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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Patents are not valid indefinitely. Given the ridiculous amounts of money thrown at this, patents will probably expire long before the break-even point is met.

Besides patents, Uber has no way to bind customers. Yes, it's a commodity business, and I see no way around it. Users can simply use a different and cheaper car, which will inevitably exist and become popular.

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Both rideshares subsidize about half of what they pay drivers, but their deficit is not nearly half of their total revenue. Take out the drivers, profit tomorrow. Patent good for 20 years. That's about as juicy as it ever gets.

The patent may last for 20 years, but that might also be the time required to develop driverless cars and get them approved.

Well... the last patent that makes driverless actually feasible in the real world will last for 20 years, and for most of that time the development will already be done.

Approval? That's another matter.

More than one company is working on driverless cars. Either most of the patents will be easy to work around by some other approach, or several companies will each hold some of the needed patents and all will license from each other - it might stop someone new from getting in but it won't stop everyone already in. I would expect some combination of both.

Take out the drivers and you have a company that makes short term rentals of automobiles to consumers. There are already companies that do this. You may have rented a car from one of them last time you traveled. Take a look at Hertz or Budget and see if those are companies you actually want to be invested in.

And regarding patents: what will probably end up happening with self-driving patents is that there will be a bunch of different entities (everyone currently working on self-driving tech) that will cross license their IP to each other. A patent in this space is going to be good for licensing fees, but not for giving yourself a monopoly on self-driving tech.

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