4 ms·
Why not an arms race to burn through the other side's cash, thus gaining monopoly status for a time?
by jsprogrammer 10y ago
Why not an arms race to burn through the other side's cash, thus gaining monopoly status for a time?
- novocaine 10y agoThis is the simplest, most conventional business explanation and what their MBAs would be thinking. They won't have many particular incumbent advantages if / when self driving cars arrive; all their carefully tuned business model, investment and product is about how to handle human drivers.
- usrusr 10y agoSo true. The closest we have now to self-driving taxis is car sharing, not taxis. Everybody I know is either on no car sharing network at all (the overwhelming majority) or on all available of them at the same time, picking case by case whichever network has the closest car available. In absence of monthly charges coupled with long contact periods, network lock-in only happens with horizontal, bidirectional peer to peer networks (e.g. facebook or traditional eBay), not in a vendor/buyer model. People who happily ordered from Amazon rarely stop considering other stores, hence artificial lock-in attempts like prime. What could give Uber/Lyft an advantage in the robotaxi age would be huge amounts of cash for the enormous investments required to blanket whole cities with cars to locally reach the critical mass of "a robotaxi is always closer than my own car would be", but I don't see how luring users with subsidized prices now would in any way help with that then.