3 ms·
Uber losing could happen, sure. But why would tiny companies win ? big companies still have somewhat better economics(volume discounts, vertically integrated m
by 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 agoA 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jacques_chester 10y agoThere are economies of scale, but there are also people who don't know they're going to go out of business for undercutting the major rates. And there will be people who bought a self-driving car et voila, someone pitches "AirBNB for self-driving cars!" and they decide to undercut Uber to make a few easy bucks. There will be constant downward pressure on price and no structural way to build a moat against it.