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It isn't efficient for Toyota to fully stock every city in the world for peak demand, and yet that's what they'd have to do to compete with the surging multi-ma

• MagnumOpus 10y ago
  They don't need to stock for peak demand. They don't need a monopoly (nor will they be permitted to get one). To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.
  • EdHominem 10y ago
    To get as big as Uber means they need to be as convenient which means that there's always a car available. Uber handles that by being multi-brand, and by incentivizing their fleet with surge pricing. Toyota would have to prepare for worst-case load and let those cars sit idle to keep them available. And they'd have to do that in almost every city in the world or their app would just be another local annoyance. Also, if you order a Toyota and a Ford shows up you're going to laugh and tweet it. On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes...
    • kbenson 10y ago
      > On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes... That's the underlying assumption I was working with. If they've invested heavily in production yet they see a downturn in individual ownership, it's a way to capitalize on that resource (factories) to stabilize production until some factories reach end-of-life and have theoretically paid for themselves. Factories which require large capital expenditure are not something you want to see sitting idle. Every year is another year where the tooling is becoming more obsolete.