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Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business

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

#81

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

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…

Tens of billions is not really that massive in 2020.

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

#82

Post by lhorie »

windexh8er wrote: post #65
Jommi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are in Ubers pocket. Wayne and Tesla will be smooching to be Uner's chosen one. Businesses are demand based, not supply based.

I'm not sure you're considering how fickle riders are. I work in a (what used to be) high travel group of tech. Most all of my peers and I are heavy rideshare users. Honestly, we don't care who the app owner is, but want the rides to be consistent and reliable. None of my peers is tied to Lyft or Uber, even with promotions and "status" gimmicks. If a ride can show up 3 minutes faster on Lyft - I'm taking that over Ub…

I often hear people say ubers tend to be easier/faster to get than lyfts.

When I visited Japan last year, I wasn't going to bother finding out what competitors existed. Just firing up the uber app is no-brainer in comparison.

This is similar to the dichotomy of McDonald's being almost universally considered bad junk food, yet they are packed in roadside locations in small towns because they are popular rest areas among travellers whereas local mom-and-pop competitors are far less successful. Brand is a powerful thing.

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

#83

Post by listenallyall »

windexh8er wrote: post #65
Jommi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are in Ubers pocket. Wayne and Tesla will be smooching to be Uner's chosen one. Businesses are demand based, not supply based.

I'm not sure you're considering how fickle riders are. I work in a (what used to be) high travel group of tech. Most all of my peers and I are heavy rideshare users. Honestly, we don't care who the app owner is, but want the rides to be consistent and reliable. None of my peers is tied to Lyft or Uber, even with promotions and "status" gimmicks. If a ride can show up 3 minutes faster on Lyft - I'm taking that over Ub…

You are discounting the difficulty of getting typical consumers (not "high travel group of tech") to install a 3rd, 4th, 5th app to perform the same function that Uber and Lyft already do. And when you are in a hurry, you might check 2 apps, but will you check and compare 5?

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

#84

Post by listenallyall »

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

Consider a very simple city model which requires 10,000 cars to meet demand during rush hour (3 morning hours, 3 evening hours) and 4,000 cars to meet demand the rest of the time.

A self-driving model requires the up-front purchase of 10,000 cars, 6,000 of which sit idle 18 hours per day, earning nothing. Meanwhile Uber and Lyft have zero up-front costs, and only pay drivers when the company itself is earning revenue (and presumably, a marginal profit).

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

#85

Post by opportune »

listenallyall wrote: post #83
windexh8er wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you're considering how fickle riders are. I work in a (what used to be) high travel group of tech. Most all of my peers and I are heavy rideshare users. Honestly, we don't care who the app owner is, but want the rides to be consistent and reliable. None of my peers is tied to Lyft or Uber, even with promotions and "status" gimmicks. If a ride can show up 3 minutes faster on Lyft - I'm taking that over Ub…

You are discounting the difficulty of getting typical consumers (not "high travel group of tech") to install a 3rd, 4th, 5th app to perform the same function that Uber and Lyft already do. And when you are in a hurry, you might check 2 apps, but will you check and compare 5?

Yeah, I got my parents to start using Uber. They are not very technologically literate and could definitely not be bothered to download a new app to save 10%.

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

#86

Post by api »

epistasis wrote: post #80
untog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, whic…

It's the sort of problem that is easily prone to extreme optimism extreme pessimism cycles. You get 90% of the way there and then the difficulty skyrockets. Getting to 95% is as hard as going from 0 to 90%. Getting to where you need to be for it to be mainstream is like 10-20X as hard as making an impressive looking proof of concept.

Space flight is another thing like that. We were supposed to have manned flights to the outer solar system by 2000. We're getting reusable first stages that are actually economical to fly and commercial orbital spacecraft in 2020. That was supposed to be 1980s stuff according to 1950s and 1960s space hype.

Putting someone on the moon? 1969. But that was done with a monstrously expensive finicky one-off architecture that could never be anywhere close to economical, and it was dangerous as hell. Routine trips to the moon that could even approach economic sustainability are at least 10X as hard as Apollo.

I strongly suspect safe, sustainable, and affordable nuclear fission power is yet another one. Getting some atoms to smash and boil some water? Easy! Build some power plants? A little harder. Then you hit the edge of that bath tub curve and the problems (waste, safety, fuel cycle, cost management) multiply and it gets brutally hard really fast.

We should learn to recognize engineering problems that have this kind of "bath tub curve" for difficulty vs ones with gentler learning curves.

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

#88

Post by lhorie »

baddox wrote: post #53
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…

There are certainly some overly optimistic timelines being promised by some people and companies, but "several decades" seems extremely pessimistic. There are self-driving cars driving all over San Francisco (and presumably other cities) with minimal human driver intervention. I'm sure they're not perfect, and they might not be as good as whatever human driving ability baseline will be needed for mainstream and regul…

Several decades ago, I was hearing about flying cars. The technology existed for years. Commercial flight is a thing too, but 20 years later we're still no closer to having flying cars.

Why would self driving cars be different?

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

#89

Post by dforrestwilson »

deminature wrote: post #5

"Net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. of $2.9 billion, which includes $277 million in stock-based compensation expense and pre-tax impairment write-downs of $2.1 billion. Net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. excluding the impairment write-downs, net of the tax benefit would have been $1.1 billion." So a loss of $1.1bn is an improvement on $1.4 last quarter, not including write-downs associated…

It’s very hard to “explain” why a stock goes up or down after earnings using only a handful of the reported KPIs.

Lots of factors, company specific and macro, factor in.

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

#90

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

windexh8er wrote: post #65
Jommi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are in Ubers pocket. Wayne and Tesla will be smooching to be Uner's chosen one. Businesses are demand based, not supply based.

I'm not sure you're considering how fickle riders are. I work in a (what used to be) high travel group of tech. Most all of my peers and I are heavy rideshare users. Honestly, we don't care who the app owner is, but want the rides to be consistent and reliable. None of my peers is tied to Lyft or Uber, even with promotions and "status" gimmicks. If a ride can show up 3 minutes faster on Lyft - I'm taking that over Ub…

I used to work for Thoughtworks and I just used Lyft all the time. I’m not going to look at both apps wasting time basically comparing prices. Definitely not just to save three minutes. I think this kind of thinking, is a very small minority, they probably all read HN too, am I right?

I don’t use Uber cus of ideological reasons. A lot of people, even in this community, are the same.

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