The arguments against Uber here are well-stated and have been posted elsewhere (see Naked Capitalism's excellent 6-part series) In these comments (and other HN

The arguments against Uber here are well-stated and have been posted elsewhere (see Naked Capitalism's excellent 6-part series) In these comments (and other HN threads) I see the same pro-Uber arguments again and again so I will try my best to address them as I think they are misguided. > Uber is doing all this in anticipation of self-driving cars, which will change the economics of the whole operation. The first and most obvious issue here is runway. True self-driving cars that won't need a human in the driver's seat are probably 5 years away. Can Uber lose 1-2B a year until then? The second problem is that Uber won't have a monopoly on self driving car tech. Google and others will get there around the same time. How will this be a competitive advantage to Uber and not to Lyft or some yet-to-come competitor? > Uber is building network effects that will protect it from competitors. Uber's network effect, if it has one, is at odds with the self-driving car strategy. Right now Uber has the shortest ride waits because it has the most drivers. If a driver is a robot, a well-capitalized competitor can just buy a huge fleet and take over any local market. So you can't have both the network effect and the self-driving fleet. And without both, Uber is likely not worth anywhere near 70B. > Taxis are just step 1. Uber is building a platform to bring anything or anyone from A to B. A software platform for logistics would never be worth 70B. Period. In Uber's meager attempts to generalize their own platform, such as Uber Eats, they have not done very well. If total knowledge about driving patterns and navigation is the real money-maker, Google will have a big advantage with Maps/Waze data. In fact, most Uber drivers are using Maps or Waze to drive anyway. > Uber's customer experience is so good I stopped using Taxis. Uber's current dominance can be explained by one thing: price. Analysis has shown that every Uber ride is subsidized by about 50%, even in mature markets. If Uber suddenly doubled all prices they'd lose customers in droves. As for driver quality, any long-time Uber user can tell you this has gone down to be about the same as a cab (slightly better, but not reliably better). The average uber driver is just some guy doing whatever the GPS tells him to do. It's low-wage work and Uber is pushing the wages down all the time, there's no way you're going to keep high driver quality indefinitely.