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Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

reuters.com

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Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#121

Post by searine »

bsbechtel wrote: post #120

If this is true, this is an incredibly risky move. I know self-driving cars are more or less inevitable at this point, but there are hundreds of unknowns that still need to be figured out. How will passengers treat the vehicles? What happens when there is a problem, and there isn't a human present? How secure will the cars be? Is the 'call a car from an app' business model the one that will win? Committing this amoun…

>How will passengers treat the vehicles?

As a mobile drug/prostitution marketplace.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#122

Post by BinaryIdiot »

cbr wrote: post #114
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k. No way. Absolutely no way. Looking online I'm seeing estimates of 300,000 to 500,000 miles per year in a taxi. If Uber is even NEAR that max, this car is going to have 300,000 miles on it. Hell even 150,000 is a ton of miles on a used vehicle. Looking at KBB with a base S-Class that's 5 years old with 300,000 miles you're looking at roughly $12k in "good" condition (beca…

Lowering the sale price to $7k only bumps the per-year cost to Uber from $8k to $10.5k.

True which is a $250k difference if my numbers are even correct (I mean I think they're closer than parent's but who knows). But $250k isn't that much when the company is a billion dollar company.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#123

Post by Retric »

ebbv wrote: post #27
gk1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's a volume discount when you order 100,000 of anything, even an S-Class. There's also the possibility of this not entirely being a cash sale. That is, if the report is even true.

Yeah but how much of a discount? The example in question was already assuming $50k per car which is already a tremendous discount. Even if you cut it in half again to $25k (which there's no way the price per car is that low) that's still $2.5B in cars. That's insanity.

Depends on how this is structured, if it's say 33k cars on a five year lease, renewable twice that's ~2.5B over 15 years. Also, Uber has a huge and arguably inflated market cap, so if they get this deal in exchange for stock it could be very valuable to them in the short and long term.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#124

Post by shostack »

searine wrote: post #121
bsbechtel wrote: post #120

If this is true, this is an incredibly risky move. I know self-driving cars are more or less inevitable at this point, but there are hundreds of unknowns that still need to be figured out. How will passengers treat the vehicles? What happens when there is a problem, and there isn't a human present? How secure will the cars be? Is the 'call a car from an app' business model the one that will win? Committing this amoun…

>How will passengers treat the vehicles? As a mobile drug/prostitution marketplace.

Wonder what level of surveillance these will have. Surely that would be an excellent data mining opportunity.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#125

Post by bliti »

dsr_ wrote: post #112

I am reminded of Lucent, who built the best hardware for the end-user ISP market in the form of the Ascend MAX TNT, which would terminate a DS3, break it into individual dialup lines, and handle all of them as modem calls. Cool stuff. It's just that they sold all this stuff to ISPs who didn't have any good credit lines, so Lucent extended them credit (bing! interest payments!) using the MAXen as collateral. When the…

The maintenance cost of these cars in the US is high. Whoever is making this deal should probably stop by the Lexus dealership before they sign any papers.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#126

Post by SilasX »

archildress wrote: post #80

Uber is an interesting company for a number of reasons, but here's the part that interests me the most: Uber operates in a grey-area legal environment in the cities it operates in. Uber's defense / view on this is that they generate such a societal positive in terms of jobs that it outweighs the legal constraints. But, when your goal is to eventually use a fleet of self-driving cars and eliminate the job possibilitie…

I don't think those are Uber's main defenses, which I think are actually:

1) They fall under the traditional pre-arranged/limo exemption since they aren't doing street hails.

2) They massively increase the convenience and affordability of getting a ride, which cuts down on drunk/bad driving and saves money.

Neither of those points is affected by the move to SDCs.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#128

Post by WalterSear »

nodesocket wrote: post #8
mmakunas wrote: post #6

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.

Agree. Even if Uber got them at 1/2 price, let's say $60,000, the math doesn't add up. Assuming they don't do some fancy accounting and tax magic.

Over ten years, that's $6k a year.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#129

Post by Erwin »

tixocloud wrote: post #77
timme wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. Most of them are E-classes.

How do taxi drivers afford them?

In Denmark, you could buy a car for taxi use at a much lower tax rate than normal people, but after driving it with passengers for around 250,000km and 2 years you could sell it as a private vehicle. The calculation made the car extremely cheap (I've seen a calculation of deprecation of 20% over 2 years despite the heavy use ) -- so you might as well get a nice Mercedes.

The tax a private person has to pay to buy a car was 180% in 2015 so essentially a luxury car is nearly triple of what it might be in US, with a new S350 being $250k.

Thos taxi rules have changed recently however, so Mercedes may lose their 90% taxi market share.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#130

Post by username223 »

sirkneeland wrote: post #96
williamcotton wrote: post #72

How does this benefit Uber? Imagine Daimler can produce 100,000 self-driving cars. They would continue to produce and sell self-driving cars to other people as well. They could sell self-driving cars to Lyft. Individuals could operate their own self-driving car services. They could organize in to cartels and have a single app that competes with Uber or Lyft. Uber is destined to be a commodity in an open marketplace o…

I think the other function Uber serves is not just an aggregator of supply (of cars and drivers) but of demand (passengers). It is far from a trivial effort to have a sufficient amount of users know of your app/service, download and install it, trust it enough to add payment details and use it. While not quite as insurmountable an obstacle as, say, making a new smartphone platform (sorry Palm/Nokia/BlackBerry/Microso…

> I think the other function Uber serves is not just an aggregator of supply (of cars and drivers) but of demand (passengers).

I think you misunderstand Uber. Most of its perceived value is in arbitrage between drivers' perceived and actual costs of car ownership: drivers mostly think in terms of wages minus cost of gas, ignoring all of the other costs. Given that business model, I doubt Uber is actually looking at buying these cars. They will presumably force drivers to buy or lease the cars themselves.

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