I can believe that's their goal: I see little reason to believe they'll succeed in it, beyond making the market a bit bigger than the current taxi/minicab market. Just because they're very good at supplying an unlicensed minicab service (apparently subsidised by VC money in many areas) doesn't mean they can (i) run a minicab business at a profit so much more efficiently than every other minicab business in history th…
at the very least their drivers will still own cars.. if buying a car is all of a sudden not normal, then it would cost A LOT to become an Uber driver.
Car ownership is already not necessary. Both Uber and Lyft offer a car "rental" or leasing program where you will be given a car to use for the job for a fee which will be waived or reduced if you drive enough and do enough business with the car. They profit off of this or at least recoup money if you fail to hold up your end of the contract or in certain cases, you pay for the mileage you drive outside of work hours. This drastically reduces the capital necessary to start driving for these companies.
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
TFA and a lot of commenters here don't seem to understand that Uber doesn't want to compete with taxi services, which are a niche business to be disrupted en route to the real prize. It wants to compete with your car - imagine 12 lanes of L.A. traffic composed mostly of Ubers. That's their dream. They even admit this in public. [0] The day they can get cost per mile one penny below what you'd spend owning a Toyota Ca…
> It wants to compete with your car - imagine 12 lanes of L.A. traffic composed mostly of Ubers.
It's close to competing with my own car. I'm in West LA and use Uber daily, but only use my own car once or twice a week.
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
I'm not sure why a Level 3 needs to be a person in the vehicle? Uber may time their IPO just before they start having growth problems. That seems to have a high probability. The contrarian side of me thinks that the more negative people become about a tech company the more likely it is to succeed (assuming a real product and not elaborate fraud.) Markets become far more favorable when all of your competitors believe…
"Is Uber/Lyft the starting point for calling a car or is it Android/iOS ; or is it Google Maps/Apple Maps ; or may be it is Siri/Alexa/etc." - This is an extremely good and often overlooked point. With Apple, Google, and Amazon now offering AI-powered smart-home devices (i.e., Google Home, Alexa) as well as mobile assistants like Siri and Android Assistant, they will increasingly own the first point of contact for a user when they need to hail a car. You could hail a ride without even having to open the Uber App at all, meaning that from a consumer perspective the relationship has shifted upstream to the phone OS or connected device, and Uber now becomes the behind-the-scenes middle-layer that runs the dispatch logistics. Right now, Google/Apple/Amazon operate under the guise that they are "integrating" with Uber's services, but when Google and Apple roll out their own autonomous vehicles (which they already are working on) and Amazon starts rolling out autonomous logistics (i.e., trucks and drones) then they will own both the upstream point of contact, as well as the downstream supply of cars/trucks/drones. When they have built the user behavior of people ordering directly from a phone OS or in-home device, what's to prevent them from connecting directly to their self-owned fleet and cutting out the middle layer (Uber) completely? While everyone is focused on Lyft...Uber's real competitor is one or all of the above situations. Piggy-backing off Uber in the connected home / OS integrations is as classic of an example of a trojan horse maneuver as I have ever seen.
Uber's current problem is they have run out of things to innovate on. They've pretty much nailed the UX in their app, and all they're left with is cars taking people from Point A to Point B. What is left to improve on there? So now, their only way to grow is to race to the bottom on price and undercut their competitors. And the only way to do that is to light billions of VC dollars on fire in the form of subsidized t…
> They've pretty much nailed the UX in their app ...
Ehhhh....I disagree because I have a less than stellar UX every time I use it. However, my situation is more or less an edge case. I rely on Uber to take me from the train station to work every morning. The train station is right by FLL. It's even called the Fort Lauderdale AIRPORT Station at Dania Beach. I have to call the drivers and tell them I'm at the train station and not the airport every time, and sometimes, they'll cancel or just go to the airport anyway. The GPS will place me at the airport sometimes too for extra fun. I've reported this several times to Uber, and it's still not fixed. It's also important to note a self driving car would make my situation worse (no one to contact when/if the app gets it wrong).
I would switch to Lyft, but after having a driver flat out refuse a fare, and leave me stranded in Miami, I'm not so keen on that idea.
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
TFA and a lot of commenters here don't seem to understand that Uber doesn't want to compete with taxi services, which are a niche business to be disrupted en route to the real prize. It wants to compete with your car - imagine 12 lanes of L.A. traffic composed mostly of Ubers. That's their dream. They even admit this in public. [0] The day they can get cost per mile one penny below what you'd spend owning a Toyota Ca…
> they'll open up the biggest transport market ever created
And others will see the opportunity and jump in to compete on a market Uber spent all it's money to create. And there will be very little Uber can do to stop them.
Perhaps, Uber may be able to be a few percent more efficient if they have more cars around and more data to use for predictions. The question is can uber be materially cheaper with it's data in the long term?
at the very least their drivers will still own cars.. if buying a car is all of a sudden not normal, then it would cost A LOT to become an Uber driver.
Car ownership is already not necessary. Both Uber and Lyft offer a car "rental" or leasing program where you will be given a car to use for the job for a fee which will be waived or reduced if you drive enough and do enough business with the car. They profit off of this or at least recoup money if you fail to hold up your end of the contract or in certain cases, you pay for the mileage you drive outside of work hours…
either way this drives up cost because it raises the amount a driver must make a month. obviously we dont have concrete numbers but if people are switching to uber only they probably would want to save a lot every month versus owning a car.
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
>The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. Wait, what? How can that be possible? Wouldn't the airlines cease to exist if they never generated profits?
There are subsides, and there is a difference between "losing money most of the time" and "losing money on average".
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
Carter was also the one who chose Volker to head the fed and squeeze inflation (to kill stagflation). This cost Carter the election because it also squeezed the economy...but ignited a recovery that Reagan got credit for.
The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs). I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost th…
Amazon also has crazy AWS profits to subsidize major investments. Uber lacks such a super profitable but tangential revenue stream.
People seem to underestimate just how much money AWS makes.
AWS makes almost no money compared to their core business, it's around 10%, maybe a little bit more. The profit from AWS, however, is something like 50% of Amazon's total profit. That said, it's not hard to occupy a huge percentage of profits from Amazon since they purposefully run almost every other facet of the business at razor thin margins.