Well, minicab drivers had all the time in the world to band together and invent something like Uber, and they never did.
Capitalism has plenty of problems, but let's not pretend it doesn't have advantages too.
Capitalism has plenty of problems, but let's not pretend it doesn't have advantages too.
There were plenty of ride hailing apps before Uber all of them sorta failed becuase of bad tech, business model or both.
Uber made it with millions if not billions of funding and sure now it’s more easy to copy since the model and the tech is better understood but that’s just it it too capitalism to refine the model and now they want to effectively socialize it. This might sound cool but in reality it won’t work since this is a chicken and the egg problem and while you can socialize the chicken some one had to design the hen and optimize it before hand.
Taxi unions had no intention to take the risks Uber did despite likely having just as much access to funds with 40-50,000 cab drivers each could’ve easily funded a mini Uber with a few 100s to a few 1000s £s over several years but they chose not too.
Im pretty sure their plan from was to build a large enough user base to be in a leading position to switch to robotaxis as soon as they are available and I think that’s what many of their backers are funding.
With robotaxis being likely about 5 year or so from being approved in major metropolitan areas without any shenanigans from the cab cartels Uber can afford to bleed money until then and then just switch.
Audi is releasing L4 cars in Europe this year which will allow you to take the back seat during traffic.
While I don’t think anyone will be releasing L5 before 2020 I wouldn’t bet against that for a 2022-2023 time frame.
Don’t get me wrong I dislike Uber and AirB&B with passion for their predatory practices but I also don’t like cartels the cab and car hire companies in London had a decade to get their shit together when the ride hailing apps / websites began popping up in the late 2000s and in all honesty they only turned worse.
NVIDIA is set to deliver their L5 platform in mid 2018, they have the automotive safety certification and compute power (300> TOPs of int8 inference) to meet expected L5 requirements.
And they aren’t alone in this game.
Beyond this it’s a legal issue once a precedent will be set however I think it will open the flood gates.
This is a great example of capitalism not being able to generate the best solution. In an alternate universe there would be a regulated exchange with ~0 cut of the profits, instead making sure drivers get the money since they're doing most of the work. Uber does handle pricing, but even then it has "cheated" to get a bigger slice of the pie.
Imagine the NYSE taking even 5% of trades.
Of course they could. All the regulations you mentioned are only there because the Taxi companies lobbied hard for them. Had they lobbied half as hard to have the regulations loosened they could have gotten any regulations they wanted. The taxi companies bet big on using regulation to entrench their position and avoid competition rather than on improving their product. History will tell if it was a good bet or not, but so far it isn't looking too good.
In reality, modern taxi regulations date back to the 1930s, when the prevailing view was that consumer protection was best served by a combination of limiting competition and government price regulation. This was all happening at around the same time as the government rate-regulated other transportation industries: busses, freight trucking, and airlines.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-commercial/innovati...
It's been widely reported that its mature markets are already profitable, which means that it's not cheap because of VC dollars. The VC dollars are only being used to supplement growth into new immature markets. The profitable markets are also being used for the same purpose. Enough markets should be mature enough for Uber to be profitable by sometime in mid to late 2018 at the rate they've been reducing their losses relative to gross bookings.
It was always kind of fascinating to me that other industries did not try to apply the concept of open-source more widely to different problems, despite the clear benefits it has shown in software.
From the outside, it looks like few other industries are willing to sink in the time/effort for the benefit of the community as a whole, with no clear, short-term financial incentive for doing so.
[1] - http://libretaxi.org
But it's obviously risky and someone has to bear the risk, without investors, you can't really do that. Uber didn't bootstrap their own business, they got millions of dollars from big shots from the Silicon Valley to get started. Individual cabs can't do that.
That's a problem you see again and again, I think. No matter what your intentions, it's incredibly difficult to compete when a company with huge pockets comes to town and subsidises rides.
It's frankly a bit concerning that Corbyn doesn't realise this.
This is, btw., how coops work all the time. People form a coop that does something. Raiffeisen in germany started as a farmers cooperative, Rewe started as a cooperative of food stores, the various Coop supermarket chains (Italy, Switzerland, ...) started or are still organized as cooperative. There’s no particular reason the drivers could not band together and form a Taxi cooperative that develops and maintains an app. All it takes is the will to organize.