31–40 of 213 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think so too. Most likely Daimler will get a stake in Uber - which makes sense for both sides.
Uber is what you need to make an auto-driving automobile acceptable to the general public. With Uber spin, Daimler can push on the driver-less car in many markets.. Sci-fi days ahead methinks.
At that kind of volume, would it make more sense to have MB develop a bespoke car for Uber? The S-Class is a great car, but I'm sure there are Uber-specific improvements that can be made. Why would you order some many of something 'off-the-shelf'?
I don't think you'd find any manufacturer who would tool up for a bespoke car. Uber either needs to buy an existing manufacturer with existing large scale capacity, or build out their own capacity. And we've seen with Tesla how much and long that capacity takes to build out for only 100K vehicles/year. Uber is capital chasing a potential treasure chest. Google, Tesla, GM/Lyft/Cruise are the real players it appears.
That's one way a precommit makes sense to me; a contract could be structured such that Uber gets a certain price as long as they keep up with their commitments, if they don't keep up, they pay a penalty.
Mercedes/Audi/BMW taxis are common in Germany. This doesn't mean you'll be able to order your S class in NYC/SF any time soon.
And most of northern Europe
Edit: to be clear, these are regular taxis, not high-end/limousine/whatnot-service
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you'd find any manufacturer who would tool up for a bespoke car. Uber either needs to buy an existing manufacturer with existing large scale capacity, or build out their own capacity. And we've seen with Tesla how much and long that capacity takes to build out for only 100K vehicles/year. Uber is capital chasing a potential treasure chest. Google, Tesla, GM/Lyft/Cruise are the real players it appears.
They might do a special trim package for that volume. That's one way a precommit makes sense to me; a contract could be structured such that Uber gets a certain price as long as they keep up with their commitments, if they don't keep up, they pay a penalty.
Bye Uber.
Maybe I'm missing something but that number sounds hard to believe. An S-Class in the US is $100K. Even if a stripped down "utility" version was available at $50K that's $5B worth of cars. Yes, it's a "long term" order (i.e., not paid for and delivered at once), but that seems way beyond anything even Uber would do.
Well, if they expect to use them as self driving cars (which the article mentions), the investment can pay out pretty quickly. Say they can make on average 5$ per ride. To make $60k they need 12k rides. A self driving car should be able to easily make 12k rides in one year (only 32 rides per day).
If these are self-driving cars, it makes sense to me, otherwise it doesnt.
Maybe I'm missing something but that number sounds hard to believe. An S-Class in the US is $100K. Even if a stripped down "utility" version was available at $50K that's $5B worth of cars. Yes, it's a "long term" order (i.e., not paid for and delivered at once), but that seems way beyond anything even Uber would do.
An order like this is probably:
* For a delivery spread over 10+ years
* The vehicles will almost certainly be leased/finance
* Each vehicle will probably assume a 5+ year working life and have a residual of about perhaps 25% of list after 5 years given the likely mileage
* There will be a big initial discount given the size of the order
So assume each car, is $100k new, but given an order that size is perhaps a 40% discount. So that's a $60k sale. After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k.
So the unit economics are that each car costs (before financing costs) 40k over 5 years, or $8k a year. This is a relatively low cost given the number of rides it can take and the cost of the driver who will be driving it.
On that basis is doesn't sound that expensive.
[1] http://corporate.ryanair.com/news/news/14908-ryanair-places-...
Maybe I'm missing something but that number sounds hard to believe. An S-Class in the US is $100K. Even if a stripped down "utility" version was available at $50K that's $5B worth of cars. Yes, it's a "long term" order (i.e., not paid for and delivered at once), but that seems way beyond anything even Uber would do.
Uber placed an order for 10,000 vehicles with the option to purchase 90,000 more.
http://m.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/autoindustrie/a-1082...
It says they plan to buy "a six digit number of cars", and they're only interested in self driving cars.
Maybe I'm missing something but that number sounds hard to believe. An S-Class in the US is $100K. Even if a stripped down "utility" version was available at $50K that's $5B worth of cars. Yes, it's a "long term" order (i.e., not paid for and delivered at once), but that seems way beyond anything even Uber would do.