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Comment by throwawaylogs | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be super negative but I don't see this going well.

They are losing a billion a year and have the worst self driving tech.

Their self driving tech is built on top of Baidu's open source platform and another open source platform with only 1 year of development with a huge team. A recipe for disaster.

They only have 1 year of development and scant few of their technical leaders - including their VP - worked in self driving before starting at Lyft.

I don't see how they survive.

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If you are an optimistic (or realistic) you could say this will go great because they are the ones wasting less money on self driving fairies which will never go anywhere.

You're making the (implied) assumption that self-driving vehicles will be successful, and furthermore, deployed across a wide geographic area.

I would invite you to come to Minnesota in the winter and drive a car for a few weeks, and then proceed to make the same (implied) claim.

Do you not think there's a market for self driving cars that only operate in good weather? I live in the mountains and we get a ton of snow. But there are very few times where snow is actually on the ground.

Self-driving cars in the south, bay area, Seattle, and DC in the summer would be more than enough to make a shitload of money.

Minnesota is a paradise to drive in (even in winter) compared to where I'm from. You should have picked a better example.

"I would invite you to come to Minnesota in the winter and drive a car for a few weeks"

Can't make it, but thanks for the invite

Door-to-door general self-driving is utterly irrelevant to the financials of any of these companies within a relevant timeframe.

And yet their financials under current limitations of reality are utter shit. Who would buy this?

I honestly don't understand why (barring greater fool theory/delusion/etc.) Uber's new CEO didn't just say that prices had to go up 50%-100% (to basically cab fares) to create a sustainable business. It is a better service in many cases after all. If you're not interested in using the service at those prices? Sorry. We don't want you as a customer.

There would have been howls of rage from young urbanites who had structured their lives around subsidized transportation. But...

Lyft could have contested this but I'm not sure it would have been credible.

Really? You can’t think of any reasons why he wouldn’t say that?

How about: because he was hired to take the company to an IPO, and they’re selling a growth story in that IPO.

That falls under greater fool theory.

Fares only need to go up 11% to break even today and that assumes no increases in efficiency (and similar market size at increased rates...). Lyft had bookings of $8B, and lost $900M.

> Uber's new CEO didn't just say that prices had to go up 50%-100% (to basically cab fares) to create a sustainable business.

I’m assuming you mean to say he did say that? Otherwise I’m not sure I understand your comment.

If so, can you link the statement you’re referring to?

I'm saying that Uber basically kept prices where they were when they really needed to jack them up. Which he didn't do.

Ah, I took the period at the end of “etc.” to be separating two sentences. It makes much more sense reading it the correct way :)

Regardless, Uber is profitable on a per ride basis in most markets, except for those they’re trying to expand in. In established markets raising prices would lower demand for rides faster than it increases revenue.

One thing they have going for them is that they are the ideal partner for Waymo/GM once their self-driving tech is ready for a broad roll-out. They are in all the same US markets as Uber, can provide immediate access to customers, and are more easily acquirable than Uber.

> Their self driving tech is built on top of Baidu's open source platform and another open source platform with only 1 year of development with a huge team. A recipe for disaster.

I assume you're talking about Apollo [0]. Out of curiosity, what's the other open source platform you've mentioned? Do you have any sources?

[0] https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo

They survive as a competing cab company to Uber because self driving tech is too far out to save Uber from its business model.

People use them? They don’t have the international that Uber has but they also don’t have the baggage.

They're going to make it up by losing $20 per day on each of a huge fleet of electric scooters.

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