as ‘a service in the field of transport’ within the meaning of EU law”.

“Consequently, such a service must be excluded from the scope of the freedom to provide services in general as well as the directive on services in the internal market and the directive on electronic commerce. It follows that, as EU law currently stands, it is for the Member States to regulate the conditions under which such services are to be provided.”

As we reported earlier this year, an influential advocate general opinion had indicated the decision would not go Uber’s way — with the CJEU advisor stating that Uber “exerts control over all the relevant aspects of an urban transport service”.

Responding to the court’s final verdict today, an Uber spokesperson emailed this statement: “This ruling will not change things in most EU countries where we already operate under transportation law. However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours. As our new CEO has said, it is appropriate to regulate services such as Uber and so we will continue the dialogue with cities across Europe. This is the approach we’ll take to ensure everyone can get a reliable ride at the tap of a button.”

The original legal challenge was filed in 2014 by a professional taxi drivers’ association in Barcelona — seeking a declaration from that court that the activities of Uber’s Spanish unit amount to misleading practices and acts of unfair competition. In order to determine that matter, the court decided it needed a judgement on whether the services provided by Uber are transport services, information society services or a combination of both. Hence the case being referred to the CJEU.

While the court’s verdict is certainly a blow to Uber’s expansion ambitions in Europe, and will feed back into other legal challenges across the region, the company does already operate under transportation regulations in some European markets, such as London in the UK. (Albeit, it has currently had its license to operate in the city withdrawn for unrelated reasons.)

So Uber’s contention is the legal verdict will not change how it operates in most EU countries.

The ruling also only pertains to Uber’s peer-to-peer ride-hailing services — which have long faced out-and-out bans in multiple European markets, such as France, Spain and Belgium.

In some of these EU markets Uber has gone on to relaunch professional services (i.e. non-p2p ride hailing, using licensed drivers) — including in Berlin and Madrid — apparently complying with local transport rules.

Although in Spain, at least, local taxi associations are still striking and protesting at the presence of Uber and other ride-hailing firms, claiming that rules which are supposed to limit the number of taxi licenses to operate are being broken.

What’s clear now is the CJEU’s decision cements the need for Uber to work with local authorities and regulators in each and every EU market and city where it operates. It also closes the door on Uber being able to restart the engine of p2p ride-hailing expansion in Europe.

So any faint hope the company might still have entertained of being given a legal green light to speed down a digital EU fast-lane and overtake local transport interests is gone.

Even as taxi association blowback and regulatory and political pressure have already pushed it to conform to existing transport rules in many EU markets.

While in others, ‘hostile’ regulatory climates — as Uber has characterized it — have resulted in it pulling its service altogether. Though, more likely, it has just done a cost-benefit analysis and determined that a small market — like Denmark — is not worth its while to put in time and lobbying cash to try to flip the regulatory regime to something less restrictive.

The company may be hoping that the legal clarity provided by the CJEU’s ruling on ride-hailing apps pushes cities and local authorities to accelerate reforms of existing rules to more generously accommodate the new generation of app-based players. Though existing taxi associations will also be pushing in an equal and opposite direction against any changes they don’t like.

New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi does represent a welcome break with the old Uber and its aggressive style of business — and has signaled a desire to work with local lawmakers, as well as apologizing for Uber’s past mistakes, and managing to sound genuinely contrite and constructive.

But the reality for the still profit-less company is that its operational costs only look set to rise from here on in, as legal rulings unpick exploitable loopholes — at the same time as regulatory roadblocks are cemented in place to close down its old rapid expansion playbook. And as the cost of still emerging liabilities come home to roost.

In the UK, for instance, Uber has just lost its first appeal against an employment tribunal verdict that ruled a group of its drivers are workers, not self-employed contractors — and are therefore entitled to benefits such as holiday pay. Opening the company to additional legal challenges from other drivers.

Uber has said that if it has to fund such benefits for all ~50,000 of its local drivers it would cost its UK business “tens of millions” of pounds.

The UK government is also looking at changing employment law to reflect “modern” gig economy platform work — and will clearly be keen to protect its tax takings which have been dented by an algorithmically accelerated boom in ‘self-employment’.

“Uber does not charge VAT on the basis that it is for the self-employed drivers who supply the services to register with HMRC to charge VAT,” notes Rachel Farr, senior employment lawyer at international law firm Taylor Wessing, commenting on the implications of the ruling in a statement.

“Now that the ECJ has said that Uber itself is a transportation company, that will put further pressure on Uber to charge VAT. This would immediately increase the cost of fares by 20%, even before the extra costs such as the minimum wage and paid holiday if the drivers are treated as workers.”

Add to that politicians in Europe and elsewhere appear increasingly willing to give tech firms a public hosing — whether it be over tax, safety or wider societal problems being exacerbated by their products — and there’s a sense that the tide of public opinion is no longer going to be swayed just because you have a shiny app.

Even less for Uber whose reputation has been shredded in recent years by a string of corporate governance and internal scandals — including its disclosure last month of a data breach in 2016 affecting 57 million of its users and drivers. Instead of informing regulators when it learnt about the breach, Uber’s then management sought to conceal it by paying off the hackers.

That decision is yet another that seems likely to be an expensive one for Uber — both financially and, perhaps more importantly, in the eyes of the regulators and lawmakers which it increasingly needs to have on side.

Its competitors are certainly wasting no time in painting themselves as ‘constructive disruptors’ and jockeying for favor as more reliable local partners for cities to work with.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/blow-to-uber-in-europe-as-top-court-rules-its-a-transport-service/

Uber settles lawsuit with woman who accused executives of obtaining medical records after she was raped

Uber settles lawsuit with woman who accused executives of obtaining medical records after she was raped

by • Cars • Tags: , , ,

Uber has settled its lawsuit with a woman (Jane Doe) who accused its now-former CEO Travis Kalanick, president of business in Asia Eric Alexander and SVP of business Emil Michael of improperly obtaining her medical records after she was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi, India. Michael was dropped from the lawsuit about tow months ago.

“A settlement has been reached and the Parties anticipate the case will be dismissed on or around January 2018,” the document states. Specific terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing.

In the lawsuit, Doe’s attorneys said “Uber executives violated her a second time by unlawfully obtaining and sharing her medical records from that vicious sexual assault and have failed, as of the date of this filing, to apologize to her for this outrageous conduct.”

Doe had previously sued Uber in 2015 for negligence and fraud for failing to do a thorough background check on the driver. In that case, the driver was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In light of Doe’s most recent suit, Uber fired Alexander in June. Just a few days after Alexander’s firing, Michael also left the company after the board agreed to adopt Uber’s law firm’s recommendations in light of an internal culture investigation.

I have reached out to Uber and will update this story if hear back.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/uber-settles-lawsuit-with-woman-who-accused-executives-of-obtaining-medical-records-after-she-was-raped/

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