Uber loses $2.9B, offloads bike and scooter business • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by sceptical » Sat, May 09, 2020, 6:48 AM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #62

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…

Ride hailing wasn’t losing money.

Not only was it not losing money. It was actually quite profitable pre-covid.

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

#122

Post by SyneRyder » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:08 AM UTC

someonehere wrote: post #117

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…

Somewhere on reddit I saw an info graphic showing what parts of the US were dominated by food delivery businesses. Uber Eats was apparently the top delivery service in the Georgia region. I don’t recall them being anywhere else. I have this weird feeling with people ordering out food, Uber could easily shift to being a delivery service. 1) You keep your fit economy workers employed. 2) They have an app to tell them w…

Is Uber not already in the delivery business in the US?

In Australia, Uber Eats grew 3x post Coronavirus, and they even landed contracts with our two biggest supermarket chains to fill the gaps in their home grocery delivery services. Both companies didn't have enough trucks or drivers to meet the surge in demand:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2020/04/27/woolw...

And three weeks ago, Uber Australia launched Uber Connect, a parcel delivery service. They're running a promotion for Mother's Day - since we're still meant to be distancing from the elderly, you can use Uber Connect to deliver a home-made package to your Mom same day, faster than the postal system (which has just about collapsed in Australia).

https://www.uber.com/en-AU/newsroom/uberconnect-2/

So what you're suggesting Uber try has already happened in foreign markets - I'm surprised if Uber US hasn't already built that out there.

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

#123

Post by criddell » Sat, May 09, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

sg47 wrote: post #63

redorb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Being a 50mm company probably includes no longer serving the majority of markets they do now. At 50mm they become a regional taxi service with phone hailing rides. Truth is - now that they are public ~ I'm not sure what success is... for a lot of people who started there a long time ago - the IPO was 'the success' now the public is left holding the bag (mostly by their own choice of buying the stock…

I think they meant $50 million in profit.

No, I was talking market cap. That's the size of some nation-wide retailers (like J.C. Penney).

I think Uber can exist, I just don't see how what they do is worth billions. When Uber withdrew from Austin, it took a couple of days for very similar replacements to pop up.

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

#124

Post by agumonkey » Sat, May 09, 2020, 12:55 PM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #111

agumonkey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The factors seems weighted very differently. Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV (a flying ton near buildings ?). The technological soil of the era might be less nurturing than today.

> Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.

I never could swallow the statistics of flight safety. Of course they're safer, there's nothing in the sky. I assure you I can drive a million mile in a flat desert without a single incident while sleeping[0].

Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO.

[0] end of hyperbole.

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

#125

Post by josecyc » Sat, May 09, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

Not really, Uber has accumulated around 3 million drivers, Tesla has around 1 million cars with FSD capabilities and growing much faster than Uber. Tesla has the advantage that their fleet would be composed with their owned cars plus customer cars, my prediction would be that they would quickly becoming bigger than Uber's fleet of drivers once they have FSD and with a click of a button you could send your car to make money for you.

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

#126

Post by api » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #103

api wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like these analogies to other engineering challenges! It's easy to make predictions when outside a field (and I'm guilty of this fallacy too), but easy to miss the true challenges. For example, a lot of people just assume that fusion reactors will be better than fission, because that's what they were told their entire life and because we still haven't figured it out. But looking at energy density or thermal transfe…

Fusion is much better on safety, waste, and fuel cycle. The thing I wonder is whether it can be made cost competitive with renewables plus storage when the latter is experiencing falling costs at scale. At midday solar is already cheaper than most other power sources, and economical storage at scale is probably a much easier problem than fusion (or really good scalable fission for that matter).

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

#127

Post by wdb » Sat, May 09, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

yabatopia wrote: post #115

sizzle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not convinced that self driving cars are pandemic proof, on the contrary. Who's gonna desinfect the car seates and handles of an autonomous self driving car during a deadly pandemic? It's a lot safer to use your own car than a virus and bacteria ridden shared car used by God knows how many infected people. The customer isn't gonna clean it. So you need workers to clean and desinfect the car after every single rid…

Yes, I can't wait to buy a self driving car :)

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

#128

Post by wdb » Sat, May 09, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

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?”

I never understand why people expect there won't be self-driving cars for sale to the public which voids the need for self-driving car taxis? I would prefer buying such as car than keep taking taxis. In the end I think it would be much more convenient if you could call via app your own car in a similar way :)

That's the kind of future I am imagining

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

#129

Post by lhorie » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #124

lhorie wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.

I never could swallow the statistics of flight safety. Of course they're safer, there's nothing in the sky. I assure you I can drive a million mile in a flat desert without a single incident while sleeping[0]. Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO. [0] end of hyperbole.

One of the promises about flying cars was speed: you would theoretically be able to live in LA and commute to SF. So there was definitely some amount of disruption talk.

With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome.

There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.

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

#130

Post by ulisesrmzroche » Sat, May 09, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

sceptical wrote: post #120

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don’t use Uber cus of ideological reasons. A lot of people, even in this community, are the same. Uber/Lyft marketshare in all US markets tell another story. This community is a small echo chamber and thus rather uninformed.

Yeah, you’re right. I see what you’re saying.

I even forgot what my ideological reason was, something about them stealing tips.

I still don’t think riders are fickle like that, comparing prices amongst multiple ride share app and uninterested in promotions. I think people pick one and stick with it, more out of habit that anything else, not likely to change unless something crazy happens

I was all on Uber until they had some old controversy that I totally forgot about, but I’m not going to use it again, not for something as small as saving a couple dollars or a few minutes time difference