91–100 of 234 posts
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no man! its the juicero! that thing is so cool and practical!
AvE teardown of the Juicero, in all it's glory: https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ
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There is; they are hemorrhaging money, and only manage to stay afloat because of the billions of dollars being shoveled into the furnace by investors and nation-states. In a way, venture capital is subsidizing your rides. They're not insane, though. They're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets while they still have the market on lock. Without having to pay drivers or…
Let's be clear that "they're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets" thing is revisionist history. Nobody who invested billions in Uber years ago was told, "Our plan is to burn your money and win driverless cars." They didn't even have a driverless car program until about two years ago. Uber thought that they had a viable business model based on human drivers, and that…
Driver (D): I want to drive for Uber!
Uber (U): Sure! Do you have a car that is safe and less than 5 years old? (I have no idea what the car reqs. are)
D: No
U: Ok, well, we can loan you one! Just sign this!
D: Great! I signed! What are the loan repayments like?
U: Well, you owe us, per the 3 year contract, $100/week (I have no idea what the actual loan terms are like, but 100 is a nice round number so lets use that)
D: Ok! That's not bad!
U: It gets better! We'll just auto-deduct the money you owe us from your driver's account, after that, all the money is yours! You don't have to worry about any of it, just drive for us, we'll take care of it.
D: Cool! What happens when I get sick or something and can't drive?
U: Well, then you still owe us the money, plus a 10% fee on that week's loan payment (again, I have no idea what the loan agreement is like, YMMV) that we'll automatically tack on to the next week's loan payment.
-A week goes by-
D: Oh man, the weather was great this week, not a lot of people needed me to drive them around! I only made $90!
U: Ok, well, per the loan agreement, you owe us $10 more then (100-90=10), plus the 10% late fee, making your next week's payment $100 + $10 + (0.1 x $100) = $120.
D: Oh man! I better hope that the weather is bad so people want to take an Uber that I am driving!
-Another week goes by-
D: The weather was really rainy, but even still, I only got notifications to pick up $90 worth of people! Not again!
U: Well, now you owe us $120 - $90 = $30 plus the 10% late fee on the $120, making your next week's payment $100 + $30 + (0.1 x $120) = $142.
D: Well, darn, I thought a lot of people wanted to take Ubers! All my friends take them! But I don't get enough notifications to pick people up from Uber!
U: We know. We are the people that are giving you a loan and simultaneously are the ones that control how much of that loan you can pay back because we are the ones that tell you how many people you pick up and we also set the 'surge' rates and regular rates that we tell you. Also, we have something of a history of acting in morally reprehensible way without shame.
D: Wait, what did you say?!
U: Nothing! Nothing at all! Get back to driving! That car we bought isn't going to pay itself off, you are!
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Right, when we say Uber is better than Taxis, we generally mean "the Uber model is better than Taxis". We can exchange Uber with Lyft or any other company that works with thath model. It's about the general environment that ride sharing brings. Things like how using an app makes hailing a ride easier, how having a rating system forces drivers and riders to behave better, how mobile payment removes the awkwardness of…
> There's nothing specific to Uber in there Even further, there's nothing specific to the Uber model in there. Every one of those things could be implemented exactly the same way by an ordinary cab company. In fact, many cab companies worldwide have already implemented both the first and the third one. The only unique thing about the Uber model as opposed to regular cabs is that it's priced lower through a combinatio…
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Let's be clear that "they're buying market share and betting that they can pull self-driving cars into their fleets" thing is revisionist history. Nobody who invested billions in Uber years ago was told, "Our plan is to burn your money and win driverless cars." They didn't even have a driverless car program until about two years ago. Uber thought that they had a viable business model based on human drivers, and that…
I can't find the post, but there was a 'UBER finance guy' (self-claimed) on HN a few weeks back that 'spilled the beans' and quit on what Uber is actually: a sub-prime auto loan company. Again, this is my recollection, take it with salt. It goes like: Driver (D): I want to drive for Uber! Uber (U): Sure! Do you have a car that is safe and less than 5 years old? (I have no idea what the car reqs. are) D: No U: Ok, wel…
A predatory auto-loan company is not a $70B business.
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When I read about stuff like this and also how Uber is losing a lot of money, I have to wonder if maybe there's a fundamental problem with their business model.
It's astounding to me that they can't make it work based on the convenience of the service. I understand the strategy of wanting to buy market share quickly, and to bet on self-driving cars. That they can't compete on the convenience of the service at a fair price and playing by the rules of the districts they operate in is just astonishingly bad management.
It was also expensive, and nowadays known as UberBlack, and is a market many times smaller than Uber's ambitions.
UberBlack was a great product with unit economics that would allow for a high-quality product that was a win-win for both drivers and Uber. But it was not a big enough product to justify Uber's stratospheric valuation - hence UberX.
I think we're running into the fundamental truth here that providing high-quality taxi rides at such cut-rate prices is not possible, at least not when a human is at the wheel.
Cutting corners and playing dirty are IMO a manifestation of this fundamental problem.
That's a huge "bug" not to notice for presumably a long time. I recently had a Lyft driver in NYC talk to me about how he quit uber after doing the math on what his fare should have been when a passenger told him how much they were being charged. He brought it up to uber and then quit when they didn't fix it. Anecdotal story but seems extremely relevant now
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aren't all prices determined via some sort of market testing?
That may be true, but I assume Uber commits to paying drivers $X per mile or hour or something similar (as stated in that article). Surely, you won't drive for Uber if you don't know exactly how much money you make and if it's always subject to changes and experimentation?
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What your driver was talking about may not be a bug/math error like stated here. After rolling out guaranteed whole-ride pricing (as opposed to metering) Uber is allegedly testing algorithms to bid different prices for rides to both driver and passenger. i.e., passenger sees a fare of $X, while driver sees a fare of $Y, where presumably $Y Passengers' fares can be "optimized" by estimating a specific passenger-trip's…
>To be clear, I find this entire concept incredibly abhorrent why?
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since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less That is exactly what they do do. IT, media, even public sector, it is rampant. The Inland Revenue keep trying to crack down on it but contractors are very sly about it and always find a loophole to technically meet the requirement as if they were a genuine small business.
Well, they also lose the right to paid holiday, sick pay, not be fired at will, and so on.
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> There's nothing specific to Uber in there Even further, there's nothing specific to the Uber model in there. Every one of those things could be implemented exactly the same way by an ordinary cab company. In fact, many cab companies worldwide have already implemented both the first and the third one. The only unique thing about the Uber model as opposed to regular cabs is that it's priced lower through a combinatio…
The good thing about Uber is that I can get an Uber no matter where in the world I am (assuming that town has Uber). I don't have to know what cab companies are around or what apps I have to download.