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Yeah Uber's navigation in Manhattan and Brooklyn is unusually bad in my experience. The last incident that truly soured me on Uber Pool was when it tried to tak

by CPLX 10y ago

Yeah Uber's navigation in Manhattan and Brooklyn is unusually bad in my experience. The last incident that truly soured me on Uber Pool was when it tried to take me from Downtown Brooklyn into Manhattan to drop the other guy off before me, when I was going to Brooklyn Heights. Um. That, however was only my second worst Pool experience, not nearly as surreal as the driver who spoke nearly no English, and didn't actually understand the basic concept of Uber Pool. So I get in, then it prompts him to pick up another passenger, but he doesn't understand so he drives to the spot and expects me to get out. I try to explain that he just drove by the woman he was supposed to pick up, and after much confusion, she gets in the car. The driver thinks she's a friend of mine, and doesn't understand that we're now going to two different destinations sequentially. Then it prompts him to pick up someone else. It would have been more painful if it wasn't sort of mildly amusing. Oh wait that might be tied for second with the time that I was headed down Canal leisurely when the app pinged indicating a new passenger, and prompting the driver to take an immediate right, which caught him off guard a little and he veered right into the Holland Tunnel approaches. Thankfully I was paying attention and immediately vocal enough to get him to stop and escape by moving a few traffic cones. Your average tourist would have been blissfully headed for New Jersey in that scenario. Or, in other words, Uber needs to stop spending so much time fantasizing about valuations and robot cars and actually improve their product. I have no idea why they're spending so much to theoretically develop a monopoly when ever user in this town at least is developing many reasons to bolt to a credible competitor on moment's notice.

jacques_chester 10y ago
They're betting on self-driving cars. My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated. "Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return. Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.
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- gaadd33 10y ago
  Has anyone tried a self driving car in Manhattan rush hour traffic (or similar cities)? I assume SV rush hour is more slow moving traffic/etc on expressways rather than tiny congested streets. In any case wouldn't their self driving car implementation be improved by a better mapping and navigation algorithm in dense traffic?
  - CPLX 10y ago
    No. The reason I know the answer is because there is no such thing as a self driving car.
- petra 10y ago
  Uber losing could happen, sure. But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated maintenence, a variety of ways to raise capital, maybe a bit of branding(with regards to reliability, cleanliness...), etc).
  - michaelt 10y ago
    A company that limits itself to online dispatch and doesn't own any vehicles itself (a) can expand to new cities at almost no cost, (b) can perform well on certain metrics like return on capital invested and revenue per employee, (c) faces no risk from buying too much capacity and (d) bears much less of the costs of risks like bad routing, mispricing or vandal customers, and so doesn't have to spend money mitigating those risks. Of course, to get those benefits the supply of self-driving cars has to outpace the large companies' ability to expand. The fact your dispatch software can scale to 100 cities in a day is irrelevant if Google, Amazon and Uber are buying all the self-driving cars as soon as they come off the production line.
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by CPLX 10y ago

jacques_chester 10y ago

They're betting on self-driving cars. My expectation is that self-driving cars will be promptly disintermediated. "Google Rides", maybe, or "Amazon Prime for People", scatter-gathering over thousands of small companies owning 1 or 2 cars. Prices will fall to the marginal return. Uber's investor fountain will run dry and they'll be stuck with the same economics as everyone else. There will be no brand loyalty once price-finding apps enter the fray. They'll still be a major competitor, but the fevered dreams won't pan out.

deleted 10y ago
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gaadd33 10y ago
Has anyone tried a self driving car in Manhattan rush hour traffic (or similar cities)? I assume SV rush hour is more slow moving traffic/etc on expressways rather than tiny congested streets. In any case wouldn't their self driving car implementation be improved by a better mapping and navigation algorithm in dense traffic?
- CPLX 10y ago
  No. The reason I know the answer is because there is no such thing as a self driving car.
petra 10y ago
Uber losing could happen, sure. But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated maintenence, a variety of ways to raise capital, maybe a bit of branding(with regards to reliability, cleanliness...), etc).
- michaelt 10y ago
  A company that limits itself to online dispatch and doesn't own any vehicles itself (a) can expand to new cities at almost no cost, (b) can perform well on certain metrics like return on capital invested and revenue per employee, (c) faces no risk from buying too much capacity and (d) bears much less of the costs of risks like bad routing, mispricing or vandal customers, and so doesn't have to spend money mitigating those risks. Of course, to get those benefits the supply of self-driving cars has to outpace the large companies' ability to expand. The fact your dispatch software can scale to 100 cities in a day is irrelevant if Google, Amazon and Uber are buying all the self-driving cars as soon as they come off the production line.
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