23 ms·

Yeah, this is a big deal. Uber has gambled everything on self-driving cars, what with their absurd burn rate and all. If that gets shut down because of trade se

• empath75 10y ago
  It was a stupid moonshot play. They should have just focused on being a really good taxi company.
  • tekklloneer 10y ago
    I disagree. They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. Instead, hyper aggressive business tactics (which were largely unwarranted) has backfired.
    • untog 10y ago
      > They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.
      • shrewduser 10y ago
        i disagree again, making cars isn't the competitive advantage it's being able to run and service large fleets of cars, taxi / bus companies with all the physical plants would have the competitive advantage out of the gate.
        • jaimex2 10y ago
          I disagree, if you make the cars you can create them from the ground up to be self driving taxis. Think of all the improvements you could make to make better use of the cabin. If you are retrofitting existing cars you are wasting a ton of money and getting a half baked solution to a dedicated provider.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      The issue is that autonomous tech that's good enough to do what Uber would need it to do (reliable door to door transportation without a human available to take any degree of control in a wide range of conditions) isn't close. Even a decade or two--which IMO is optimistic--isn't really a useful timeframe for Uber.
    • deleted 10y ago
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    • TillE 10y ago
      What position is that? Having a popular taxi app? That really isn't much; that advantage can disappear in an instant when a cheaper/better competitor appears. Actually developing self-driving tech and then deploying it is almost entirely unrelated to the business that Uber has developed thus far. It's an enormous undertaking, and they were starting from almost zero.
      • thrill 10y ago
        Having THE popular app can be everything.
    • cityhall 10y ago
      They're a decade late and have no engineering culture. All they could do was throw money at the problem. If they weren't hyper aggressive they would have looked to partner with someone more experienced or to play vendors off each other.
    • pratap103 10y ago
      Prime candidates for sure but I don't know about prime position as they clearly had a lot of ground to make up on the tech. I agree with you on the hyper-aggressive business tactics, I bet there was an Aha! moment where they were like..wait, what if we get rid of the drivers?!
  • ivraatiems 10y ago
    Their "taxi" business model was completely unsustainable. A moonshot was/is the only thing that'd save them. That's why they did this (the self-driving part we know for sure, and the alleged stuff, if proven).
    • ProblemFactory 10y ago
      Taxi services are a centuries-old profitable business model (London had first laws regulating "taxis" in the 1600s). Dispatch via app is a solid improvement over the old phonecalls or street pickup, automatic credit card billing is an improvement over cash, and in cities with shady taxi drivers, GPS tracking is an improvement over potentially hacked taxi meters. So there is an obviously valuable business model for "taxi dispatch app" here even without a moonshot - just perhaps smaller than Uber's dream of being the only provider of personal transportation in the world.
      • beamatronic 10y ago
        Exactly and not to mention, people aren't the only thing that needs to be taxied around.
        • _audakel 10y ago
          i never understood why something like food / grocery delivery never took off with lyft/uber. they could partner with costco and do deliveries. I would love that.
          • te_chris 10y ago
            UberEATS
          • r00fus 10y ago
            Google Shopping Express already does this - I get my 50lb. bag of rice delivered on-demand to my house. Uber would need to start understanding how ordering of goods works, returns, and service/quality complaints. They could do it, but there are a whole lot of domain specific problems and approaches to resolve and it's not clear that's it's long-term viable.
  • dookahku 10y ago
    They're not. Every major car company plus competitors are focusing on self-driving cars. Why pay a human what a machine can do for cheaper? Uber's future depends on being first with self driving cars. Being a good taxi company in the 21st century will mean good at self-driving cars.
    • astrodust 10y ago
      If self-driving cars become the norm, if you can just buy one at will, Uber's business model is junked.
      • Ajedi32 10y ago
        I disagree. Uber's transportation-as-a-service model is likely to be far more cost effective when applied to self driving cars than car ownership is. Self driving cars will initially be quite expensive, making outright buying one cost-prohibitive. By the time costs come down transportation-as-a-service will have taken over the industry, and few people will have any particular desire to own their own car anymore. Not to mention that transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership. No need to refuel, repair, or otherwise maintain your vehicle; just grab whichever one happens to be nearby. You can have as many or as few cars as you need at any particular moment, and get a car of any model or paint color you want at the push of a button.
        • astrodust 10y ago
          > Self driving cars will initially be quite expensive... Not relevant to my assertion. I said when they become the norm, as in, when they're no more expensive as other cars. > ... transportation-as-a-service would also be a lot more convenient than car ownership. This means I can share a car with several friends, neighbors, or room-mates with little fuss. The problem with sharing a car today is licensing, insurance, and the inconvenience of the car being stuck somewhere when in use. If it acted, instead, as your own personal driver it can handle multiple trips concurrently. Two people go to the movies, so they're committed for X hours, and in that interim instead of sitting in a parking lot the car can deal with other things. Uber's business model arbitrages the difficulty and expense of owning a car vs. the expense of buying a cab ride. If the car becomes more cost effective because of personal ride-sharing their margin evaporates. Today a decent car would cost me about $600/mo. all-in. If I could buy a 1/6th share in a car for $100/mo. and be able to use it in short stints with little contention that's going to be cheaper than Uber if I use it more than a handful of times.
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  • bsder 10y ago
    A taxi company isn't a unicorn. A taxi company has well understood financials and valuation and would never be given a crack at VC Lotto. In addition, the kind of quality control that Uber/Lyft exert over drivers almost certainly places the drivers in the position of being employees which makes things even more unprofitable.
  • Spooky23 10y ago
    You're assuming that the real objective of the company was a positive outcome for the company.
• noir_lord 10y ago
  Hard to think of a response other than "good" to that.
• NathanKP 10y ago
  I'll be really interested in seeing what happens if Uber can't recover from the burn rate and make a sustainable business without self driving. I can see in the best possible scenario we end up with more cities like Austin, Texas that have their own nonprofit ride sharing app. I actually have huge respect for what Austin did in banning Uber and Lyft and making their own app (Ride Austin) that isn't designed to make investors and owners rich, instead just benefit drivers and riders.
  • repomies69 10y ago
    Wow, I didn't know about these. How well do those work? Do payments work automatically? What about reputation system?
    • NathanKP 10y ago
      They work fantastically. Ride Austin is actually way better than Uber in my opinion. In fact even if Uber and Lyft decided to start following the city regulations and return to Austin I would probably never use either in Austin again, simply because I prefer the non profit approach that respects drivers and gives them a much higher percentage.
      • jimmywanger 10y ago
        > because I prefer the non profit approach that respects drivers and gives them a much higher percentage For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors. Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on transportation to/from low income areas or art festivals. That would degrade service, and there would be no accountability to the customer in that regard.
        • cityhall 10y ago
          What you want is competition, not for one entity to control the market regardless of its organization.
• amptorn 10y ago
  I'm honestly amazed that anybody bought "pivot to self-driving cars" as a strategy. Even if it did work and they built perfect working autonomous vehicle software, right now, legitimately, what's the next step? Were they going to buy and operate a fleet? Have random people sign up to rent their unused cars out as taxis?
  • beamatronic 10y ago
    Yes, and then these "private contractors" who own the car and buy the self-driving hardware box from Uber take all the risk.
    • amptorn 10y ago
      They'll take that risk for one single day. Then they'll wake up the next morning with their vehicle, which they rented out to Uber for taxi rides overnight, parked in their driveway full of vomit. That's the best case scenario, where the box actually exists and works, and Uber can find a sucker.
  • eugeniub 10y ago
    > Were they going to buy and operate a fleet? I don't see what's the problem with that.
    • amptorn 10y ago
      It's not problematic at all. But it would require Uber to cease being a software company and start being, like, an actual taxi service, with physical assets and vehicles and garages and maintenance. The whole reason Uber is competitive with actual taxi services is that those costs are all offloaded to the poor saps who drive for them.
      • netsharc 10y ago
        That sort of thing is outsourcable... Just work with a manufacturer or a car rental company, they'd do the maintenance, and Uber would do the stolen, allegedly, software.
• tlrobinson 10y ago
  If Uber doesn't have a path to profitability before fully autonomous self-driving cars are viable and legal in enough markets (5 years?) then I don't think they had a chance even without this debacle.
  • fullshark 10y ago
    They have a path to profitability without self-driving cars. They don't have a path to justifying a 70 billion dollar valuation without self-driving cars on the horizon IMO.