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Can Uber ever make money?

economist.com

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Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#181

Post by bluGill »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #119
amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent may last for 20 years, but that might also be the time required to develop driverless cars and get them approved.

Well... the last patent that makes driverless actually feasible in the real world will last for 20 years, and for most of that time the development will already be done. Approval? That's another matter.

More than one company is working on driverless cars. Either most of the patents will be easy to work around by some other approach, or several companies will each hold some of the needed patents and all will license from each other - it might stop someone new from getting in but it won't stop everyone already in. I would expect some combination of both.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#182

Post by [deleted] »

IanCal wrote: post #175
parksy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a way, that's the beauty of disruptive use of technology. Without the innovation of the Uber app, the traditional taxi cartels would have no incentive to improve their services and the fact that they have been forced to do so in order to compete benefits the consumer. They're not quite there yet, and are still catching up. The next logical step is a lift aggregation service that creates a marketplace. I want a…

> Without the innovation of the Uber app, I had local services with an app before Uber, I'm sure. It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either. But then, all Uber cars are the same as private hire cans anyway here. It seems like the real innovation was being big enough to ignore the local rules. That and being able to say it's "ride sharing" with a straight face.

[deleted]

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#183

Post by segmondy »

dcolkitt wrote: post #26
TruthSHIFT wrote: post #7

Keep in mind that this may not change when driverless cars become widely available. Maintaining a fleet thousands of driverless cars may prove to be more expensive than crowdsourcing a vehicle fleet.

There's either two possibilities for the self-driving future. 1) Hardly anybody owns cars anymore. When we want to get from point A to point B, we just call a driverless car from the network. But this type of service is a natural monopoly. When people are ridesharing everywhere, the network with the biggest fleet, becomes the stochastically fastest and cheapest option. Plus add in the fact that they're collecting a l…

if I build a self driving car why would I see or lease it? I would go for the monopoly you painted. I truly believe this is Elon's dream. Figure it out and they will claim you can own a self driving car for $300/month. Don't worry about the parking, garbage or maintenance. Just use your phone to request a car.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#184

Post by monsieurbanana »

IanCal wrote: post #175
parksy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a way, that's the beauty of disruptive use of technology. Without the innovation of the Uber app, the traditional taxi cartels would have no incentive to improve their services and the fact that they have been forced to do so in order to compete benefits the consumer. They're not quite there yet, and are still catching up. The next logical step is a lift aggregation service that creates a marketplace. I want a…

> Without the innovation of the Uber app, I had local services with an app before Uber, I'm sure. It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either. But then, all Uber cars are the same as private hire cans anyway here. It seems like the real innovation was being big enough to ignore the local rules. That and being able to say it's "ride sharing" with a straight face.

Hacker News about Dropbox (2007):

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

Hacker News about Uber (2019):

"It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either"

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#185

Post by __jal »

dcolkitt wrote: post #32
govg wrote: post #17

I can only see them making money in three ways : - They scale up massively and capture a huge fraction of the ride sharing market, thus allowing them to offer low cost / low margin rides, but making up for it by volumes : At least in India, they are in a good position, but they seem to have conceded the other markets with high potential for growth like SE Asia and China. - They have a premium offering that is actuall…

Option 4: Uber uses the expertise, infrastructure, and brand it built in ridesharing to expand into the becoming the de facto standard for timely last mile delivery. This is why UberEats is such a major strategic focus for the company. It's proof of concept that they can do more than be a taxi. An efficient platform for quickly and cheaply ferrying around stuff around town is a way bigger market than ridesharing. We'…

> that could only emerge in a post-Uber world.

Maybe, but a lot of restaurants despise Ubereats and want it to die, so they can't count on goodwill or loyalty there. (This is second-hand from a couple local restaurant owners; I am not one.)

As I understand it, Uber is playing a sort of TicketMaster-ish game, demanding exclusivity (no having your own drivers, no using competitors) and funny terms about hosting your menu designed to make you dependent on them.

I despise Uber, and when my local pizza shop was essentially forced to start using them, I started walking to pick up my greasepie. So I guess Uber is good for me, too.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#186

Post by treis »

cc439 wrote: post #135
joncrane wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the other group of people who benefit: the users of the app.

How much of that benefit is purely short-term though? In a hypothetical world where Uber and Lyft's current pathway to profitability never pans out, what are the ramifications. The most obvious one is that their fares will increase by 25-50% depending on the market, pricing them well above the legacy taxi services that existed before the arrival of these VC-backed companies. The second most obvious ramification is th…

>How much of that benefit is purely short-term though? In a hypothetical world where Uber and Lyft's current pathway to profitability never pans out, what are the ramifications. The most obvious one is that their fares will increase by 25-50% depending on the market, pricing them well above the legacy taxi services that existed before the arrival of these VC-backed companies.

For most U.S. cities that Uber/Lyft now service there really wasn't a taxi service before them. You could get one at the airport and possibly in certain other areas of the city like by major hotels. Everywhere else it was call a company and maybe they'll show up at some point.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#187

Post by nsxwolf »

Uber might make sense as a public utility. If it's going to lose money no matter what, why not fund it like public transportation? Lots of taxes on the back end offset by user fees to take some of the sting off and mitigate overuse.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#188

Post by reverend_gonzo »

IanCal wrote: post #175
parksy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a way, that's the beauty of disruptive use of technology. Without the innovation of the Uber app, the traditional taxi cartels would have no incentive to improve their services and the fact that they have been forced to do so in order to compete benefits the consumer. They're not quite there yet, and are still catching up. The next logical step is a lift aggregation service that creates a marketplace. I want a…

> Without the innovation of the Uber app, I had local services with an app before Uber, I'm sure. It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either. But then, all Uber cars are the same as private hire cans anyway here. It seems like the real innovation was being big enough to ignore the local rules. That and being able to say it's "ride sharing" with a straight face.

Wtf?

It is completely different. Before Uber, you had to call dispatch, give them your location or your closest estimate of it: dispatch would then manually try to find a car that was available and send them to you. This usually took at least 30-40m, if they arrived at all.

With Uber, I open the app, it looks at all available cars, finds the closest one available, and sends that car to my GPS location. Oh, and if that car gets stuck in traffic, it automatically picks another car and sends that over

Uber completely revolutionized taxi services and is absolutely nothing like calling dispatch on a phone.

Re: Can Uber ever make money?

#189

Post by reblis »

charliebossy wrote: post #160
mywittyname wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pools are where the money is at, IMHO. If they can put together a good predictive transportation model, then I think they will really have a killer app. Personal transportation is just too costly for regular use. But having an "Uber Bus" that shows up down the street from your house right when you need it, then can bring you home right after work for maybe $5/day will have wide-spread appeal.

that's called public transit

And it's pretty terrible in some cities...especially in the United States
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