I'd love to hear some smart people opinions on this idea: "Uber doesn't need to be profitable, they just need to survive until their autonomous cars are deployed"
Let’s pretend Waymo has 100% safe, easy producible, street legal self driving cars available today and everyone else was clearly several years behind. I see this would play out in a few ways:
1) Would Waymo actually want to spend billions to buy enough cars to maintain their own fleet in most cities in the world/US so that you could quickly and reliably hail a self driving car (and spend on marketing / referrals to grow marketshare). Would Waymos/Google investors actually allow them to lose this much money to start a new business that has historically been so unprofitable?
2) Would Waymo just sell cars to consumers/rental car companies, who would then deploy the vehicles to uber/lyft. In this scenario wouldn’t the cars be even more price sensitive about automatically switching between driving for different platforms and optimizing for the cars time. Wouldn’t consumer still open their uber/Lyft apps, check for the lowest price and then take the cheapest ride? Isn’t this fundamentally the same economics issue (unless the rides perhaps get so cheap that consumer no longer bother to check)