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Comment by electricslpnsld | Hacker News Reader

How sustainable is Lyft's pricing in comparison to Uber? I've been getting absolutely dirt cheap Uber Pool fares in the Bay Area. From my apartment to work the fare is often less than two dollars (which is around what BART would cost me), and I've even had fares less than dollar. I would be amazed if this is making anyone a profit, but if the price even doubled I would be way less likely to use Uber/Lyft on a whim.

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I honestly don't see how anyone makes money with fares so low.

Uber, and I imagine Lyft, are banking on automation. So what is sustainability? Self driving vehicles, at scale, could profitably provide service for a lower cost per mile than a person who owns their own vehicle. And that industry is going to have incredibly rapid growth likely culminating in a monopoly that could yield the largest company in existence. We drive in the ballpark of ~300billion miles per month [1]. Consider the worldwide market. A profit of even just a few cents a mile starts to look very insane very fast.

[1] - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring...

Sustainability is having a business that doesn't depend on a rapid rollout of a technology that doesn't work in weather that most people won't trust for years and that isn't even legal yet.

- By the time the technology is at the 99.999% level, the game will already be over.

- Things are legal by default. If self driving vehicles are not explicitly made illegal by a state, they are legal.

- Peoples' trust changes rapidly. I think as a culture we've become much more scared of technology and change, but the change from horses to internal combustion engines and brakes was many magnitudes 'scarier' than having AI manage navigation.

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