161–170 of 213 posts
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Because they are going to lease them out to drivers to compete with Lyft, which earlier this week announced a similar program.
Uber already has a financing deal for drivers.[1] This may just be a mod to that plan. [1] https://get.uber.com/cl/financing/
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And most of northern Europe
Here in Norway we even have Tesla Model S taxis. (The government subsidies are a bit crazy.) Edit: to be clear, these are regular taxis, not high-end/limousine/whatnot-service
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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).
Only 32 rides per day? I would think that's pushing the limit. You will have to buy cars for peak times, so most of them will see only a few hours of use each day. At a guessed 6 hours of busy service a day, that's 5 trips an hour, or 6 minutes to drive to a customer and 6 to drive him where he wants to be. Also, a risk here is that other large parties will make the same calculation, flood the market (anybody with mo…
You're assuming that each ride is independent, but that's already not the case with their Smart Routes - the driver picks up a customer, then picks up another one on the way, then drops off the first and picks up a third, etc.
The goal stated by their CEO is "perpetual rides", in which the car is never without a passenger.
TLDR: It's not self driving. It's data collecting cars for now. I know a little bit about this. It's not "self-driving" car per se. You know with current technology we can't have completely driver-less cars. But to get there we need a lot of data. Uber and Lyft saw all the rides on their systems and thought if we had a lot of sensors in cars and recored all of that we could have the winning factor for self driving ca…
Why would they even sell the cars, when they can rent them out and make much bigger margins ?
Uber's current strength is it's database of drivers, but since we're talking self-driving cars here, that become irrelevant.
It's not like Mercedes or BMW lack brand recognition in the transportation space...
Just a shower thought, but if the car makers can make self-driving cars, can't they also implement their own versions of Uber ? Why would they even sell the cars, when they can rent them out and make much bigger margins ? Uber's current strength is it's database of drivers, but since we're talking self-driving cars here, that become irrelevant. It's not like Mercedes or BMW lack brand recognition in the transportatio…
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…
The fetishism of "job-creation" is misguided and unsustainable. The purpose of life is not 'work'.
High-availability self-driving Ubers are undoubtedly better for the majority of urban consumers than taxis or individual car ownership.