In the past UBER was supposed to lead in shared rides(i.e. UberPool) , and their VC's talked about that as the thing that will bring UBER to replace private car

In the past UBER was supposed to lead in shared rides(i.e. UberPool) , and their VC's talked about that as the thing that will bring UBER to replace private cars. Currently, other companies seem to have the lead.And btw, when done well, this segment has a pretty strong network effects. In the same way,if most of UBER's advantage is awareness and installs, credit card numbers, and common trip data, in the context of real self-driving cars, that's almost nothing: Awareness and app install - a working self driving car will the miracle of the century. Everybody will hear about the company who offers it, constantly. from there the road to installs is short. And for such value as self-driving cars offer, entering a credit card number doesn't seem like a big deal. As for common trip data? well at the very least Apple, Google, Moovit, Cellular ISP's, and maybe others have plenty of that(in one form or the other) to start. But most importantly:time. Self-driving cars are a risky technology. it also takes time to scale manufacturing. so they'll probably be deployed relatively slowly. That gives the companies who own them enough time to not need UBER. But UBER still has one strong card to play: flying cars.