Is this the death of Uber?
Uber is likely to survive in some form without one, they have the ridership and can use someone else's self driving cars in the future. They will just get a much smaller piece of the pie.
Uber's dominance in the taxi app space + Waymo cred?
But there are probably ways out of this for them. They will probably chug along for at least a decade and in that time anything can happen.
I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.
- raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL - reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets
Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?
There are other costs that go into taxis that Ubers don't have. Taxis have back-office support staff too (the people you call up to order one to you).
Uber's a company whose current main product is software, that doesn't mean they can't branch out into new things and are forever tied to software. I'd also argue that Uber already has a lot more experience with working with a million different people than most other companies (currently drivers, in the future possibly mechanics, garage owners, etc).