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Comment by heisenbit | Hacker News Reader

From a strategy point Uber is in a desperate position. After the Google lawsuit their self-driving story is not working. Their existing business is loosing money in most places with no end in sight. Top level executives are leaving which is a sign that they can't imagine a positive course in the medium term.

The company is under extreme pressure and has proven over and over again to be willing to cut corners when it comes to legal compliance. It should be frightening to anyone on the streets that Uber managers are making decisions to put self driving cars on the road. They neither have the culture, patience nor the expertise to make decisions affecting life and death.

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I'm surprised we don't hear more about Mercedes. I don't know how much of a story they have when it comes to self-driving car, but they already build cars, and they already have a well established rent-by-the-minute business: car2go.com.

If and when they figure out self-driving cars all they have to do is slowly replace the people driven car2go by self-driven ones and they'll become a leader of that market without any fuss!

As a rule, Mercedes tends to keep mum on tech they're not ready to roll out (at least to the S-Class), and they like it be pretty near perfect at that piont.

Every single carmaker will offer self-driving as an option at first, then as a standard feature.

They'll also come with software that allows you to flip a switch and see your car take off to earn some money whenever you tell it – or it is reasonably sure from experience - that you won't need it for a while.

The manufacturer will take care of billing and insure you against vandalism for a 30% cut.

Meanwhile, Uber is but the faint memory of a bro-themed ponzi scheme. They have nothing that would allow them to remain relevant: no reputation, no technology, and -50 billion in capital. All they got to scale was the one part that's irrelevant: managing drivers.

And groping women, of course.

I think it's far more likely you'll just be able to lease a timeshare on a car than this complicated scenario people bring up where a company sells you a car and then rents it back from you. Like, the tax implications of this scheme are pretty obnoxious alone for someone who isn't doing it for primary or even secondary income.

But this way it's the car buyer who assumes the risk in case the timesharing model is less lucrative. The manufacturer doesn't want to hold any more inventory than it already has to.

Probably other companies will step in to manage the inventory and match cars to users, just like existing rental car companies.

Although in the short term, I can see the appeal of selling cars with a built-in ride-share mode. Many current car owners are likely to continue to want to own their own cars. If manufacturers can provide this feature out-of-the-box, it may help drive car sales to people who want to own cars and get "free money".

There seems to be a big jump from what could happen to what definitely will happen.

I would say highly likely that whatever car companies are left standing, one or more of them will have fairly good margins.

How the ownership ends up working out remains to be seen. May be cities will cut deals with a specific company and all non-commercial vehicles will be controlled by that municipality. May be Google Maps will turn in to a transport marketplace and operators will bid based on destination.

Likely Uber is going to have a very tough time. Likely they can cut a lot of the excess and operating expenses and be profitable for a while but at the loss of growth and new markets.

Uber paved the way for a lot of this. There is no way Google, Apple, Tesla or definitely an established car company would have been able to plow their way in to these local markets, bypassing and ignoring regulations until the point that cities became dependent on Uber. Now it is done, and it isn't particular a moat for Uber. But they fucking did it, they are the ones who need the recognition for it.

>> Uber paved the way for a lot of this. There is no way Google, Apple, Tesla or definitely an established car company would have been able to plow their way in to these local markets, bypassing and ignoring regulations until the point that cities became dependent on Uber. Now it is done, and it isn't particular a moat for Uber. But they fucking did it, they are the ones who need the recognition for it.

I don't understand or like this attitude. A company creating a moat by breaking the law to gain an advantage over people following the law is not something to be admired or celebrated.

(If I've misunderstood your tone I apologise but your final sentence gives me this impression).

The point is they didn't create much of a moat but they did bust the regulations. So competitors are free to pop up and consumers win at the expense of taxi drivers and taxi medallion owners (usually separate people).

> A company creating a moat by breaking the law to gain an advantage over people following the law is not something to be admired or celebrated

There are two wrong assumptions in this statement.

First, the OP said that Uber didn't create a moat, they just paved the way. These days, after Uber moves into an area, other ride sharing services are able to enter the market without Uber being able to abuse their market position to push them out. That's definitely a positive.

Second, Uber did not break the law in most situations. They re-interpreted a formerly gray area of the law, by asserting that their services shouldn't be regulated by taxi laws as they were not a taxi company. This was a legal battle that none of the entrenched players were willing to fight for various reasons, and with that legal precedent, that opened the way also for other ride sharing services to operate.

You’re misunderstanding the argument. He is not claiming that Uber has any kind of moat. He’s instead arguing (as far as I can tell) that Uber’s disregard for local regulations expanded the supply and convenience of taxis to the point that more people could forgo car ownership or develop a habit of taxi travel not easily switched to other modes of transportation, paving the way for other companies to roll out fleets of autonomous vehicles.

Not sure that argument really holds any water (the desirability of autonomous driving in an Uber-less world is counterfactual, so we can only speculate), but there you go.

> Now it is done, and it isn't particular a moat for Uber. But they fucking did it, they are the ones who need the recognition for it.

Okay they can have a cookie. A $3B+ cookie. Seems like they've been out hustled. Oh the irony.

I think it's funny that you're seeing people as still wanting to buy a car in that scenario.

If anything, people will want cars more as they transition from necessity to status symbol.

What planet do you live on? Cars have been a major status symbol for, what, a hundred years now?

There's no significant untapped well of car ownership to be found from self-driving cars. But the market for commuter-grade cars will plummet.

> There's no significant untapped well of car ownership to be found from self-driving cars.

At what age might you be comfortable letting your child self-drive to school, but not walk alone to school?

That doesn't increase the number of cars a family needs, it just automates a previously manual task.

It doesn't increase the number of vehicles needed, but it may increase the number of vehicles wanted. If a family of four has two kids that attend different schools, and two jobs in different locations, and everything starts at 8 am (because, life); each person can most delay leaving the house if there is one vehicle per person.

An incredible edge case, not an untapped market. And how does your hypothetical scenario work today? Right, some people get to arrive a bit earlier.

At that point, why would I own a car? Insuring against vandalism is all very well financially, but if my car needs to be repaired after a random person takes a ride in it I'm still going to be without my car for a few days.

At that point, why wouldn't I just pay the car manufacturer for "car use on demand"? Suddenly I don't have to care about having a garage at home, repairs, upgrades, etc. etc.

I can see the argument for still owning your own car, but owning it and renting it out seems like a half way measure that will satisfy no-one.

Assume you want to go to work at 9am and all your neighbours too. Is it okay for you to wait an hour until a car is free to drive you to work? Or imagine in previous times you bought a car when you got a bonus payment, now you pay the car-service each months - imagine you get sick and now can't afford to pay for the monthly car service, if you owned the car you wouldn't have to worry about that, as it would have been your asset without a fixed monthly payment.

Renting might be convenient, but in the long term owning something is cheaper and more convinient.

Why would the rental company not just scale up to match morning demand? Even if a car is only used for an hour a day the cost of having it parked up somewhere for the rest of the day would be very low.

And you're talking about a car as if buying it is a one-off expense that'll never be added on to. That's not true at all - insurance, maintainence and repairs are all ongoing costs that you'd be similarly unable to afford if you lost your job.

Re: morning demand: The same could be said for public transport or taxis. And do they increase to match the morning demand? Often not, you have to squeeze in to catch the public transport and wait for a taxi.

Insurance, maintenance and repairs are not monthly fixed costs. You can pay insurance e.g. once a year. And maintenance/repair really depends.

Not really. Most systems run extra buses/trains/etc during the morning and evening rush hour. This is true even in smallish US cities that have lackluster service.

It's certainly possible that public transit is still crowded despite this, but I've never heard of anywhere that doesn't even try to scale to match demand.

> You can pay insurance e.g. once a year.

Why would car insurance be a once a year cost but car service would not? I don't see any reason why a company couldn't charge once per year. That said, many consumers are unable to pay for a year of anything upfront and choose to pay monthly. Like car insurance.

> And maintenance/repair really depends.

Which is a huge problem! Again, if you don't have a ton of money a surprise repair bill can absolutely wreck your finances.

Also, pretty much every public transit system I know scales up service during peak times and winds it down at other times of day. This isn't a new concept.

Both Mercedes and BMW (DriveNow as a co-venture with Sixt) run car sharing businesses. In terms of cities served Uber beats them hands down. Mercedes has 14.000 and BMW 4000 cars on the streets (wikipedia). That is a fraction of what Uber can mobilize. For Uber to be taken on they would need to scale up a magnitude or even two. At that scale it would affect their existing business and their now increasing engagement is an indication how serious the companies are taking this shift.

Transportation as a service is clearly something. Car ownership is not always the best economic solution for an individual. The sharing demand exists but no one has established a large scale sustainable enterprise around it.

What is needed?

- Capital first and foremost as cars are not cheap. Two models so far:

-- Uber leveraging car owner capital. That area is really opaque but one can assume individuals capital cost is higher than manufacturers especially as Uber drivers likely have not the best credit ratings. The volume Uber can leverage here is - assuming 500.000 drivers with cars worth $20.000 then this is 10 Billion USD.

-- Car manufacturer and car rental companies (in the past often linked to manufacturers). There is some synergy in the vertical integration e.g. through manufacturing capacity management, tailored car features and marketing.

- Fleet servicing. Uber has managed to shift that to drivers.

- Driver. Uber has an individual driving. There may be autonomous vehicles. Then there is the person renting assuming driving license.

- Critical mass. There is a focus on serving cities. I suspect autonomous vehicles may be vital to serve the wider area.

- Insurance. Liability needs to be clarified and forms of insurance found if autonomous cars are allowed.

> The sharing demand exists but no one has established a large scale sustainable enterprise around it.

Zipcar et al?

I guess my question is the following: If you don't want exclusive ownership and use of your vehicle, why would you want the hassles of ownership at all? I do get the some money on the side argument but I really wonder if it makes sense with cars given that a lot of depreciation/costs is because of mileage. It's a bit different from the AirBnB situation.

Exactly. Today Uber relies on the owner/driver for the capital behind the vehicle, the vehicle acquisition, servicing, insurance, etc...

Current car-sharing business (car2go, zipcar, etc...) already had to figure out all those parts, the only piece missing for them, like for everybody else so far, is the self-driving technology.

> That is a fraction of what Uber can mobilize

I don't understand your point. You're saying Uber will have random people buy self-driving car for them, service it etc... and let Uber use it? They'd effectively become a pico-bank in a very risky investment... Or am I missing something here?

Very few Uber drivers are likely to be carrying insurance that would cover any claims. The reason being is that standard personal auto insurance excludes use of the vehicle for commercial purposes, and insurance that does cover commercial use is significantly more expensive.

Mercedes released a video [1] back in 2013 showing pretty decent driving. I imagine they didn't stop with progress and have even more capable systems today.

Mercedes-Benz has successfully completed the first autonomous long-distance drive ever, involving both town and cross-country traffic, using near-production-standard sensor systems. The Mercedes-Benz S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE research vehicle covered 100 kilometers from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, under real traffic conditions and complex situations including traffic lights, roundabouts, pedestrians, cyclists and trams.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AihC5flC-38

I read an article couple months ago in a RL car magazine where they test-drove a Mercedes prototype. They had the impression that it drove almost perfect, even dealing with complicated highway construction sites without proper safety lines.

Keep in mind that the technology Mercedes is actually shipping today is said to be worse than Honda's and significantly worse than Tesla's [1]

[1] http://www.thedrive.com/tech/5707/the-war-for-autonomous-dri...

Mercedes show cased a self driving van in the 1980s, with stereo black/white cameras, and a big computer in the back.

But can you buy a Merc Maybach S class with self driving comparable to Tesla S autopilot 2? No. That's why you see more and more Tesla S these days, plus it is all electric too.

My husband takes casual carpool most mornings to SF from Berkeley, and last week got a ride in one of the Mercedes Intelligent Drive cars (he mentioned the model, but I forgot). He said the driver didn't have to handle the car at all once he was picked up. The car drove itself onto the freeway, all the way over on the Bay Bridge, navigated the exit into SF and drove several blocks in the city. He said the driver took over only at the very end, when he pulled to the side of the road to drop my husband and the other passenger off. Pretty incredible!

Mercedes comes from a tradition of 'keep your mouth shut and then deliver a premium product.' Self-driving cars are not a market where 'move fast and break things' is an acceptable consumer philosophy and Uber demonstrates how tricky it is to reposition your brand from naughty to trustworthy. Mercedes, by contrast, can just run an ad in a year or two announcing that the new Z-Class or whatever it's called can drive you around in any weather and be believed by the vast majority of consumers.

Absolutely agreed and the kind of credibility Mercedes has in the market takes decades of excellent execution to accrue and a few years to fritter it away.

Given that the gap between Mercedes and run of the mill saloon has been closing in real terms rapidly (when I was a kid cars where serviced every 5-12,0000 miles, these days it's not unusual for service periods to be more than twice that with 7 year warranties and the generally higher build/reliability across the board) their brand of understated excellence is a key part of why they can still charge so much.

I worked with a guy who had previously interned at Daimler (Mercedes) in Germany working on self driving cars, although it wasn't called that - I don't remember the phrase he used. This was in 2005.

>It should be frightening to anyone on the streets that Uber managers are making decisions to put self driving cars on the road.

Something that probably should have been in the article's title that this accident occurred because the human driver in the other car failed to yield. While Uber is certainly a very flawed company, neither its technology nor its people were at fault here.

In theory one of the benefits of an autonomous car is its many-times-faster-than-human reaction and the fact that it doesn't ever get "distracted".

Meanwhile, multiple brands of existing, human-driven cars already have the ability to detect an impending collision and avoid it, either through automatic emergency braking or other mechanisms. If Uber isn't even caught up to the stuff that's in cars for the general public, then what the hell are they doing?

> Meanwhile, multiple brands of existing, human-driven cars already have the ability to detect an impending collision and avoid it, either through automatic emergency braking or other mechanisms.

Without more details we can't say whether this accident would have been avoidable with those systems.

While I agree in general, I don't think we have enough details here to say that this was preventable by the Uber car, or any existing car. It's possible that the officially-at-fault car was sufficiently outside the envelope of expected behavior that no system could have prevented the crash. Stuff like predicting whether someone else will yield is basically mind reading, a Hard Problem in the general case.

Existing active collision avoidance systems only work in the front aspect. Passive warning systems will give warnings about crossing traffic in some limited cases but it's still on the driver to react. That's about it for human-driven cars right now.

There are collision-avoidance systems which can detect when you're making a dangerous turn into or, I believe, in front of other traffic.

This.

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone who reads this headline and gets a quick summary. This headline makes it sound like Uber isn't confident of its technology and they think their technology might be the cause and hence they are suspending it. In this case, it seems pretty clear, as confirmed by the police officer, that Uber's car wasn't at fault.

It's normal for drivers to fail to yield legally. A human driver would respond by letting the other car go. If Uber tech can't handle this completely standard situation and results in a high-speed collision when another driver makes a minor error then Uber tech is not ready for prime time.

> the human driver in the other car failed to yield

Driving around Houston this happens to me several times a day. Obviously the technology wasn't designed for essentially "normal" driving conditions.

Interesting thought. Anecdotally, I do probably make frequent subconscious decisions to avoid dangerous situations when I am able to predict the other driver is about to do something stupid, even if I have the right-of-way.

Its like looking both ways before crossing a one-way street - nobody should ever be coming at me from the wrong way, but if someone was.... I want to be prepared to deal with that.

I live in an area popular with walkers & bicyclists due to the winding, undulating roads. They often travel against traffic on one-ways in the heart of town(roundabouts and one-way streets) and on the shoulderless two lanes.

Anecdote related to TFA:, a couple months back an SUV stopped at a marked crosswalk with ped traffic. I stopped in right lane next to it. When peds cleared it began rolling before I did, and once I commenced it braked hard. I braked, looking for unseen peds and noticed it's nav gear & small uber decal. No additional peds were in crosswalk. There were dozens og people on either sidewalk for an art fair. I wonder if human intervention caused the hard braking or the large amount of data points on the periphery.

And this is the 'hard bit' about self driving cars. If they are too passive and cautious human drivers will exploit them, if they assume the other cars will follow the rules, they will hit them.No amount of LIDAR magic and deep learning can fix that problem yet.

We don't know about the specifics of the accident, but I just want to say that simply not being "at fault" is not the same thing as driving safely. A large number of accidents can be avoided by the non-"at fault" party alone exercising caution – something autonomous vehicles should be far superior at than humans.

Say you're approaching an intersection with a green light while another car is traveling perpendicular at a moderately high rate of speed – perhaps just 5mph faster than their maximum safe stopping speed. You're completely allowed to just keep driving through the intersection, and when they hit you, they will be at fault. However, you could have avoided the collision by recognizing the situation and slowing down – and this is a type of analysis that autonomous vehicles are specially suited for compared to human drivers.

This one of the many reasons why self-driving cars are such a hard problem though. They don't just have to drive better than humans based on knowing the road and the conditions, they also have to deal with other drivers (who are perhaps also automated) behaving in unexpected ways. Self-driving cars have to be robust even when (especially when) normal assumptions about the road or other drivers aren't valid.

This isn't tangential to the engineering problems surrounding self-driving cars, rather it's at the heart of those problems and why it's an order of magnitude (or more) harder than what so many people assume. It's not insurmountable, but whenever I hear people making comments like "self-driving cars are a solved problem, and are an inevitability in the near future", I cringe so hard. With a lot of care and skepticism, we can all make self-driving cars a thing in our lifetimes. Or, with a lot of overenthusiastic credulousness, we can make self-driving cars briefly a thing in the very near future, which get regulated out of existence for the remainder of our lives by a relatively small number of high-profile accidents like this.

I agree with you about the hardness of the self driving car problem.

But I think your other point about the inevitability of regulators killing self driving cars if they are short of perfect is just as cringe-worthy, as at least as harmful.

Self-driving cars should be allowed to roll if they are better than humans, which might be the case already.

It is hard, but not impossible, for government to do the right thing.

When I learned to drive I was taught to always drive defensively - basically to avoid situations that could result in the 'chance of a risk of an accident'. Sure, 16-year old me and my friends joked about the terminology but the lesson stuck with me.

  Other driver going faster than they should? Switch lanes and avoid the situation.

  Turning into traffic and there is a car in your intended lane signalling that they're going to move out of the lane?  Wait for them to actually move and make space for you - don't trust that their lights are the whole truth.

Being a safe driver means not causing accidents but it also is on you to avoid being in situations with greater risk - "identify and reduce".

The worst part of Uber's situation is that they have priced themselves out of any reasonable path to further fund raising. Even a successful IPO would be a huge down round.

I've never understood how valuations computed from white powder are strategically in the best interest of... anyone? Maybe someone more clueful about the nuances of VC can enlighten me. Even if Uber can make the Google suit and the harassment culture go away, I still don't see how they can ever justify that valuation. Every car company is about to ship (or has) some form of auto drive and there are no strong barriers to competing with Uber on ride sharing. Transportation is a commodity.

How's Lyft doing?

Abusing legal gray areas is a fundamental part of their business model. They were able to position this in a positive 'move fast and break things' light. Now people are noticing things are broken and are fixing them.

For example, they were abusing an exception for businesses grossing <30K a year to not pay taxes in Canada. That law is now being reviewed.

As far as I can tell Uber's corporate culture is both self-interested, self-righteous, and entirely inconsiderate of the people and markets they affect. You can only piss in the pool so long before it catches up with you, and they don't have any other runway left.

We have some of the greatest minds in the world collaborating, and this is one of their primary ambassadors.

> Abusing legal gray areas is a fundamental part of their business model.

Uber was/is quite willing to break the law (and encourage their drivers to do so, with lies and misdirection), even in areas where it's very clear that they're in the wrong.

Leveraging a ton of market anger about the existing taxi services helped them get started, it's unclear if it'll be enough to sustain them.

> Abusing legal gray areas

What abuses are you talking about? Their assertion that they're not a taxi company holds some water, and their 30k a year exemption in Canada is for independent subcontractors, which Uber argues that its drivers are.

Every company looks at laws and sees just how much money they have to pay. There is no abuse in this case.

If Uber were a publicly traded company I'd be buying as much stock as possible right now. All I see is total hysteria over completely surmountable setbacks. People want your statements to feel true because they have beef with Uber's culture, business practice, etc. so they're bending their perception of every event to fit their model. This is a discussion thread about how a self-driving car that was, according to evidence so far, hit by another driver who failed to yield. And basically every comment is talking about how reckless and irresponsible the company is, and intimating that it was probably Uber's fault. Everyone is just having the conversation they want to have, regardless of how it contacts reality. "Their existing business is loosing [sic] money in most places with no end in sight." According to whom, you? Why should I be even slightly credulous that this company with massive market penetration and a product people want has no wherewithal to turn a profit?

This whole thread is pure platitude. "Kalanick and his bros are sociopaths". Sure. Keep operating in those terms and see where it gets you. I'm going to stay here on planet Earth, thank you.

It's like this on every single thread on HN re: Uber. It's maddeningly out of touch. Uber is fine.

Around the issue of this crash? Yes. Around the issue of how much Uber needs self-driving to pan out, now? Not so much. Around the reality that Kalanick is bad news, and at the same time utterly in control? Not at all.

I see what you're talking about, but overall I see (although not necessarily in this thread) people talking about Uber operating a VC subsidized per-ride loss, and just how much they need self-driving to pan out in a hurry.

Fair points. If I were a VC, I wouldn't be thrilled with Kalanick at the helm, even if I wasn't about to sell sell sell.

I get why people might be concerned about the operating losses, at least to first order. But I just don't see the structure of how people think this disintegration is going to happen. To me, it looks like a very solid business model that makes tons of cash and spends tons of cash (like Amazon). I don't see some kind of tower of Babel built entirely on the perception of value that could topple at any moment (Twitter). People love using ride-sharing apps, and there's no way that's going to change in the near future.

Even if their self-driving-car play isn't working out, I don't see why it has to pan out _now_. They can always just fall back on their massively successful core business..

This is the most absurd comment of this thread, hand waving away every major problem or scandal Uber has had even in just the last year. Uber self-driving cars blew 6 red lights in their 1 week San Francisco autonomous testing run, and lied to everyone saying it was not the technology's fault - it was, thanks to documents sent to NYT. They are on track to lose 3 billion this year. 3 billion. Their self driving golden parachute/ bail-out plan has been a disaster so far, in terms of the clearly not-ready technology and Google's lawsuit. Even ignoring the deep flaws of their executives - bragging about threatening journalists, instituting a culture of sexism and abuse, berating their own Uber drivers - your response is still "Everyone is wrong, everything is amazing at Uber, and I won't even offer any details why." Thanks for this wonderful contribution to HN.

Your whole comment is a perfect demonstration of what I'm saying. My point is not that Uber has no problems, but rather that people are blowing things out of proportion because they've taken an emotional dislike for the company. So people see what they want to see.

For instance, you see 3 billion in losses. In 2015 Q4, Uber generated $560M in net revenue. In 2016 Q1, $960M. Q2: $1100M. Q3: $1320M, and Q4: $1584M. I see massive growth, and massive expenditures into R&D which could be halted with relative ease if solvency becomes a problem.

You see the self-driving program as a boondoggle, and you see 6 blown red lights in 1 week as just a taste of nonfunctional technology that would have only caused more and more damage the more time it was allowed to be on the road. I see people trying to solve a difficult technical problem, and having some issues in an initial run-up test.

You see a company whose executives routinely berate their own Uber drivers. I see one dashcam video where the CEO has a human debate with one of his drivers, which has been extrapolated into a portrait of "the type of person this Kalanick guy really is".

I'm _not_ saying that they don't have their problems, or that it's impossible Uber is going to run into financial or regulatory trouble. But this sky-is-falling talk is not for me.

I am pretty concerned about the pricing and subsidizing of said prizing. Its unsustainable for the drivers and uber in the long run.

How is $1584M net revenue in Q4 subsidizing rides?

because Uber subsidizes 59% of the cost for passengers with VC money.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2016/12/02/uber...

Net revenue is what Uber makes after paying the drivers. IOW, any losses Uber has accrued in that quarter is based upon costs outside of the rides themselves.

You are missing the point.

The subsidizing is the problem. If there is no subsidizing that cost have to be paid by the passengers which makes it a much more expensive service.

Do you have a source for "massive R&D spending which could be halted"? I was under the impression their losses come from massive operating/marketing expenses, which cannot be cut without harming the business.

Transport is a tough industry with a lot of knowledgable competitors, and is a significant 'big data' consumer. It has thin margins. Uber can do what it does because it's burning through capital, but there's a reason why financially-sustainable people-moving companies don't drive all shiny new vehicles and offer bottled water to their passengers.

If you want to talk about reality, then talk about sustainable financials in the transport industry.

Regardless of what you think of Kalanick there are legitimate questions about the business model. I see many people claim things like "They lose money because they spend on R%D". I have not been able to see the most recent year but leaked numbers from prior years show that even if you cut R&D to zero they still lost money. In the more recent year I have not seen the breakout for R&D but the losses scale with revenues by quarter which is not what you would expect to see if they had a fixed R&D budget cutting into profits. I also see many wildly overoptimistic estimates of how much driverless cars would increase their margins. For example you see absurd statements like "driverless cars can produce revenue 24 hrs a day". Demand for rides is not constant 24 hrs a day. To meet peak demand (which is critical to their competitiveness with alternatives) you will have many cars idle off peak. That means parking (costs money) or driving empty wasting money. Many others have pointed out some of the many costs currently born by drivers that somebody still has to pay. You can debate the exact cost of all those things but it is definitely not zero. I am not saying it is impossible for them to make changes and make money but until I saw detailed numbers and a plan to increase margins I would not invest my money.

The whole business model of Uber was about no legal compliance.

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