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Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

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Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#71

Post by nindalf »

timewarrior wrote: post #38
rileymat2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t Running your own cars would mean incredible capital costs and marketing costs to get people to switch from uber? Additionally you need people maintaining them.

My understanding is that in a reasonably stable state, an autonomous car would run on battery, charge itself and cost 40k. If a car has a life time of 5 years and electricity costs 4k/yr + 2k maintenance (lower for electric cars), we are looking at operational cost of 14k/yr per vehicle. Right now an Uber driver who is probably online 60 hours a week, needs to support a car priced around 25k (amortized over 5 years),…

Great comment.

Let me take a stab at it as well, because I think it could be simpler.

Let's assume the driver drives the exact same model as the autonomous one, except he saves $10k upfront on the sensors. So his costs are 12k/year. A decent alternate job would pay $10/hour, and a person could probably work 9 hours a day * 6 days a week * 50 weeks, which comes to $27k. So for the taxi driving gig to be worthwhile, the driver needs to make somewhere in the region of $35-40k ($27k + $12k).

As mentioned earlier, the costs of the self-driving car is $14k/year. So that's a difference of 2.5x-3x. Still significant enough that the a taxi company that offers rides at 30-40% of the cost of its competitors will just win.

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#72

Post by adventured »

timewarrior wrote: post #34
rileymat2 wrote: post #33

If Uber was only a world wide Taxi company with virtually no capital costs, wouldn’t this be incredibly profitable alone? I am not clear on the impetus everyone sees for Uber creating self driving cars. If developed by another company, can’t they just add them to the service? Do they really want to be responsible for that capital?

Uber is valuable only because it has solved a two party network problem at a city level. You need drivers and you need riders. If you don't have any drivers riders won't come and vice versa. Two party networks are much more difficult to solve than one party network problems. Because with two party networks you have a chicken and egg problem. Anyone who has solved self driving, has near unlimited scale on the driver s…

China and Russia are poor examples.

Google lost both of them as well, not because they were out-competed by superior products. Amazon also 'lost' China, it also had nothing to do with being out-competed.

What matters for Uber are the hundred other important markets globally. China was never on the table as a possibility, it's a small miracle they got out of it what they got (a big chunk of Didi).

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#73

Post by simias »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #70
gcb0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can still live for 20+yrs very profitably on other markets. Even US and high tech markets like japan and korea will take several years to transition to self-drive cars. Specially because this will start either with trucks or very high cost cars so they can offset support and iron out bugs. And that's my guess assuming self-driving cars are ready tomorrow.

Self driving cars would be such a dramatic improvement to the public, it would be adopted much sooner than 20 years after being implemented. Cars that require a human driver would depreciate so quickly and the safety benefit would be so clear, people would upgrade incredibly fast.

We don't really know that though, do we? I mean, I can see this being true eventually but I'm still very perplex that we'll see cars able to drive autonomously in all conditions any time soon.

It's one thing to drive on the wide streets of american cities literally built around cars. It's an other to navigate the narrow, crowded streets of many european cities, with scooters and bikes zooming left and right, people parking anywhere they can, passing where they shouldn't be etc... Let's not even talk about some places in Africa and Asia where it seems that driving is more art than science.

I'm expecting self driving cars to start on friendlier turf (large avenues, highways connecting cities etc...) and then expand iteratively to "wilder" areas. I'm sure it'll take a while to completely take over though.

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#74

Post by dump121 »

nopinsight wrote: post #68

When I look at their runway and valuation going forward, IPO is the most probable path they will take. But it might imply some risks to the overall startup IPO scene in the future as well. Apparently Uber is bleeding about $2 billion a year and have only $6.6 billion in cash reserve. If this deal adds $1 billion more cash, then that would only last 4 years. Since full-scale self-driving cars launching across most maj…

Dara, the new CEO has said they are targeting a 2-3 year time frame for IPO.

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#75

Post by mathgeek »

timewarrior wrote: post #42
mandeepj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t Running your own cars would mean incredible capital costs and marketing costs to get people to switch from uber? > Additionally you need people maintaining them. This is why I think Tesla is a bigger threat to Uber in long term. If you are not sure then refer to Tesla's plan 2 but Uber also have a counter plan - UberAir https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

I somehow feel that Autonomous drones would be easier to build than Autonomous cars. Benefits of Autonomous drones: 1. Do not need to deal other non autonomous devices while in flight. Cars needs to deal with human, other cars driven by humans. 2. Do not need to follow existing road traffic rules. 3. Lot of paths available. Cars are limited to existing roads. Drones can have a lot of flight paths. I understand that t…

> Do not need to deal other non autonomous devices while in flight. Cars needs to deal with human, other cars driven by humans.

Birds and power lines both come to mind as obvious things to deal with while flying in urban areas.

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#76

Post by _pmf_ »

ttul wrote: post #45
yeukhon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might spin off the autonomous program into another company to raise fund, prior to IPO, perhaps, just a thought. I think that's a better option financially.

There is no future for Uber without automated cars. Think of it this way: as soon as someone else has an automated fleet, Uber is finished unless it has its own. This is an existential requirement.

> Think of it this way: as soon as someone else has an automated fleet, Uber is finished unless it has its own. This is an existential requirement.

But the converse is not true, i.e. even if Uber is the first large scale company operating autonomous cars, this is by no means a guarantee for success. This is where the whole "betting on Uber" investment scheme kind of falls flat in my opinion: even if all goes according to plan, Uber does not have anything special (since by that time, autonomous driving will be open to its competitors, too). They probably bet on "hacking" the regulatory process to allow only their cars for a certain period, but this merely delays the issue of competition a bit.

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#78

Post by loceng »

nopinsight wrote: post #68

When I look at their runway and valuation going forward, IPO is the most probable path they will take. But it might imply some risks to the overall startup IPO scene in the future as well. Apparently Uber is bleeding about $2 billion a year and have only $6.6 billion in cash reserve. If this deal adds $1 billion more cash, then that would only last 4 years. Since full-scale self-driving cars launching across most maj…

IPO is good for Uber - not for society though, who will be the ones to capture the losses.

Also, Tesla often is brought up in this competition - usually mentioned between Uber and Lyft and Chinese companies - however Tesla is positioned to dominate here. I wouldn't doubt that they're working on the apps internally to create the shared vehicle system that Elon speaks of. How many vehicles could Tesla create AT COST spending the $2B / year that Uber is burning? Where Tesla has a fleet of assets on the road ...

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#79

Post by loceng »

gourou wrote: post #77

Saudi Arabia owns half of Softbank's Vision Fund and they already put $3.5 billion in Uber (5.6%), why would they want to double down? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investmen... http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/softbank-vision-f...

It's likely part of the exit strategy. They are confident they can get a maybe even a small return on billions of dollars, and Uber likely is hoping it looks like such a big 'positive signal' is a sign that Uber is a solid company to invest in..

Re: Uber confirms SoftBank has agreed to invest

#80

Post by cjsuk »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #64
onion2k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars don't solve the traffic problem, but they do solve the "hell" problem.

There's a word for a properly-networked ensemble of self-driving cars: "Train." People around here like trains, I've noticed.

I love trains. As long as I don't have to get on one.

Car trains is an idea I could buy.

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