Building on this analysis: Self-driving cars will DESTROY Uber. In the long-run, self-driving car networks will become a regulated utility. Uber's current busi

Building on this analysis: Self-driving cars will DESTROY Uber. In the long-run, self-driving car networks will become a regulated utility. Uber's current business: Uber is the middleman in a two-sided marketplace. It connects drivers with passengers, and takes a cut for this service. Uber's competitive advantage is that it had the capital to attract drivers - with lots of drivers on its network, costs & wait times are lower for passengers, so passengers use Uber. And so on and so forth, flywheel metaphor, etc. Self-driving: Assuming self-driving car saturation, Uber's competitive advantage completely disappears. As a passenger, all I care about is getting from point A to point B safely, quickly, and cheaply. As a manufacturer of self-driving cars, why would I sell or lease them to a middleman (or if we're getting extreme, even to consumers!) to take the profits in this space? As Tesla, GM, etc. I am going to pump out a fleet of self-driving cars and have consumers pay for a subscription plan (X number of minutes / miles per month on my fleet). Because this is a very capital-intensive business, the government will then grant local monopolies to different providers and regulate the prices, much as it does today with telecoms. Uber provides no value in this scenario unless it can figure out how to develop the best self-driving software that is installed in these cars (and that seems extremely unlikely). The winners in this space are going to be car manufacturers and the developers of the self-driving tech that get legal approval. I'd imagine these software companies negotiate a great licensing deal to the car manufacturers. I suppose since the rollout of self-driving tech will be slow, Uber can continue to operate in a hybrid space with some self-driving cars and some drivers. Whether or not it will be profitable is a different question altogether. But I have no faith in the long-term viability of Uber's business model once we reach a saturation point of self-driving cars. We are going to look back on this time in 20 years and talk about how VCs subsidized a lot of cab rides.