I don't know what the end game for these companies is. Most average people would never use uber or lyft for transportation on even a semi regular basis if those companies didn't heavily subsidize the rides.
Why? Is there some reason someone else couldn't make a basic app-based service to get taxi rides?
Either they have huge margins or they don’t. If they do have large margins someone will come along and attack the most profitable segment of the business. That could be airport rides, or having extra cars outside the end of a sporting event, or whatever.
As long as switching costs for customers are low then they can’t defend high margins. For monopoly to work you either have to corner supply somehow or lock the customers in. There’s no plausible mechanism for either with taxi services.
At their current scale uber and lyft don't need to have huge margins, they just need to break even and can make up for it with volume. Like amazon they could undercut any new competitor and play the long game. Their marginal costs are so low that they could win out any city with competition by aggressively cutting their 25% of the fare.
No, they don't. They could just hang out outside of big crowded events, like the end of a stadium concert, or rush hour at the airport. Or whatever the peak crunch point is for the existing service. It would be trivial to make at least some money doing only that.
Then the existing service sees its margins eroded. And so on.
There's just a ton of handwaving here, but there's no mechanism for a monopoly. Burden of proof would be on your side to demonstrate it. It's absolutely trivial for customers to switch, there's no way to lock them in. At least some people would do it literally to save $10 on a single ride to the airport. And you don't need a fleet to take one person to the airport. Or a couple. Or to strike a deal with one large company, or airline, or whatever.
Acquiring a monopoly is pointless if you can't defend it. And you can't unless you can constrict supply or lock in demand. Uber and Lyft can't and aren't ever going to be able to.
The alternatives I’ve tried in Canada succumb to failing miserably to even get the app experience right. There’s an extra level of competency needed to get an alternative to be considered competition.
Driver acquisition isn't cheap.
Then there's the question of which city you start in. The mega corp could probably just cut prices in that city until you give up.
Uber's big competitors, on the global front, aren't really competitors. Uber, Grab and Didi all own each other, and Masayoshi Son has massive stakes in all 3, it's an oligarchy. The global rideshare companies aim to bring accountability and logistics supremacy to ad hoc and inefficient transportation networks all over the developing world.
I expect profit margins will forever be slim, but if it's a safe bet that rideshare is here to stay, then I believe over the long run Uber is a safe bet. I won't be investing in Uber myself because I have morals.
Much like, I am arguing, the market for taxi hailing will continue to be.
Intel and Nvidia have a hardware advantage. Ford, GM, Tesla etc have the advantage of making their own vechicles. Google is Google.
What do Uber and Lyft have that makes it likely they can figure it out before the market is conquered by others?
Maybe their assumption is that if driverless tech is widely available then their brand names will get them more business?
But they're sinking tons of money into self-driving, which means they would bear the costs of buying and maintaining their fleet. That's a completely different business model, and seems like a tough pivot. And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, other companies are better-positioned to do this, with better manufacturing, more sensor data, more experience, or all of the above.
I read this in literally every HN discussion of ride sharing, but there's literally no reason to think that ride sharing companies will have any special role to play with autonomous vehicles if they materialize (which seems extremely doubtful in the short or medium term) and there's even less evidence that it will be cheaper.
I still can't figure out why people don't realize that low income humans are cheap. An autonomous car, if such a thing is ever in the real world, will at least for a long time be a complicated technically advanced computerized machine.
Like here's a pretty straightforward machine that rents for $125 a day: https://www.adoramarentals.com/p-~nkd4skit/NIKON-D4S-KIT
For reference that's about the same price as the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee for an entire work day.
Now tell me if the guts of a self-driving car are going to be cheaper or more expensive than a standard DSLR camera.
The utilization rate of the camera is going to be far lower than the rate of the car. The camera may sit on a shelf for weeks before being rented for a single day, so the per-rental price must be relatively high. The market is small. Also, cameras are comparatively easy to break, and the technology goes out of date extremely quickly as compared to a car.
I think the greatest fiscal advantage to autonomous car fleets is the likely high utilization rate.
Indeed. The biggest one of course being that there’s no such thing as an autonomous car.
This is far too broad a statement to possibly be true. It really depends on the situation.
A Nikon 4DS is also almost the cost of a LIDAR sensor while the cost of the LIDAR sensors are dropping quickly & will probably continue to do so due to economies of scale; the cost of the 4DS has reminded at 6k even long after being discontinued. Additionally, the 4DS has direct user wear & tear handling meaning on average it will wear out faster (drops, throwing it in a camera bag, etc) than a LIDAR mounted to the car.