FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS

I would've provided dumb investors with consulting services to tell them this was all dumb.

Starting around May 2016, Uber projected in public and private presentations that it would manufacture 13,000 autonomous vehicles by 2019, only to change that forecast four months later to over 75,000 units. The company also said that human safety drivers, who take over the wheel when an AV needs help, would not be required on its cars by 2020. And in 2022, the company declared, tens of thousands of fully self-driving Uber taxis would be in 13 of the largest cities.

As it turns out, even Uber didn’t have any faith in these claims. According to the released court files, nobody at Uber vetted its AV deployment figures, which Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, described as nothing but “hypothetical scenarios.” He added, “They are assumptions and estimates. I don’t think anything in this document would be described as accurate. It’s a set of knobs you turn to try to understand parameters that you need to try to meet.” Perhaps more damning, the Uber employee responsible for the forecasts said that while she was designing them, executives had asked her “to think about a way” to show accelerated Uber AV development.

I guess I already told them for free on this dumb blog.