4 ms·

This is a great article. The biggest point here is unlike facebook, google and Amazon there is no chance to magically find billions of new users and scale up fo

by yalogin 10y ago

This is a great article. The biggest point here is unlike facebook, google and Amazon there is no chance to magically find billions of new users and scale up for Uber. So the chance of turning a profit can only happen with driverless cars, which is atleast a few years away. I did not realize they are desperate to get self driving cars. Wonder how long they can sustain if their self driving car project hits a snag.

jayjay71 10y ago
There is absolutely no way Uber will have fully self-driving cars in a few years (a car that picks you up without a driver). If anything is going to save Uber, it's going to be Otto. Self-driving trucks are a much easier technical problem and the market is the better part of a trillion dollars just in the US.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Right, "driverless cars" are still at least 10 years away, probably 20.
  - BipolarElsa 10y ago
    I don't think we'll have anything close to a pure "driverless car" until at least middle of the 21st century, if not later. People have been making wild predictions for hundreds of years. Most of them aren't true. The "autonomous vehicle" hype circlejerk on HN is friggin' strong as a 1000 Suns. I'm sorry to say this, but it's just not going to happen on the timeline that you want it to. Give it a century, then we'll see. You're basically asking for the computer to be a human and anticipate dangers on the road and have instincts like a human. That's H U G E. I'm sorry but you guys need a major dose of salt with your claims. Major. EDIT: What do I mean by "pure driverless car"? I mean a couple things: completely unaided driving...that means if I go into a large parking structure with a toll booth at the beginning, the car should be doing all the work. "Driverless car" only on freeways and some minor roads just doesn't cut it. When I think driverless, I think "no more steering wheel" ...if we can get there, then we'll talk.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > Self-driving trucks are a much easier technical problem People keep saying this. Wouldn't you still have to solve the hard problems? A truck that spends 99% of it's time on interstates still have to deal with that 1%.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    And I'm not even sure about the 99% number. I've been told that trains tend to be used for most longer distance shipping so a lot of trucking is relatively short distances. There are also a lot of reasons I can imagine for keeping a human in trucks even if the trucks could mostly drive themselves between depots.
  - ksk 10y ago
    What if you bunched up multiple rides? Like a leader truck which has a human operator and multiple driver-less follower trucks that simply follow the leader.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Going to need drivers for each of those trucks after you exit the interstate.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    You buy a bunch of truck stops, and use human drivers for the local portion. The truck stops become analogous to ship ports. The vast majority of the miles are then automated.
mdasen 10y ago
The problem with self-driving cars is that, while they help Uber's cost situation, they eliminate Uber's barrier to entry. Right now, I can't create Newber because it would be hard to convince drivers and users to switch. You need good driver availability at all hours of the day and night and drivers won't want to be on your service earning nothing if you don't yet have users. Many companies like Sidecar went bust hoping to hit a critical mass and overcome that barrier to entry. With self-driving cars, it's easy for me to pay, say, $400/mo/vehicle and blanket a city even before there are users. It isn't cheap, but it also isn't so expensive. 100 vehicles would only be $40,000/mo. That's certainly not such high start-up costs for anything with a bit of funding. Plus, the economics work out nicely. $400/mo comes out to $13/day. Let's say you only charge $3.25 per ride. You'd only need to do 4 rides per day to justify that $400/mo - and 4 rides per 24-hour period is extremely low. Even when you start thinking about costs beyond the fixed price of the car (fuel, maintenance), it's still pretty good. You're going to get at least 4 rides per gallon in a reasonably fuel-efficient car. Make them Prius vehicles and get 10 5-mile rides on a $2-3 gallon. Tires cost money, but if the average ride is 5 miles you'll get around 10k rides for a set of tires adding $0.20 per ride? Point being, the only reason Uber doesn't have a lot of competition today is that it's very hard to overcome the network effect. Once self-driving cars come into the picture, it will be easy to create many Uber competitors that can overcome the network effect by blanketing a city quickly and easily and scale quite reasonably by ordering new self-driving vehicles as demand increases. That will put a lot of downward pressure on pricing. I think Uber has found that if they're more expensive than competitors like Lyft and Fasten, riders will switch. Self-driving cars will make that pressure only more intense. At some point, Uber is likely to face competition from car manufacturers themselves. If you're GM, you can see the writing on the wall that car buying might be going away. But you could always offer people a car subscription. GM would certainly have a cost advantage on the vehicles compared to Uber. Likewise, they might face competition from logistics companies like FedEx or Amazon. Why not create vans that can be fitted with seats for the morning commute and create ad-hoc bus routes as users request them (think of Uber Pool on steroids or a bus route that conveniently goes from your house to your work on your schedule). During the passenger lull during the working day, put packages in them and have a quad-copter or robot move them from van to stoop. The thing is that self-driving vehicles just looks like a lot of competition for Uber. Yes, it will mean lower costs, but I don't see how they'll fend off a legion of new competitors where they have no barrier to entry with any good margins. The only thing Uber could do is keep margins so low that they won't make a profit. But that's no good for them. If they ever try to raise the margins, others will swoop in. Plus, if Amazon has shown us anything, it's that a lot of competition will stick around even if your margins are tiny. I think there's a big market that will come from self-driving vehicles. Car ownership might not last. Deliveries might be automated. Traditional public transit might be replaced by ad-hoc routes with 15-passenger vans. But it's hard to see Uber lacking competition here. Self-driving vehicles will simply make it too easy to compete and leave Uber without its traditional barrier to entry.

by yalogin 10y ago

jayjay71 10y ago

There is absolutely no way Uber will have fully self-driving cars in a few years (a car that picks you up without a driver). If anything is going to save Uber, it's going to be Otto. Self-driving trucks are a much easier technical problem and the market is the better part of a trillion dollars just in the US.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Right, "driverless cars" are still at least 10 years away, probably 20.
- BipolarElsa 10y ago
  I don't think we'll have anything close to a pure "driverless car" until at least middle of the 21st century, if not later. People have been making wild predictions for hundreds of years. Most of them aren't true. The "autonomous vehicle" hype circlejerk on HN is friggin' strong as a 1000 Suns. I'm sorry to say this, but it's just not going to happen on the timeline that you want it to. Give it a century, then we'll see. You're basically asking for the computer to be a human and anticipate dangers on the road and have instincts like a human. That's H U G E. I'm sorry but you guys need a major dose of salt with your claims. Major. EDIT: What do I mean by "pure driverless car"? I mean a couple things: completely unaided driving...that means if I go into a large parking structure with a toll booth at the beginning, the car should be doing all the work. "Driverless car" only on freeways and some minor roads just doesn't cut it. When I think driverless, I think "no more steering wheel" ...if we can get there, then we'll talk.
serge2k 10y ago
> Self-driving trucks are a much easier technical problem People keep saying this. Wouldn't you still have to solve the hard problems? A truck that spends 99% of it's time on interstates still have to deal with that 1%.
- ghaff 10y ago
  And I'm not even sure about the 99% number. I've been told that trains tend to be used for most longer distance shipping so a lot of trucking is relatively short distances. There are also a lot of reasons I can imagine for keeping a human in trucks even if the trucks could mostly drive themselves between depots.
- ksk 10y ago
  What if you bunched up multiple rides? Like a leader truck which has a human operator and multiple driver-less follower trucks that simply follow the leader.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Going to need drivers for each of those trucks after you exit the interstate.
- tyingq 10y ago
  You buy a bunch of truck stops, and use human drivers for the local portion. The truck stops become analogous to ship ports. The vast majority of the miles are then automated.

mdasen 10y ago

The problem with self-driving cars is that, while they help Uber's cost situation, they eliminate Uber's barrier to entry. Right now, I can't create Newber because it would be hard to convince drivers and users to switch. You need good driver availability at all hours of the day and night and drivers won't want to be on your service earning nothing if you don't yet have users. Many companies like Sidecar went bust hoping to hit a critical mass and overcome that barrier to entry. With self-driving cars, it's easy for me to pay, say, $400/mo/vehicle and blanket a city even before there are users. It isn't cheap, but it also isn't so expensive. 100 vehicles would only be $40,000/mo. That's certainly not such high start-up costs for anything with a bit of funding. Plus, the economics work out nicely. $400/mo comes out to $13/day. Let's say you only charge $3.25 per ride. You'd only need to do 4 rides per day to justify that $400/mo - and 4 rides per 24-hour period is extremely low. Even when you start thinking about costs beyond the fixed price of the car (fuel, maintenance), it's still pretty good. You're going to get at least 4 rides per gallon in a reasonably fuel-efficient car. Make them Prius vehicles and get 10 5-mile rides on a $2-3 gallon. Tires cost money, but if the average ride is 5 miles you'll get around 10k rides for a set of tires adding $0.20 per ride? Point being, the only reason Uber doesn't have a lot of competition today is that it's very hard to overcome the network effect. Once self-driving cars come into the picture, it will be easy to create many Uber competitors that can overcome the network effect by blanketing a city quickly and easily and scale quite reasonably by ordering new self-driving vehicles as demand increases. That will put a lot of downward pressure on pricing. I think Uber has found that if they're more expensive than competitors like Lyft and Fasten, riders will switch. Self-driving cars will make that pressure only more intense. At some point, Uber is likely to face competition from car manufacturers themselves. If you're GM, you can see the writing on the wall that car buying might be going away. But you could always offer people a car subscription. GM would certainly have a cost advantage on the vehicles compared to Uber. Likewise, they might face competition from logistics companies like FedEx or Amazon. Why not create vans that can be fitted with seats for the morning commute and create ad-hoc bus routes as users request them (think of Uber Pool on steroids or a bus route that conveniently goes from your house to your work on your schedule). During the passenger lull during the working day, put packages in them and have a quad-copter or robot move them from van to stoop. The thing is that self-driving vehicles just looks like a lot of competition for Uber. Yes, it will mean lower costs, but I don't see how they'll fend off a legion of new competitors where they have no barrier to entry with any good margins. The only thing Uber could do is keep margins so low that they won't make a profit. But that's no good for them. If they ever try to raise the margins, others will swoop in. Plus, if Amazon has shown us anything, it's that a lot of competition will stick around even if your margins are tiny. I think there's a big market that will come from self-driving vehicles. Car ownership might not last. Deliveries might be automated. Traditional public transit might be replaced by ad-hoc routes with 15-passenger vans. But it's hard to see Uber lacking competition here. Self-driving vehicles will simply make it too easy to compete and leave Uber without its traditional barrier to entry.