Cyber Attacks Demonstrated on Autonomous Ground Vehicles

As reported by Net Security: Mission Secure Inc. (MSi), a cyber defense technology and solutions provider, and Perrone Robotics Inc. (PRI), a provider of robotic and autonomous ground vehicle solutions, announced a pilot project to demonstrate cyber attacks and protections targeted at ground vehicles. The University of Virginia Department of Systems and Information Engineering is sponsoring the pilot project.

As vehicles increasingly rely on automation, software and technology enhancements to run basic functionality, those systems serve as a potential safety risk when under cyber attack. Mission Secure uses a proprietary methodology developed by the University of Virginia with the Department of Defense for identifying the most consequential and easy to carry out cyber attacks on any system that a defense capability must address.

Proprietary software and hardware tools and best practices have been developed to support the methodology and to facilitate test and evaluation of the defense capability provided by MSi’s Secure Sentinel solution.

The pilot project will use MSI’s methodology and tools to develop and simulate realistic cyber attack scenarios against onboard control systems using a robust autonomous ground vehicle platform from PRI originally fielded for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge (“Tommy Jr.”), ideal for rapid prototyping and testing of this nature.

The goal of the pilot is to demonstrate how to identify vehicle safety threats malicious cyber attackers could use to easily compromise the vehicle’s key control systems and how these attacks could be detected and protected using MSi’s Secure Sentinel. Attack and protection scenarios are designed around several safety requirements of vehicles used on the road today.

“We are all excited about rapid innovation and automation for better efficiency and convenience as the world rapidly automates, but industry has not fully accounted for cyber security required for safety,” stated David Drescher, CEO of MSi. “The cyber assessment methodology, accompanying attack scenarios and protections being demonstrated in this ground vehicle pilot project follow results of a similar project involving autonomous air vehicles recently demonstrated by our team.”

PRI has been involved with a variety of pilot programs with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Vehicle Research Center (VRC) in Ruckersville, VA. The team provides a unique understanding in test protocols and data collection.

PRI has a long history in development of fully autonomous ground vehicle solutions using their general-purpose mobile autonomous robotics software platform “MAX”. PRI has fielded automated vehicle projects for the DARPA Grand Challenges, various commercial applications, and is leading the development of an automated robotic vehicle test system for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in Ruckersville, Virginia.
Throughout the pilot project MSi’s Secure Sentinel with System-Aware Cybersecurity technology will be used to monitor, detect, inform and correct against various cyber attacks available to an adversary. System-Aware Cybersecurity and Secure Sentinels recently made news in December for the ability to monitor, detect, inform and correct against cyber attacks in an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle demonstration completed by the University of Virginia in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

“This type of collaboration with cyber defense technology providers will continue to be extremely important in validating the serious nature of potential cyber attacks on both autonomous and human operated vehicles,” stated Paul Perrone, President and CEO of PRI. “MSi’s Secure Sentinel technology along with PRI’s fully autonomous vehicle and automated vehicle testing technology continue to push the forefront of the next wave of autonomous vehicle technology and safety considerations for ground vehicles. Our technology has been automating vehicles since 2004 and we were happy to bring our expertise to these test scenarios.”

PRI’s “Tommy” line of vehicles were fielded for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The company’s MAX software platform technology has been automating vehicles since 2004 including passenger cars, Polaris ATVs and drop in actuator kits for vehicle safety testing. The project has implications across both autonomous and manned vehicles and in a variety of industries including the automotive industry.

Electric-Car Pioneer Elon Musk Charges Head-On at Detroit

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, shown last year, is pushing hard to sell 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: When Elon Musk , who loudly disdains the traditional auto industry, makes his first public appearance in Detroit in two years on Tuesday, it will be easy to see how much has changed since then.

Mr. Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. is worth six times more in stock-market value. He is pushing hard to sell 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020, up from 90 a day in the third quarter. And giant auto makers are on a collision course with Tesla like never before, with General Motors Co. showing off a new electric car at the Detroit auto show on Monday.

Mr. Musk’s response? He says he doesn’t plan to change a thing, from his proclivity for F-bombs to double duty as chief executive of rocket makerSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to a hands-on obsession with the tiniest operational and car-design details at Tesla.

He calls himself a “nano-manager,” works about 100 hours a week and still runs the auto maker largely as he did before it sold the first Tesla Roadster in 2008.

“I have OCD on product-related issues,” he says with a laugh. “I always see what’s... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what’s wrong. I never see what’s right. It’s not a recipe for happiness.”

In a speech Tuesday at an auto-show event, Mr. Musk is expected to criticize larger auto makers for not responding to Tesla even more aggressively. He denounces the rest of the industry as only halfheartedly trying to produce battery-powered cars for the masses, not just early adopters.

More than a decade after launching Tesla, the 43-year-old Mr. Musk has gained lots of believers in his brash, iconoclastic quest to run gas guzzlers off the road. Tesla is worth $26 billion in stock-market value, nearly half the size of GM or Ford Motor Co. GM sold more than 27,000 new vehicles a day in the third quarter—or about 90 every five minutes.


Panasonic Corp. will invest as much as $2 billion toward the $5 billion cost of Tesla’s new lithium-ion battery factory, under construction in Nevada. The state approved $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives for Tesla, among the most ever in the U.S. for any company.

Futuris Automotive is getting a new factory the size of three football fields in Newark, Calif., ready to rev up production of seats and headliners for Tesla, which builds its Model S sedans nearby. Headliners are attached to the inside roof of cars.

“We decided to move into the Bay Area because we believe in what Tesla is trying to do,” says Sam Coughlin, Futuris’s top executive in the U.S. He plans to double the number of jobs at the factory this year, including engineers wooed away from Detroit.

Just 0.3% of the new vehicles registered in the U.S. since the start of 2012 are fully electric-powered, according to IHS Automotive, part of IHS Inc. Tesla had more than 20% of all electric-car sales in that period.

Tesla’s growing size is one reason why Audi AG , the premium-car brand owned by Germany’s Volkswagen AG , is working on a compact sport-utility vehicle designed to go 300 miles on an electric charge, according to Audi executives. Tesla plans to start selling its new Model X sport-utility vehicle in the third quarter of 2015.

GM’s new Chevrolet Bolt would be aimed directly at Tesla’s forthcoming Model 3 and capable of traveling 200 miles with one charge, according to people familiar with the strategy. A concept version of the Bolt will be unveiled at the industry’s biggest annual event, the North American International Auto Show, which starts Monday.

The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid introduced by GM in 2010, has an electric range of just 38 miles, though next year’s model will go 50 miles.

Some Tesla investors are jittery, pushing the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s share price down more than 10% in the past three months, compared with gains by GM, Ford and major U.S. stock indexes during the same period.

Analysts at some securities firms are worried that the 40% slide in gasoline prices at the pump since April might hurt demand for electric cars. Tesla shares also are being hurt by concerns that a several-month delay in the Model X rollout will make it harder for Mr. Musk to hit the 2020 sales target.

But because of the unwavering intensity of Mr. Musk’s determination, investors have flocked to Tesla and shrug off the fact that the auto maker has never made an annual profit. They don’t care that the Model S usually sells for more than $100,000, or about double the company’s original projection.

In the first nine months of 2014, Tesla had revenue of $2.24 billion, up 60% from a year earlier. Its net loss grew to $186.4 million from $57.7 million.

“There are a lot of investors whose main thesis is based on Elon Musk and his vision for the future of vehicles,” says Colin Langan, an auto-industry analyst at UBS AG . He has a “neutral” rating on Tesla shares.

Cristiano Carlutti is more blunt. He ran Tesla’s operations in Europe before leaving in 2011 for startup auto makerQoros Auto Co., where he is a top executive. Tesla was “driven and is still driven by Elon Musk,” says Mr. Carlutti. “You take Elon out of the company, [and] the market cap would go down 80%.”

Mr. Musk says the auto maker has “certainly gotten a lot of attention, but we make very few cars, so the effect is small. The value that Tesla can provide is…an example of what is possible.”

He said when Tesla stock hit $280 last year that it was probably too high. According to the company’s latest proxy filing, Mr. Musk owns a 27% stake worth about $7.2 billion based on Friday’s closing price of $206.66.

With characteristic directness, Mr. Musk admits Tesla has no succession plan. The company also has suffered from growing pains because of his domineering presence.

Some high-level managers quit or were fired after clashing with the chief executive over Mr. Musk’s insistence on doing things his way, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Tesla executives.

During the launch of Model S production in 2012, Mr. Musk set up an office in the middle of the factory floor in Fremont, Calif., and took over when hiccups emerged. He told workers to buy USB cables at nearby Fry’s Electronics Inc. stores after a snarl delayed a shipment from China.

“If you are fighting a battle, it’s way better if you are at the front lines. A general behind the lines is going to lose,” he says.

Elon Musk, right, and Peter Thiel, shown in 2000, made a fortune
when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.4 billion. (AP)

Three weeks before the first Model S was delivered to a customer, Mr. Musk demanded that the sedans have larger rear tires because he felt they looked better, according to people involved in the process. The last-minute design switch also required complicated tweaks to the car’s anti-lock braking system and carried the risk of shortening the car’s driving range.

Tesla engineers protested that the electronics supplier might not honor its liability warranty if Mr. Musk went through with the bigger tires.

Mr. Musk didn’t back down. The engineers did. And the design change went through without a hitch, says someone who was in the room when the decision was made.

Current and former Tesla executives say few people are willing to disagree openly with Mr. Musk. Those who fall out of sync with him often don’t stay long. Turnover in the auto industry can be especially problematic because it takes several years to design and roll out new models.

Last month, the chief of Tesla’s operations in China, Veronica Wu, left the company after being there for only one year. Tesla hasn’t announced the reason for her sudden departure, and she didn’t respond to emails or other attempts to contact her.

Mr. Musk “is very, very demanding, and it’s not the right speed for a lot of people,” says Ricardo Reyes, who left Tesla in 2012 as its vice president of public relations and was rehired in November when his successor quit after about six months on the job.

Before that, Tesla went nearly two years without a director of the public-relations department.

The car maker’s CEO “pushes really hard, and it’s mission driven. It’s constant activity,” Mr. Reyes adds. “He used to say that he only wanted ‘special forces’ working for him. No normal people.”

Mr. Musk agrees that he can be exacting but denies that he fires employees without reason or cause. “I don’t like to fire people. I hate it,” he says. “The issue I’ve had is firing people too late, not too early.”

Media relations have been largely handled by Mr. Musk himself, who writes his own tweets and blog posts. Last Monday, he answered questions on social news forum Reddit Inc., telling readers about a favorite Winston Churchill quote about surmounting adversity: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

In the legal department, Tesla went through three general counsels from 2009 to 2012. It then had no general counsel for more than two years until Mr. Musk promoted his former divorce lawyer, Todd Maron.

Mr. Maron had been Tesla’s deputy general counsel. Mr. Musk says the turnover was an aberration, noting that SpaceX has had the same chief counsel for a decade.

Last spring, Tesla pushed out its sales chief in Europe shortly after the company started selling cars there. An executive overseeing Japan and Hong Kong was let go last summer. 

George Blankenship, the former Apple Inc. executive who came up with Tesla’s slick retail-store concept, left Tesla in 2013 after his responsibilities were scaled back. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Tesla’s chief engineer quit months before the Model S sedan was launched, while Mr. Musk fired the chief chassis engineer working on the Model X sport-utility vehicle, saying at the time that he asked for the resignation because “there wasn’t a good fit for him.” Tesla shares fell 17% after the auto maker announced the two departures but then rebounded.

Several people at Tesla say Mr. Musk has looked on and off for years for a chief operating officer who would be the auto maker’s second-highest executive. Outsiders approached by Mr. Musk include Andy Palmer, the former chief planning officer at Nissan Motor Co. who left the Japanese auto maker in September to become CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd., a person familiar with the matter says.

Tesla technology chief JB Straubel, chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, business-development chief Diarmuid O’Connell and finance chief Deepak Ahuja have been at Tesla for at least five years and are considered close to Mr. Musk.

But none of them is seen as likely to succeed him. Mr. Musk has indicated that he will stay in the top job for at least four or five more years.

Tesla often spurns job candidates who have “too much automotive experience,” says someone recently recruited by the company. During an interview, the person was told that Tesla considered it a major negative to have extensive GM experience on a résumé. Tesla didn’t offer the person a job.

People who have worked at Tesla say Mr. Musk’s ambition and vision are inspiring. But the hard-charging culture can be exhausting, they say.

Brett Foster, a former Tesla engineer who redesigned faulty retractable door handles on the Model S, recalls a profanity-laced email in mid-2013 in which Mr. Musk prodded managers to soften their communications with lower-level employees. “ ‘Don’t be an a—’ was the gist of it,” Mr. Foster says. “I actually kind of liked that he did it.”

Some managers tried to emulate Mr. Musk’s never-say-no style, but “without being as smart as Elon,” says Mr. Foster, who didn’t interact with the CEO regularly. “I struggled with the culture and am extremely happy I am no longer there.” He now works at Samsung Electronics Co.
Ryan Popple, Tesla’s finance chief from 2008 to 2010, says Mr. Musk’s relentless perfectionism has steered Tesla to where it is today. Mr. Popple, now the chief executive of electric bus makerProterra Inc., remembers when Mr. Musk demanded that Tesla figure out how to make aluminum body panels for the Model S, rather than hire an outside supplier to do the job.

The process is highly technical, tricky and expensive. “He was the only person in the room who thought it was a good idea,” says Mr. Popple. “There were a lot of people, including me, who thought: ‘I don’t know how this is going to work.’ ” Mr. Musk responded: “We have to own it.”

Tesla now makes all the aluminum body panels it needs in its own factory.

Why the US Navy Is Building a Five-Foot Robotic Tuna

As reported by Popular Mechanics: The U.S. Navy just completed its first round of salt water testing of GhostSwimmer, a five-foot-long prototype UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) that looks and swims like a tuna. Some day soon, the Navy might deploy robotic fish to spy on enemy forces or protect friendly harbors and ships. 

Typical UUVs are torpedo-shaped and propeller-driven. But Project Silent NEMO, which began in 2013 at the Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC), seeks to develop a drone sub that piggybacks nature. "We're fascinating by the biomimicry aspect of it—the fact that is a very non-conventional propulsion system," CRIC Director Cmdr. Benjamin Salazar says.

The tail of the GhostSwimmer, built by Boston Engineering, moves up and down and side to side as a form of propulsion. Thanks to its fish-like maneuvering, GhostSwimmer can navigate waters as shallow as 10 inches and make unusually sharp turns. "It can turn almost within the length of its own body," Salazar says.

But there's performance in the lab, and then there's performance in the field. This most recent test looked at how GhostSwimmer survived realistic conditions at sea. "Very few experiments survive first contact with salt water," he says. "The sea is a harsh mistress."

Capt. Jerome Lademan, project lead for NEMO, tells PM that the robot fish is still at Technical Readiness Level 6—that's engineer-speak for a prototype not yet ready for prime time. To get there, the team will need to improve the software of UUV's navigation system, which relies primarily on an inertial navigation unit when the GhostSwimmer is untethered.

The engineers also need to extend GhostSwimmer's battery life, both by finding better batteries and making its propulsion system more efficient. The goal, Lademan says, is to "make each flip of the tail more effective in different types of water with different levels of buoyancy." In the summer of 2015, GhostSwimmer is scheduled to undergo tests of its endurance and ability to avoid obstacles. Right now, Salazar says, the UUV can travel 10 miles before needing to recharge.

The Department of Homeland Security is currently developing a variant of GhostSwimmer called BIOSwimmer, which has a ducted propeller at the end of its tail. DHS wants to use this bot for hull inspection and harbor security. Salazar insists that CRIC isn't looking at any specific missions for the robo-fish, though Boston Engineering notes that GhostSwimmer could be used for intel and recon missions, shallow water mine countermeasures operations, explosive ordnance disposal, hull inspections as well as "covert sentry missions."

 

SpaceX Rocket Makes Crash Landing On A Drone Barge: "Close, but no cigar this time."

As reported by Gismodo: After a lot of publicity and one aborted launch attempt, SpaceX tried to land its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone barge this morning. 'Tried' very much being the key word.

Initially, the mission went to plan: the rocket launched OK (incidentally, the first successful American resupply launch since that other rocket went boom), the cargo part separated from the main rocket first stage, and is now on its way to the ISS, where it should arrive on Monday.

The first stage made it to the 'autonomous spaceport drone' (that's a robot barge to you and me) without problem, but then, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, "landed hard":

But as Musk points out, the mission wasn't a complete failure. Landing a rocket vertically on a moving ship isn't exactly easy — SpaceX has likened it to "trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm". The actual landing is comprised of a few different parts: First, a boostback burn gets the craft headed in the right direction; a second 'supersonic retro propulsion' slows the rocket to 250 meters per second; and a final landing burn brings it to about 2 meters per second.

From the sounds of things, the first two parts went well: the rocket certainly hit its target, and presumably didn't do so at several thousand miles per hour. Two outta three ain't bad.

Why SpaceX Wants to Land a Rocket on a Platform in the Ocean

As reported by Vox: At 4:47 am ET on Saturday morning, SpaceX will launch its fifth cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, part of a collaboration with NASA.

However, unlike the previous four missions, SpaceX will be doing something unusual with the main component of its Falcon 9 rocket: after its job is finished, the company will try to land the rocket vertically on a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean a few minutes later.

This would be an unprecedented feat, and the company says it only has a 50 percent chance of success. If it works, though, SpaceX could reuse the rocket on a future flight — part of a broader push towards reusability that could dramatically drive down the cost of space travel.

What SpaceX is trying to do

The company will launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in order to carry an uncrewed space capsule up to the International Space Station. (It originally planned to launch on January 6, but delayed it due to technical irregularities.) The capsule will bring all sorts of cargo to the ISS: food, life support equipment, and several scientific experiments.

The rocket itself is made up of two parts: a 138-foot-tall first stage, which burns for the first few minutes of flight, lifting the craft up to an altitude of about 50 miles before separating and falling back to Earth, and a smaller, 49-foot-tall second stage, which burns for another five minutes or so, carrying the spacecraft into orbit before disconnecting and falling back down to earth as well.

Normally, both of these stages — as well as the stages that make up other rockets in general — break up into pieces as they plummet downward, eventually sinking in the ocean and becoming unusable. But on Tuesday, as the first stage falls back to earth, SpaceX will fire its engines in order to stabilize and guide it for a controlled landing.

SpaceX made similar attempts to land its rockets as part of three previous launches, and two times, it managed to get the rocket to slowly hover and land upright in the ocean, but then it fell over.

This time, it's using an autonomous uncrewed barge, which is being stationed about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, as a landing platform.

As the rocket descends, steerable fins affixed to its outside will help guide it and slow it down. As it nears the barge, a set of legs will unfold from the bottom of the rocket, and if all goes to plan, it'll slow down to a speed of about 4.5 miles per hour before gently landing on them, fully upright.

This is a very difficult maneuver for a few different reasons. For one, the rocket is primarily designed to launch a spacecraft into orbit — which means that it'll be tricky to decelerate and steer on the way down.

Additionally, with its legs extended, the rocket will be 70 feet wide, so landing it on the 300-foot wide floating platform will require a high degree of accuracy. Finally, the platform itself will be a moving target as it sways slightly in the water.

SpaceX has compared this to "trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm," and has made it clear that the attempt might not work. But if it does, the feat could be a transformative one for the future of space travel.

Why SpaceX wants to reuse a rocket

One of the factors that make space travel so expensive is the fact that most of the equipment used to put cargo or people in orbit is destroyed after each use. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has famously likened this to throwing away a brand-new 747 after a single flight to London.

From the beginning, his company has sought to make spaceflight possible with reusable components. And though that's an extremely ambitious goal, if SpaceX can pull off this landing, it'll be a first step towards achieving it.

The rocket's outer surfaces are designed to resist corrosion from seawater, and initially, SpaceX tried to use parachutes to slow down the stages as they descended. However, they broke apart due to the stress and heat produced during the descent, so the company switched to the current, powered landing approach in 2011.

If this first stage is successfully landed, it could be refurbished and used for a future flight. The Dragon capsule it launches into orbit, meanwhile, is already reusable, and the company has plans to eventually try landing and reusing the second stage of future rocket designs in a similar way as well. If successful, this would mean that the majority of the rocket components could be used several times.

This would reduce the cost of spaceflight in a huge way. Currently, building a new Falcon 9 rocket costs $54 million, but using it to put a payload into orbit costs only about $200,000 worth of fuel. Figuring out a way to reuse the rocket could make all sorts of missions — commercial satellite launches, collaborations with NASA, and space tourism — cheaper by orders of magnitude, opening up all sorts of new possibilities in spaceflight.

BlackBerry's IoT Plans Start Close to Home: Cars, Asset Tracking

As reported by IT World: BlackBerry is taking the same approach with its Internet of Things platform, launched Wednesday at International CES, as it is with its handset business: Aim at its core markets.

In IoT, the struggling mobile vendor has found an emerging area of technology where it may have the right combination of strengths. The company signaled as much last May when it announced Project Ion, a future cloud-based service it said would make it easier for enterprises to develop IoT software.

The results of that project, which involved beta testing by several customers, have been folded into a product called simply the BlackBerry IoT Platform, set for availability in April. The cloud-based system was announced at the biggest consumer technology show in the world along with some device and messaging news closer to the spirit of CES. But apart from some plans for messaging on wearables, the company’s IoT story steered clear of Las Vegas gadget fever.

Its target market in IoT, at least for now, is squarely within familiar territory: connected cars and asset tracking.

BlackBerry’s QNX business is a powerhouse in automotive as well as industrial embedded software, and the company as a whole has been rediscovering its unsexy enterprise roots. That trend continued on Wednesday with the introduction at AT&T of its BlackBerry Classic and an updated version of its chunky Passport smartphone. Both sport the company’s trademark physical keyboard, and the AT&T Passport, though it gets rounded corners, is still pretty square. The company did give a nod to consumer tech, saying its BBM messaging will be available on Android Wear smart watches.

Industrial IoT might prove a winner for BlackBerry, simply because no company yet dominates the field and BlackBerry has enterprise credibility. But even though businesses will probably buy into IoT sooner than most consumers, the industry may take a long time to emerge.

The BlackBerry IoT Platform combines QNX embedded software with BlackBerry’s secure network infrastructure and device lifecycle management. At its heart is what the company calls an efficient, scalable messaging system that can deliver highly responsive performance, BlackBerry says. That system serves as a message bus for other components including instantaneous data indexing and storage for real-time intelligence, analytics for data visualization and detailed permissions for validating every action, message and piece of data.

The platform includes several features for device management, including application enablement, over-the-air software updating and log collection. Those can speed up device deployment and extend the useful life of devices in the field, BlackBerry says.

If IoT forecasts are accurate, anything that manages IoT devices will have to scale up dramatically to serve the expected volume of connected things out in the world. BlackBerry emphasized the size of its infrastructure in pushing the IoT Platform, saying its global network of data centers handles about 35 petabytes of data per month and has peering connections with more than 300 mobile operators.

The first place BlackBerry will try to sell the IoT platform will be businesses that need to keep track of valuable things that move around a lot, such as the shipping and automotive industries. Later it plans to take the system beyond asset tracking and connected cars to other fields including energy and health care.

AT&T will offer the Passport for US$649.99 or $199.99 with a two-year agreement, as well as under AT&T Next payment plans for as little as $21.67 per month. It will sell the BlackBerry Classic for $419.99 or $49.99 with a two-year agreement, as well as on AT&T Next plans for as little as $14 per month. Exact shipping dates weren’t provided.

UberCargo: A New Logistics Service In Hong Kong

As reported by TechCrunch: Uber is often talked about for its potential to develop into a global logistics service, and customers in Hong Kong are getting a glimpse at what that might look like after a new service called Uber Cargo launched in the city-state.

The U.S. company often trials new project in single cities. It launched bike couriers in New York last year, for example, and Uber Cargo looks to be another experiment that is telling of what the company is planning to offer beyond just taxis.

The Cargo service has actually been in quiet beta in Hong Kong, according to an Uber blog post. Uber said that the service is ideal for ferrying any kind of item around:

"With UberCARGO, a van arrives wherever you want it to be in minutes. You can load your items in the back of the van yourself or request the driver’s assistance if you need an extra hand. Deliveries can easily be tracked in real-time through the app, the item’s location can be shared with the recipient and you can even ride along with your goods so you’ll have ease of mind that your items are safe.


Prices are based on the distance of the trip and also time taken", Uber explained.

Why Hong Kong?
The busy city-state is already a thriving market for van rental services. Two ‘Uber for logistics’ startups already exist there, and both have raised significant amounts of funding from investors.

Lalamove — also known as EasyVan — raised $10 million just this week, while rival GoGoVan closed a $6.5 million seed round and scored a $10 million investment from Chinese social network Renren in 2014.

Lalamove and GoGoVan are both based in Hong Kong, but have wider plans for Asia. Lalamove is already present in six cities across China and Southeast Asia and, with new money in its coffers, it plans to expand in both of those regions. GoGoVan hasn’t gone beyond Hong Kong yet, but its founders have spoken of plans to enter China, Japan and Southeast Asia this year.

Uber covers more than 200 cities worldwide, including 35 in Asia Pacific, so don’t be surprised to see its van service rapidly expanding into Southeast Asia and China, and potentially other markets, soon.

The U.S. company’s brand and visibility is such that it can allow young startups to take the lead on new business ideas, but once they gain traction, it needs to follow suit rapidly. Uber’s move into logistics suggests that both Lalamove and GoGoVan may be on to something — and it will be interesting to see how this business/service develops in 2015.

Uber confirmed that its latest $1.2 billion financing round will go towards expanding its presence in Asia. We’ve already seen it put significant resources into India and add Baidu as a strategic investor in China — Uber Cargo is another reminder that new Uber initiatives can (and do) come from outside of the company’s U.S. headquarters. We might yet see more services originate in Asia first as part of Uber’s new-found focus on the region.  

Uber Cargo looks like it is primarily targeting business users, but Lalamove executive Blake Larson told TechCrunch earlier this week that he believes there is also a strong market for consumers. Larson, who heads up Lalamove outside of China, said this year is about validating the startup’s business model — Uber’s move to rival it with its logistics service is one checkbox ticked for the startup.