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Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

reuters.com

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Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#101

Post by aetherson »

sirkneeland wrote: post #96
williamcotton wrote: post #72

How does this benefit Uber? Imagine Daimler can produce 100,000 self-driving cars. They would continue to produce and sell self-driving cars to other people as well. They could sell self-driving cars to Lyft. Individuals could operate their own self-driving car services. They could organize in to cartels and have a single app that competes with Uber or Lyft. Uber is destined to be a commodity in an open marketplace o…

I think the other function Uber serves is not just an aggregator of supply (of cars and drivers) but of demand (passengers). It is far from a trivial effort to have a sufficient amount of users know of your app/service, download and install it, trust it enough to add payment details and use it. While not quite as insurmountable an obstacle as, say, making a new smartphone platform (sorry Palm/Nokia/BlackBerry/Microso…

Customer acquisition is, I mean, it's not like you literally just snap your fingers, but it's very straightforward. There are hundreds of channels to acquire customers, and services to help you do it.

In a hypothetical world in which we have fully autonomous vehicles and someone wants to compete with Uber, anyone who can afford capital investment in a fleet is not going to have much difficulty generating a customer base (and then they can have a mutually destructive price war with Uber).

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#103

Post by akhatri_aus »

sixQuarks wrote: post #102

Very telling that Uber is trying to go with Mercedes, when Tesla is really their first choice. It's an open secret that Elon Musk will be launching an Uber competitor using Tesla vehicles. I expect a "surprise" announcement from Tesla within 18 months.

The other thing is Tesla can't make this volume of cars yet & it carries a certain amount of risk for such a large deal.

They only made about 50,000 cars last year and have capacity for around 90000 this year. Even if Uber's order was spread on a number of years, Tesla will have trouble filling the order.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#104

Post by nsxwolf »

mixedbit wrote: post #76
nikkwong wrote: post #66

Another concern for uber is what are people going to do to the inside of these driverless cars now? Passengers today are respectful to ridesharing vehicles they sit in--because the owner of the vehicle is close at hand and the human connection commands some respect. But when its just a group of (maybe drunk) passengers in an empty vehicle--where's the accountability?

Passengers won't be anonymous and Uber already has reputation system. Also you can already rent a car, and rented cars are usually not vandalized.

You have a lot more liability as a renter.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#105

Post by jfoutz »

Uber has some of the best researchers in the world. I'd bet Mercedes builds the cars, specialized with Uber specified additional sensors and hardware for self driving. Uber customizes the source to deal with tough driving conditions, and turns the code back over to Mercedes.

Uber gets it's fleet, Mercedes gets the tech. It's getting competitive. Mercedes will get the tech perfected, but this kind of deal could get them there much faster. Access to Uber's team, and more importantly mountains of data that Uber is taking the risk for will probably speed up refinement of the tech.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#106

Post by josephmx »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31
fit2rule wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is what you need to make an auto-driving automobile acceptable to the general public. With Uber spin, Daimler can push on the driver-less car in many markets.. Sci-fi days ahead methinks.

Tesla seems to be doing a fine job showing the benefits and safety of autonomous vehicles to the general public and regulators.

Which Tesla vehicle is self driving?

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#107

Post by BinaryIdiot »

adamt wrote: post #36
mmakunas wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm missing something but that number sounds hard to believe. An S-Class in the US is $100K. Even if a stripped down "utility" version was available at $50K that's $5B worth of cars. Yes, it's a "long term" order (i.e., not paid for and delivered at once), but that seems way beyond anything even Uber would do.

The deal is probably similar to the way an airline buys planes. E.g consider when Ryanair bought 200 737s for $22Bn [1] which is about the same in it's entire market cap. An order like this is probably: * For a delivery spread over 10+ years * The vehicles will almost certainly be leased/finance * Each vehicle will probably assume a 5+ year working life and have a residual of about perhaps 25% of list after 5 years g…

> After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k.

No way. Absolutely no way. Looking online I'm seeing estimates of 300,000 to 500,000 miles per year in a taxi. If Uber is even NEAR that max, this car is going to have 300,000 miles on it. Hell even 150,000 is a ton of miles on a used vehicle.

Looking at KBB with a base S-Class that's 5 years old with 300,000 miles you're looking at roughly $12k in "good" condition (because, let's face it, people are going to be in this thing constantly and "good" is the rating the majority of used cars are in when they're sold).

Then factor in that Uber is not going to become a used car company (at least I would imagine they wouldn't) they're going to have to sell even lower than KBB to a third party so that third party can make any money. So I'd bet one of these cars would end up selling for $6k to $8k depending on mileage and condition after 5 years.

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#108

Post by alextgordon »

chc wrote: post #90
mixedbit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passengers won't be anonymous and Uber already has reputation system. Also you can already rent a car, and rented cars are usually not vandalized.

Car rentals are fairly expensive. People tend to take better care of things they've put a lot into. Case in point, rental cars tend to be in much better condition than the back seats of taxis, which in turn are in better shape than the back seats of buses. I think people's concern is that single rides in self-driving cars might even rank below buses.

Still, Uber knows who you are. If you damage their car they can invoice you. Presumably they will have CCTV in these things?

Re: Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source

#109

Post by ghaff »

jellicle wrote: post #98
mixedbit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passengers won't be anonymous and Uber already has reputation system. Also you can already rent a car, and rented cars are usually not vandalized.

Rental cars aren't vandalized because they are inspected before and after every rental by rental company employees. Driverless rental vehicles will very quickly look like the back of public buses. "Dave {hearts} Christina" inscribed on every surface.

Have you heard of Zipcar? There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that we'll see autonomous taxis in less than decades but this doesn't seem like one of the bigger problems.
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