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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

A few people here have mentioned maybe Telsa just want to stop Uber/Lyft buying a bunch of Telsas and operating an autonomous fleet.

My questions is - why would Tesla want to stop them doing that?

The goal is to transition the world to sustainable transport, ASAP. If companies are buying tens of thousands of their cars, that's great!

I have to wonder if Tesla want to stop this because they want to make the profit from the fleet, or because of legal reasons.

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They may want to start their own version of Uber/Lyft or they may just be setting up a scenario in the future where Uber/Lyft would have to enter into a separate purchase agreement with Tesla with changes to warranty terms, roadside assistance terms, price, insurance, etc.

Because they want the Teslas to be exclusive to the Tesla Network

Probably branding? If Uber/Lyft start operating a lot of Teslas, then they start to loose their brand allure and people start to view them as just taxis

Never heard of a car brand that would ban using it for taxi purposes.

If you take a ride in a taxi, and you like what you see, you seem more likely to buy that car in the future.

free supercharger use assumes not using the car as a taxi

Because they're leaving money on the table by giving away 25% of ridesharing cuts to lyft/uber for doing nothing compared to what Tesla did.

Tesla made this software. They spent years planning, designing, and working on it. Uber have a scheduling app.

Frankly I'm all for this. Tesla is a MUCH better company than Uber. Let them take the ridesharing market and our world will be much better off.

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