Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

techxplore.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 136 posts

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#71

Post by lumost »

valuearb wrote: post #56
clairity wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you shouldn't ignore impairment. it's a place to stuff a bunch of bad decisions, and an amorphous bucket where value can be plausibly inflated and deflated to control the performance story of a company (i.e., where fraud can happen).

This is all true, but it can also be a place to acknowledge the bad decisions Kalinack made. When you have a grab bag collection of growth businesses like Uber, the important question is whether the core business can be profitable, and to that end you need to exclude the failures of the non core businesses.

isn't uber still priced as if they had grown to be a profitable business across all of their growth businesses? I have a hard time understanding the valuation of Uber given any negative indications on any of their businesses.

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#72

Post by lefstathiou »

valuearb wrote: post #57
legolas2412 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I find it much more plausible that Waymo and Tesla will vendor out the details of the rideshare service rather than build their own from scratch. Yeah, but that puts all value add in waymo or Tesla's hands, not Uber's. Uber will have no advantage, and cannot charge juicy margins.

Uber will have the largest network of customers and that’s far from trivial to build. It easily costs $2+ per customer to get your app installed on their phone, and takes years to get hundreds of millions of installs.

If we can agree that switching costs are low for users, and that the cost of building an autonomous vehicle fleet is very large, then the advantage goes to Google who has both a huge distribution machine (owning Google Maps) and massive amounts of free cash flow to deploy.

They could purchase 100k vehicles in a blink of an eye, outfit them with AI, deploy in NYC Chicago Atlanta Austin LA and bam users will convert. They don't need to cover the globe, just the absolute most lucrative cities (which Uber relies on to subsidize smaller cities).

Additionally, I am not convinced the transition from largest taxi service to AV will be smooth sailing from a personnel perspective. Not having to manage the politics of a deeply embedded global supply chain is one of Tesla's advantages relative to big auto. At some point, drivers may say F* this in dealing with Uber which Google avoids from the get go.

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#73

Post by lumost »

majormajor wrote: post #68
legolas2412 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I find it much more plausible that Waymo and Tesla will vendor out the details of the rideshare service rather than build their own from scratch. Yeah, but that puts all value add in waymo or Tesla's hands, not Uber's. Uber will have no advantage, and cannot charge juicy margins.

I wouldn't be too worried about Tesla if I was Uber. Even if they get the hardware first without competition it would be a massive undertaking to build out a competitive transport business. The capital costs to create a fleet to have similar hailing times to Uber would be absolutely massive - now you have to buy the car instead of just recruiting a driver - plus they'd have to catch up on the logistics to try to pay…

barring a change in interest rates, established companies with the ability to borrow should have effectively limitless capital to deploy. We're arguably at a unique point in history with respect to small businesses ability to add leverage to throw around megacap capex e.g. WeWork

Unless TSLA or Waymo decided that they didn't want to deal with a taxi network there shouldn't be any reason they couldn't form an independent company to absorb the loan risk ( with a PE partner potentially ).

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#74

Post by sizzle »

rob_austin wrote: post #25
subsubzero wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Uber is a lost cause, sorry to say but the food delivery business cannot be profitable for a majority of customers to where they will still pay for takeout. Their ATS service(self driving cars etc) was using stolen technology from waymo, now they are forced to using their own technologies they are way behind waymo, aurora, nuro, etc. Even ride hailing which is supposed to be their bread and butter is losing m…

The worst part is consumers have also lost because of uber. The promise of convenient, affordable transportation will not be delivered. Uber/Lyft rides will be more expensive than cab rides were because users have to support Uber's overhead.

self driving cars are the answer, which are impervious to pandemics like coronavirus as an added bonus and will reduce the human death toll inflicted from motor-vehicle casualties at the hands of human drivers.

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#75

Post by aeyes »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #4

I'd rather rent a bike or scooter right now than get in a stranger's car. I don't get it.

At least here none of the bike or scooter rental services are currently working. Jump in the Uber app only shows "We will be pausing Jump in your city."

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#76

Post by clairity »

deminature wrote: post #54
clairity wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even long-term, it's tempting to think that synergies and market consolidation would lead to higher utilization rates through stacking (making multiple delveries at once), but indications from current players in the space are discouraging in that regard. last-mile logistics is an exceedingly tough nut. i think it's really going to take a wholesale reconfiguration of cities around much more density and mixed-use where…

>i think it's really going to take a wholesale reconfiguration of cities around much more density and mixed-use where shared industrial kitchens and warehouses can make the synergies work out, but of course that's decades in the making. It's actually closer than it seems if this bet plays out: https://www.cloudkitchens.com/

yes, that's the easiest part and where there has been some activity, but even then, it's a capital-intensive business without obvious super-scalar competitive advantages.

shared industrial kitchens become advantageous only with density, proximity (mixed-use), and (unfortunately) high land values.

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#77

Post by TylerE »

paulcole wrote: post #15
martythemaniak wrote: post #9

First, they were gonna make the jump to be an autonomous robotaxi service, but that's going nowhere fast. Then they were going to be mobility service - cars, bikes, scooters, everything would go through them. But no more. So what are they going to be now? Just milk their taxi service until Waymo, Tesla or whoever comes and wipes them off the market? Honestly, what are their long-term prospects? I've been staying away…

> First, they were gonna make the jump to be an autonomous robotaxi service Anyone who fell for this is a fool. Nobody could answer the question, “How is self-driving cheaper than exploiting human drivers like they are now?”

> Nobody could answer the question, “How is self-driving cheaper than exploiting human drivers like they are now?”

Huh?

There are SEVERAL obvious advantages.

* AI drivers don't get tired - they can drive 24 hrs/day if there's demand. This lowers cost because the (fixed) cost of the vehicle is amortized over more rides.

* They don't get a cut. See above.

* AI doesn't incur hr costs and can't sue you or try to unionize

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#78

Post by paulcole »

TylerE wrote: post #77
paulcole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, they were gonna make the jump to be an autonomous robotaxi service Anyone who fell for this is a fool. Nobody could answer the question, “How is self-driving cheaper than exploiting human drivers like they are now?”

> Nobody could answer the question, “How is self-driving cheaper than exploiting human drivers like they are now?” Huh? There are SEVERAL obvious advantages. * AI drivers don't get tired - they can drive 24 hrs/day if there's demand. This lowers cost because the (fixed) cost of the vehicle is amortized over more rides. * They don't get a cut. See above. * AI doesn't incur hr costs and can't sue you or try to unionize

Who owns the AI-driven car? Who maintains it?

Either Uber is spending a shitload of money to build, maintain, and replace their own fleet or they‘ll be leasing cars from private car owners for about what they paid human drivers in the first place.

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#79

Post by paulcole »

djannzjkzxn wrote: post #69
paulcole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, they were gonna make the jump to be an autonomous robotaxi service Anyone who fell for this is a fool. Nobody could answer the question, “How is self-driving cheaper than exploiting human drivers like they are now?”

The financial benefit seems pretty clear, conditional on self-driving tech working. The capital cost of the hardware would be amortized. Let’s say a driver costs $10/hour. If the self-driving car is active for 16 hours a day it saves you $58k a year in driver wages. Then over more years that number multiplies. It seems totally realistic for self driving tech to cost five figures per vehicle. With mass production the…

So instead of paying a bunch of people $10/hour, Uber is going to pony up front for a huge number of vehicles and the staff it takes to maintain them? Or are scads of private owners going to hand over their car to Uber to run as AI-taxis for $10/hr?

Re: Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

#80

Post by epistasis »

untog wrote: post #48
axguscbklp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I don't get about the robotaxi stuff - did the company and the investors ever actually believe that the robotaxi stuff was even close to viable, or was it just a scam all along? To me it seems obvious that fully self-driving cars are almost certainly, at best, several decades away - and, if it turns out that fully self-driving technology really does require artificial general intelligence, it's quite plau…

> did the company and the investors ever actually believe that the robotaxi stuff was even close to viable IMO, absolutely. The hype for self driving cars a few years ago was massive . I forget who, but a prominent SV investor offered to make a bet with someone that self-driving taxis would be on the road in five years. There was plenty of it in HN, too. That's the investors. Did Travis think so too? The insane amoun…

I think all the self-driving cars hysteria was just momentum from the hype of deep learning advances. I remember thinking about the idea of self driving cars within 10 years, "this seems crazy, but I guess I've been wrong before...". A few years later it seems even crazier. But I've also been wronger than that...

There were (are?) people talking about Artificial General Intelligence being just around the corner, which is a sign of people buying way too much into the hype cycle.

Post reply on HN