I think people severely underestimate Uber's worldwide push in preparing themselves to be a force to be reckoned with when the autonomous vehicle takes off.
That said, Facebook has a much larger network effect than Uber. The friction to create a profile and attend an driver orientation on a competing ride broker network is much smaller than telling your everyone on your Facebook friends list you're moving to Diaspora.
The reason I believe that it may collapse is because now when I want to buy something online I rather go to Walmart,Target or to the specific brand store. When I think of Amazon the picture that comes to mind is of shady people trying to scam me out of my money. My perception, even if erroneous, right now is that Walmart is less shady than Amazon when it comes to buying merchandize.
If enough people start to feel this way about Amazon there may come a tipping point and the entire company will collapse. Once the tipping point happens I don't think it will be possible for Bezos to reverse it, though he will spend mountains of cash trying to.
Also, doesn't Amazon have unique defenses against this possibility? If sales suddenly fall off a cliff, Amazon has AWS and lots of B2B products that could keep them afloat for a time while they tried to recover. If people en masse decided to stop shopping at Walmart, they would have nothing to fall back on.
All they really need to do is curate their 3rd parties better. Problem solved.
With Amazon the purchasing is seamless. That's where they really win. And they just keep making it easier. Now I can order things with my voice (using Alexa).
Of course, take everything I'm saying with a big grain of sand since this is all anecdotal. I've also purchased from Columbia Sportwear Store and some other brands that I do not remember right now. I guess so far I've been lucky.
Also the tracking you for 5 minutes after a ride is completely unforgivable.
Why does Apple even allow apps to remove the "only when in use" option?
Someone already had the domain registered the last time I checked.
Ediy: seems to also include ride sharing now.
- Availability. Who has the largest network and highest availability? - Car Design. Who has the most comfortable or fully featured cars? - Safety. Who has the safest car? Who has the safest track record?
It might eventually become a race to the bottom, but I think there's still plenty of opportunity to compete on other fronts for at least the next five years.
A car with a waterproof interior would be miserable and cheap feeling. No one wants to sit in a humid, rubber car.
It doesn't work, the water spray is not strong enough, or directed enough to remove the mud and sand. We still have to have people going round with water jets to spot clean. A have my doubts a fully automatic system could ever work effectively.
You know how a person nowadays can register for uber and drive people around?
In the future, maybe people will register their CAR (which can drive itself). So they sit at home, getting work done, while their car is off autonomously driving itself and picking people up. When you want it to come home, just call it home.
Anyways, you wouldn't happen to have that announcement handy would you?
Anyone could spin up an app that let's people lease out their self-driving cars. The existing ride-sharing consumers are not loyal to the apps.
Until an optimized business supporting lots of cars supporting fewer people undercuts the individual owner on price per ride, sure. Uber with individual driver/owners makes some sense, because you need the individual driver no matter what the ownership structure is. But with autonomous cars, fleet ownership is going to win over individual.
Uber's network effect is its driver network. It will find it a lot harder to compete if you no longer need drivers, when it has to compete with real car companies that could be able to undercut them on cost.
I agree. The fact that autonomous cars will likely reduce ownership will put a squeeze on car companies, and it might make sense for them to branch into service areas, as they can get the cars at cost. I guarantee that for 10,000 Camrys purchased by Uber and 10,000 Camrys built and shuffled to a ride service division by Toyota, Toyota's ride-sharing division will get the sweeter deal on price.
Put another way, it's much easier for Toyota to start a ride service company than it is for Uber to start manufacturing cars to get them at cost.
Ah, but the car companies have already expended that capital. The problem here is they will have a lot of building capacity from all the factories they own, and possibly less to build with that capacity. There's nothing stopping them from buying extra needed capacity from another company, but in the meantime it may help them fill the lack of utilization they may see. At some point, some factories will need modernization as normal, and they can choose at that point to reduce factory capacity.
The point is that it's a possible strategy to get them from point A to point B when they've already banked heavily on certain future production trends if they've overestimated.
To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.
Toyota would have to prepare for worst-case load and let those cars sit idle to keep them available. And they'd have to do that in almost every city in the world or their app would just be another local annoyance.
Also, if you order a Toyota and a Ford shows up you're going to laugh and tweet it.
On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes...
That's the underlying assumption I was working with. If they've invested heavily in production yet they see a downturn in individual ownership, it's a way to capitalize on that resource (factories) to stabilize production until some factories reach end-of-life and have theoretically paid for themselves. Factories which require large capital expenditure are not something you want to see sitting idle. Every year is another year where the tooling is becoming more obsolete.
People will still buy Rolls-Royce or Mercedes S-class for the comfort, but most Toyota customers don't care if they're car pooling with 3 other people or sitting in a car that's not their own.
If car manufacturers tried to clone what Uber has built they'll probably flop on making the technology usable, and the experience may just be overall frustrating.
Furthermore, if there are a bunch of self-driving car services, that service will be commoditized the same way cabs are. These ride-giving services will [and kind of already do] only compete on price.
Uber's autonomous trucking model is likely to aid in the complete change of that industry, though.
Yes, Uber may have a global precense, but that's from burning VC cash and they're not exactly successful in major markets like China. And for what? Uber is essentially a messaging app between users and drivers, and their users/drivers are not loyal.
Uber as a self-driving company would need to sell hardware to drivers to convert their vehicles into self-driving cars, and I don't think they'll have the bank to get that far, especially against larger companies with deeper pockets and existing hardware experience/partnerships.
The rich are buying the future on the backs of the working class. When uber goes under, the jobs won't come back, but transit can't be that cheap. It's not like the cost of a ride was actually based on the cost of the car OR the labor.