Uber is moving its self-driving cars from San Francisco to Arizona
theverge.com
theverge.com
My impression, based on this and other cases where Uber got in conflict with local regulations is that they don't seem to care whether the regulations are reasonable or not. They try to ignore them in every case.
Other than for PR, I couldn't understand why Uber started testing in San Francisco. It's a densely-populated and heavily-regulated city in a heavily-regulated state.
Their self-driving engineers are now split among three locations: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Arizona. I think that alone is going to cause significant engineering friction. It's a lot harder to do remote work for testing live robots (especially if they can kill people).
The Pittsburgh team is there because of Carnegie Mellon, so likely where the hardware gets made. The software engineers in SF just need data from vehicles, which doesn't require cars to be near them. The operations folks actually going out and testing the cars can be anywhere, as long as they can stream data back to the SW and HW folks.
The self-driving car ML software is also being worked on in Pittsburgh, along with the hardware.
Source: I grew up in Pittsburgh, and now have lived in SF since graduation.
Which, aside from convenience to Uber HQ, might explain why they'd want to prove the technology there.
It got me thinking about moving large fleets of self driving cars by small numbers of individuals without using a truck. And that left me with the vision of people on motorcycles herding cars along the freeway toward their winter grazing grounds in Arizona. :-)
PR 101.
So people can complain about regulations, but they are essentially the primary method we have to prevent companies from killing or hurting people accidentally. Yes there are plenty of regulations that are actually not related to human safety that are put there by other companies for the purpose of trying to close the door behind them after they get into a strong position, but for things like cars that are essentially interacting with intersections, crosswalks, bikelanes, rail crossings, stopped cars, etc, having some burden on the company who wants to put machines into these situations run by algorithms being held accountable by way of forcing transparency, that seems pretty damned reasonable to me and many other people. So Uber is being pretty lame in this situation.
It certainly doesn't make things better, but really US doesn't seem to be unique in this case. It's like that in most if not all places on this planet (I will be delighted to be proven wrong).
Bloomberg says that their Q3 net revenue is 1.7B, with a loss of 800M. That makes their overall profit margin approximately -50%.
To say that this is not a good sign is a significant understatement. Yearly figures would be about $5.5B in revenue, loss of about $3B, so expenditures of $8.5B.
Let's say that $2B in expenditures are essentially waste or research projects with no very immediate prospect of return. That leaves it with a loss of -$1B on revenues of $5.5B.
Any further expenditure cutting is going to result in loss of revenue as well -- it's super hard to see how it could conceivably get to +$1B in net profit. It's also super hard to see how it can really substantially increase its revenues without yet further cutting its margins. There are no large markets left for it to enter, so how does it entice more ridership except by cutting fares?
But even if it did manage to get to $1B or $2B in profit, that's not enough. It's allegedly a $75B company!
Uber stipulates that it shouldn't have to register its cars as self-driving, because they aren't advanced enough to meet the definition. It compares itself to Tesla: automated lane-keeping + adaptive cruise control. If we take Uber at its word, that is not a good sign for it to dig itself out of its terrible revenue situation via being first to market with automated vehicles.
My guess: Uber's investors have realized that when the music stops, there are about half as many chairs as people. They're trying to get it to pull together some kind of IPO so they can dump at least some of their losses on public investors, and Uber is trying to desperately spin along the pixie dust stories until it can get itself into some shape to IPO. That means avoiding California's reporting requirements for driverless cars because only by claiming that they have a viable automated car program do they have some kind of story about how they might eventually make a profit.
The sad thing is that there is almost certainly a very good, modestly-sized company in Uber that plugs along making $100M a year in profit on $1B in revenue as a taxi company. But they can't go back down to that company anymore.
Perhaps because it was always ludicrous. Uber's underlying technology is not complicated, it's not hard to build an app that connects buyers to drivers -- they have no durable competitive advantage there. They do have large network of drivers that they could potentially tap into, but those drivers are driving smallish sedans, not delivery trucks. They aren't necessarily super keen on double parking, getting out, and doing deliveries. They are probably 1/10th as efficient as a traditional UPS or Fedex driver in terms of cost per package delivered. Now, could that excess capacity still soak up a little additional money? Sure. If Uber needed to bump up their profit margins by 1-2%, there might be a viable play in adding package delivery. But increasing their profit margins by 20-80%? Hahaha no.
If Amazon ever really needs to have a distributed driver network, they'll clone the Uber app and set the whole thing up themselves, not work to prop up Uber's absurd market cap by overpaying for delivery. I know that Amazon has looked into this -- I think they've just decided that there's no money there. If there's no money in this for Amazon, why would we imagine there is money in this for anyone else?
i wouldn't put much faith in uber's numbers now. they aren't trying to make profit. they are trying to grab marketshare.
Not only that, but, assumedly to do so, they would have to switch away from high-growth mode to profit-mode. That's no longer deserving of a "gonna take over the world" p/e.
We'll see if investors continue to be as enthusiastic about investing. My bet is "no," though obviously I could be wrong.
Uber is a novelty. There are many people worldwide that don't know about it and are not using it... yet.
Particularly, I just don't see how Uber can massively increase its ridership while increasing its margins gigantically. Not without some kind of technological game changer. And for other reasons, some of which I detail in my original post, I don't believe that it's going to be first to market with driverless tech that proves to be a game changer.
Everyone who doesn't have a car could use a Uber at times.
The struggle in some places (e.g. China) is real but irrelevant. Should focus on the sizable markets where there is a chance, given time and some efforts (e.g. localization).
The word of mouth has spread in the EU; Uber already has a crappy reputation there and are not able to steamroll over the regulators there like they have in the US.
Maybe I'm mis-reading something, but it seems you are implying that Uber has conquered the oh-so-tech-savy 20-something group, and now they have plenty of room to scale in the stodgy 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 age range. Nice theory, but sort of ignoring the history of Uber. Uber started as a convenient, but expensive, alternative to taxis. All Uber cars at the beginning where Uber Black and the vast majority of users were folks who could afford to drop the cash; lots of people in the 40s and 50s (including me). Uber introduced cheaper options to attract more price sensitive and younger riders. So, based on that, I don't think there is some untapped group of old folks for Uber to go after.
China irrelevant? I think most business owners would disagree with that.
On an unrelated note... Despite what is implied here, that 20 year-old is no more tech savvy then I; indeed, they are most likely less tech savvy. Hell, I built my first computer when that 20 year-old was just an itching in his daddy's pants.
Soon plugs for electric cars will be ubiquitous and just that, a simple plug. There will be no charging station, an app in the car or on your phone will do the rest. For economic reasons plugs will be installed, street after street much like how broadband fiber was put down. Maybe lamp posts or other infrastructure will be used too.
Rather than the car just take power the agreement will be to supply power too, therefore electric cars will smooth out demand with owners paying an 'eco' tariff and their car providing them with peak demand power.
When this happens and people get 'free miles' for being there for the grid, the buy in for personal ownership will be compelling. Clever that the self driving cars are, all of it is just code and printed circuit boards, self-driving will be as ubiquitous as 'sat nav' today and complained about in much the same way. People will still want their personal space with their personal junk and, if there are 'free miles' for helping out power the grid, even if they are as useless as '5000 free texts', the lease/utility deal of the personally owned car will lock people in.
Before the mobile phone business settled there were business models such as 'Rabbit' where they imagined people would stop at places that showed the Rabbit sign and then make a phone call, to move on when they had finished the call. It made sense to thousands of people who put up the base stations, it made sense to investors but not to customers. I think that Uber are over-presumptive in how people will change for them and their business model. I don't think people will. They will get deeper into car ownership because their car is tied into their electricity and other utility bills. Self driving will just become a feature taken for granted as the new 'ABS' and people will adapt to it as they will adapt to plugging in - not that difficult. People aren't just going to revolve their life around Uber at the expense of personal car ownership.
So Uber got some sort of tax break / sweetheart deal for this? I wonder if that was their end-game.
They most certainly caved to NYC's demands that regular Ubers be registered with a registered cab dispatcher, and I'm quite certain they can afford $150 with their current war chest.
Edit: It just occurred to me that the requirements could mean that Uber would have to report on any accidents that have occurred to date, though I'm not sure that conflicts with my original point. I must be mistaken in my original assumption.
No, you are not. Unless there is an injury or death, you just exchange information and pay the other party or let insurance figure it out. "You must call the police or the CHP if the accident caused a death or injury." http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/AutoAccident.aspx#... In WA, you also have to report if there was over $1k in damage. But it is obviously easy to estimate it is under that while at the scene of the accident. http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.52.030 Most states are the same. If there wasn't an injury and it isn't impeding traffic, the police don't care.
Fair enough on minimal accidents. As a very young driver (< 6 months experience - i was reading a paper map propped up on the steering wheel as I was waiting for a light/coasting to a stop; bad idea) many years ago I did have a very minimal accident (low speed bumper to bumper), with no visible damage, but I insisted we not involve the police/insurance and agreed I'd pay for everything. That cost me $800 bucks (which was more than a paycheck for me at the time, had to post date a check to her), because I think the lady I bumped into got had by a mechanic.
You haven't had to deal with an insurance company. I've dealt with at least five claims personally. None had a police report. A couple were well over 2k. It would be very easy for a company with Uber's resources to avoid an official report outside a regulatory requirement. If they paid whatever it cost for any driverless accident that didn't involve an injury, there would be no insurance claims, let alone police reports.
Reporting accidents is terrible PR for a self-driving car company. If they can hide away all their mistakes, that tells a better story for when they launch.
The biggest obstacle for self-driving cars at launch will be customers afraid of giving over complete control. If there is a paper trail of all the times they screwed up, even if those bugs were fixed, then they have to account for that in everyone's mind. Similar to experienced politicians that can have prior votes held against them.
Even though I commend Uber's disruption in the Taxi space, it's actually scary once Uber attains absolute monopoly.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4871087,-111.9428112,3a,75y,...
Nothing beats appearing the victim of assault for public sympathy.
If California doesn't want those self driver car jobs, and tech investment thats ok!
There are many other places out there that will happily accept the money, jobs, innovation, and safety advancements that these technologies will create.
Ironic comment given that the cars are designed in Pennsylvania and California, and the intention is literally to permanently destroy tremendous numbers of jobs.
Of course, that's just first-order effects, productivity improvements benefit us all.
If they like high regulation places, they can move to a liberal city. If the citizens or companies like low regulation places, they can move to a place more focused on these so-called freedoms.
This was demonstrated very clearly in this situation.