Man I hate that this is the end for Uber. I've recently been trialing Lyft and, at least in my area, it always takes longer and is more expensive.
But...if Uber truly is a bunch of scumbags, they deserve to burn.
But...if Uber truly is a bunch of scumbags, they deserve to burn.
This depends on where the 700 billion dollar from the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 ended up.
You do realize Lyft has raised 4+ billion in funding and they aren't profitable either. Their ride prices are Coke and Pepsi similar to Uber in most major US markets. Do the math.
Where does the profit come from, and does it go to the VC investors?
Probably not. The main reason Uber got so much VC funding is because they promised investors that they would be treated as a technology services company, which would allow them to ignore various laws and regulations taxi companies are subject to and eventually drive them out of business to become a monopoly.
If Uber fails at executing this business model, it's not clear why investors would take a second chance with another company of the same type.
Waze is spectacularly terrible at everything. The algorithm is designed to take you out of your way to run up the meter, it encourages unsafe turns, and it's literally unable to navigate to where I live, so I straight-up refuse to ride in any car with Waze running. And yet Lyft recommends it to new drivers. It's not uncommon for me to walk out of cars because the driver pitched a hissy fit when I said "Please don't use Waze", and even when I don't walk out of the car I usually end up having to navigate the driver manually because Waze is the only thing they have installed.
Using Lyft has become a thoroughly unpleasant experience, but I'm not comfortable using Uber either for ethical reasons. I'm considering looking into what it would cost to straight-up hire a private driver as an on-call employee.
>“If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the enemy that’s in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher quality than Uber’s, then Uber is no longer a thing,” Kalanick said.
>“It starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous,” he told Business Insider in an interview. “So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.”