back to article Uber pulls up to the bumper, plonks Jeep hackers into driving seat

Uber has hired two security researchers as it shifts gears on its biz strategy with plans to develop driver-free cars. The cab app outfit has poached Twitter's Charlie Miller and IOActive's Chris Valasek. Those names may sound familiar to readers. That's because they're the chaps who recently demonstrated just how easy it was …

  1. graeme leggett Silver badge

    So the grand plan for Uber is

    Develop a new business where people can be drivers for hire, competing with established taxis etc

    Use money from same to develop driverless cars

    Deploy driverless cars thereby putting drivers for hire out of business?

    1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
      Joke

      @graeme leggett

      "...Deploy driverless cars thereby putting drivers for hire out of business?"

      Biting the hand that f̶e̶e̶d̶s̶ fed it

    2. Zog_but_not_the_first

      {deep breath} Ah.....! I LOVE the smell of capitalism in the morning.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Zog_but_not_the_first

        Capitalism does tend to drive mechanisation and automation as a means of reducing overhead. This is not a bad thing. In the distant past, the production of cotton required hundreds of people to maintain the machinery that produced cotton thread, but now that process is entirely automated to the point where one site can produce the thread that at one time took an entire city's-worth of mills. The manufacturers that maintained those mills sought the means to automate the entire process. Our lives are far better for it.

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      So the grand plan for Uber is [to screw over the people they "contract with"]

      No. The grand plan for Uber is to demonstrate enough of a successful business to reap fat bonuses for the executives, then bail out when things go sour. The short term plan is to screw over their drivers by hopping on the driverless-car bandwagon, which will keep the investment bucks flowing for a while.

  2. nuclearstar

    well if there are no Uber drivers available, the system can just hijack the closest jeep instead

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "the system can just hijack the closest jeep instead"

      You jest but perhaps that's the business plan - you call Ueber, they hijack the nearest car, up the aircon to unendurable till the driver bails out, then deliver it to you to take you where you want to go. The next thing will be that they sell anti-Ueber-hijack insurance.

      On a more serious note, the idea that the Ueber drivers will do the work to provide the income to design them out of a job apparently has its parallel in the canals. Some of the canals in the UK reached the height of prosperity hauling the materials to build the railways. Without the canals, the railways would have been too expensive to build. Without the present road and fuel infrastructure, the opportunity would not exist to fund self-driving car development. And so it goes.

  3. Lars Silver badge

    The day they get rid of the car too I will be all the uber about them.

  4. Robert Helpmann??
    Mushroom

    We have top men working on it right now.

    The duo will be tasked with working with Uber's top infosec bods ...

    Will they be working with the infosec bods responsible for securing Uber's petitions page or those entrusted with securing customers' personal info?

    - If you look closely, you can see the refrigerator in the blast

  5. Hollerith 1

    Why get driveless cars from Uber?

    Given ZipCars and so on, why wouldn't they do the same as Uber is doing? We could all choose a company whose rates we liked and dial a car to come pick us up. Rather than it bein a quasi-taxi service (Uber) it would be a short-rent vehicle hire service, and I would hope I could call up a small van or large people-mover or whatever. The rich and old-fashioned would still prefer to have a real driver up-front, I suspect, but eventally the roads would become safer and better regulated through a driverless system. Except for the cyclists.

  6. Smitty Werbenjaegermanjensen - he was #1!

    Sounds like Johnnycab

    And that really annoyed Arnie.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3ftd2TApqc

    Safe for work unless your corporate policy excludes a bit of anti-robot violence.

    1. JCitizen
      Devil

      Re: Sounds like Johnnycab

      This one was funnier

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCUYMM6pABw

  7. JCitizen
    Terminator

    I for one

    welcome our Uber overlords! Or is that Uberlords? HA!

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