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Uber and BYD Partner to Accelerate Global EV Transition
Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER) and BYD Co. Ltd. announced a multi-year strategic partnership designed to bring 100,000 new BYD electric vehicles onto the Uber platform across key global markets. Beginning first in Europe and Latin America, the partnership is expected to offer drivers access to best-in-class pricing and financing for BYD vehicles on the Uber platform, and will expand to include markets across the Middle East, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
To support drivers going electric, the companies’ joint efforts may also include discounts on charging, vehicle maintenance, or insurance, as well as financing and lease offers, based on what works best for drivers in a given market. The two companies will also collaborate on future BYD autonomous-capable vehicles to be deployed on the Uber platform. As the largest on-demand mobility and delivery platform in the world, Uber is well-positioned to bring autonomous vehicle technology to a global audience at scale.
DeepETA: How Uber Predicts Arrival Times Using Deep Learning
For several years, Uber used gradient-boosted decision tree ensembles to refine ETA predictions. The ETA model and its training dataset grew steadily larger with each release. To keep pace with this growth, Uber’s Apache Spark™ team contributed upstream improvements [1, 2] to XGBoost to allow the model to grow ever deeper, making it one of the largest and deepest XGBoost ensembles in the world at that time. Eventually, we reached a point where increasing the dataset and model size using XGBoost became untenable. To continue scaling the model and improving accuracy, we decided to explore deep learning because of the relative ease of scaling to large datasets using data-parallel SGD.