Yeah, but the self-driving tech is a proprietary trade secret. Tesla's not sharing their self-driving tech. GM is not sharing their self-driving tech. Uber i

Yeah, but the self-driving tech is a proprietary trade secret. Tesla's not sharing their self-driving tech. GM is not sharing their self-driving tech. Uber is not sharing their self-driving tech. If that moat is not easily surmountable, Uber has a long-term fighting chance. Uber does not have a long-term fighting chance if they stick with traditional drivers. It's like ISPs, no? Back in the day, anyone could become an ISP, just lease various telephone lines for running 33.6kbps to customers, and if you wanted to go fancy, T1. At the end of the day, telecom providers found it much nicer to keep their lines and become the ISPs themselves. It wasn't profitable for 3rd parties to lease those lines and try to be an ISP. Ridesharing companies similarly don't have their own cars and tech, they need to use someone else's cars and tech. Car manufacturers are making a similar switch as what ISPs did; they see a logical road that leads to becoming ridesharing companies. Uber is trying to flip the game and develop their own technology to become an ISP that owns its own lines. They're not trying to manufacture the cars though. They're just trying to manufacture the tech that goes on top of the cars, since they don't have manufacturing expertise. It'll be enough to just buy the cars from someone else and put their tech on top.