Now Uber is saddled with a huge inventory of aging vehicles needing maintenance and all the other associated costs that come with that (repaid centers, staff, etc.).
A new company "Hypercar" or something is formed that let's people "ride-share" their own personal self-driving Teslas...making maintenance and upkeep the car owner's responsibility. Hypercar splits fairs with the owners.
Keeping in mind that Hypercar would have to pay car-loaners at least the amount that the car loan is costing them in maintenance & depreciation (or else who would loan their car), Uber would come out ahead.
Maybe in the short-term, this Hypercar company could rely on car-loaners to underestimate maintenance/depreciation costs but surely that would only last so long.
if "Uber should be able to maintain their own cars at a lower cost than individual car owners can", then Uber should be buying cars today and leasing them out to their contractor drivers. Truck fleets do this, pretty much, so it's not a completely crazy idea. Uber isn't doing that, which suggests that Uber thinks its a better deal for them to have their drivers shoulder the ownership, maintenance and depreciation costs of the capital. Why does self-driving change this?
Only reasons that seems to make sense is because people think that Uber is only compensating their drivers for their labor - but they're not; they are compensating them for their labor as a driver plus the lease and use of their car.
Also, I might need a self-driving car to do a 60 mile trip to work and home every day. But, during work I may be better off letting the car drive others than pay for parking.
The idea that Uber would thrive in going from "Hey, dude, sign up and you'll be on the road," to "First we're going to place an order for a $40,000 capital investment that is all risk to us if it doesn't pay out" is completely insane.
Not to mention that they will have literally no differentiating feature from any competitor who is interested in making the same investment, so they have no way to support any kind of large profit margin.
And all this assumes that people won't just want to own their own driverless car, which is far from certain.
Uber has to say that driverless cars will be wonderful for them, because large amounts of the people who might want to invest in Uber are also convinced that driverless cars will be here in three years.
I doubt Uber's original goal was to outright own (with all the hassle & overhead thereof) a half-million vehicles.
If you don't think Fedex and UPS have logistics and fleet management down to a science, I highly recommend you research their capabilities.
1. Google isn't going to be a player in personal mobility. Their technology is no more up to the task than Tesla's or anyone else's. Expect to see a few incremental improvements from all major automobile manufacturers in open-road autonomy, but nothing that's going to enable a driverless taxicab or anything like it.
2. Webvan isn't a good comparison for Uber, except in that it's dead. The actual concept behind Webvan was a good one and is now offered by many, many companies. Had it not been founded when it was, it's likely it could have raised a few more rounds, learned the lessons it needed to, and become profitable. There's nothing about Uber that's novel or interesting; from the end user's perspective, it's no different from Flywheel, which is nothing but the pre-Internet telephone-dispatched taxicab company with a new communication frontend. The only thing Uber has going for it is a structure that tries (and is now failing) to bypass regulation. Without that, it's just another taxi service.
AFAIK, Uber's MO was to organize a massive "bring your own taxi" contracting service.
Removing the driver won't be the last innovation these companies do.
EDIT: now to mention the unavoidable legal issues, which to a certain extent are similar to what Uber is already dealing with and "resolving" quickly according to reports.
If Google dumped billions into a self driving cab fleet and offered me 30% lower prices than Uber, would I switch? Yes, probably. Do I gain any benefit from my friends being on Uber? No.
Utter rubbish.
No, you don't. You see cars which have a hands-free driving mode. Every single one of them still absolutely requires a driver.
I've been closely involved in automated transport for years, and the current hype cycle is getting exhausting. There are several orders of magnitude of difficulty between a car which allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel some of the time (or even most of the time), and a car which does not require a driver. We are many years, and possibly decades, away from the latter.
Not all environments are as friendly. Downtown San Francisco will be extremely hard to get right -- note that I say get right, not dump a robot car there and hope for the best. There are going to be a lot of crushed pedestrians and damaged parked cars, and I'm not sure the people who live there will value having autonomous vehicles enough to overlook that series of incidents. Then there are suburban and rural environments with their own challenges: poor mapping, roads that aren't obviously roads, one-lane roads, poor visibility, lack of signage, and so on. Not every location has weather like the Valley, either; suppose an autonomous car gets stuck in snow. A human driver can usually get out, possibly with the aid of a shovel, carpet, sand, etc. The robot can't do those things, and the passengers may not be able to (for example, it's unlikely that a robotic taxicab would have any provision for passengers to control it).
The world is a much bigger place than the Valley, and comes with much bigger challenges. That's why I don't see any real likelihood that fully autonomous vehicles will be developed any time soon. It's easy to get lost in narrow thinking when your entire world consists of a single place and a bunch of people all living in that same place practicing groupthink. This problem is much more difficult than you imagine.
Unless you have Uber's cap table in front of you, you cannot figure its valuation. The journalist certainly did not (and I don't either). The most we can say is that $50b is a ceiling on the company's valuation; in reality it is far less.
Many, many articles have been posted here explaining this in greater detail. Please read them.
Take out the driver, and anyone could offer their car as a cab. The app to do so could be Uber, but it the bar is lowered considerably if it's purely a way to book a car.
The two things that are a knock on Uber today are the politics around taxi licenses and the politics around compensating their drivers. I can see why Uber would be happy to eliminate one of those problems.
And I thought Uber was pretty weak compared to YellowCab on driver vetting?
You'd put it in a marketplace with an app for people to order the rides...:P
Uber got where they are - managing a massive fleet of vehicles - not by purchasing cars, but by getting other people to purchase cars on the assumption that uber would help them turn that investment into an income stream. Self driving cars raise the prospect of me being able to turn my car into an income stream without me even having to go out and drive it.
If uber do it right, people will buy fleets of self-driving teslas just so they can rent them out via uber, and uber won't have to invest a penny in depreciating vehicle hardware.
Uber does not manage a massive fleet of vehicles. They don't have to service these cars, pay insurance on them, fill them up etc. They are just middle man that links people with cars with people without them.
The clever part is that, yes, they don't own them. That was my point. Like, my entire point.
Fully driverless cars are still not going to be a good thing for Uber.
"Tesla Motors now has a huge incentive to get the RoboCar on the road by 2020, but Mr. Musk will need to get the laws rewritten in order to make that happen."
Sorry, I laughed so hard at this line. Before, he was working really hard to get them on the road, but now that Uber is "willing" (again, not even a quote, just a summary of something Jurvetson said that Kalanick said) to buy a decent number that they can't even afford EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!
Source: Crystal Ball
And here's the source quote:
"Jurvetson said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told him that if Tesla cars are autonomous by 2020, Kalanick wants to buy all 500,000 that are expected to be produced."
But I'm not interested in the high Tesla price. I would be interested perhaps in a used Tesla. I've never bought a used regular car before, because regular cars can require a lot of maintenance when they get old and I don't want to deal with the hassle and the unpredictable expenses. Electrics are simpler, though, so I think a used electric might be OK.
I'm sure there are plenty of people like me.
So here's my suggestion to Tesla (and other car companies that might make self-driving cars). Make a ton of self-driving cars. Run your own Uber-like service with them (but be legal, and feel free to put Uber out of business as a side effect).
Besides providing taxi service, these cars will serve as roving showrooms for your cars. Many people will ride them as taxis, and then consider buying one when they buy a new car.
When a given car has been used for a few years for the taxi service, retire it, tune it up, and offer it for sale used to get people like me as customers.
Heck, put a "buy it now" button in your taxis that lets a passenger buy that particular car. It would then take them to their destination, return to your service center, get its sale tune up, and then the next time the buyer calls for one of your taxis you would send his car to him, and it would stay with him after that.
Of course, we are talking about self-driving cars here so I'll just shut up. :D
