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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft

...What would they do with it? The business model (also uber) as-is makes a loss.

Uber/Lyft's initial proposition was that once ride sharing incumbents were established, they'd have a software-ish monopoly and margins. This did not work out. Now the proposition is "When driverless cars get invented..."

If google had a car that can drive itself, they can figure out an app. They can get to a customer base. The driverless car is the important part.

Amazon otoh... deliveries maybe? If they could figure out a way to do deliveries in a lyft/uber model... that's valuable to amazon.

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Yes, it probably would be a valuable to Amazon. So valuable, in fact, that it already[1] exists.

[1]https://flex.amazon.com/

yea it's trivial for Amazon to create their own 'driver network'

Yes, this exists today, but what Amazon would be buying is faster time to expansion. If they need drivers now (which is an assumption, I don't know this to be a fact) Lyft gives them an established network incredibly fast.

So obviously the price would have to be right and of course Amazon wouldn't be paying a large premium.

An advertising campaign to attract drivers is probably a lot cheaper than buying Lyft.

A simple press release would do the trick.

True. Also, given the number of customers they have, a few banner ads on their own site might work, too.

There are wild differences between flex and ride sharing.

Amazon already had an internal project that was going to compete with Lyft and Uber. It was called Rides and it was abandoned. Rex Tibbens headed that project and subsequently left Amazon and went to join Lyft as their COO.

Sure, I'll switch between ride sharing apps based on cost alone. But I'll still want available drivers near me. I'm not willing to try multiple apps just to see if it's usable.

I think Uber/Lyft's customer bases are definitely valuable. There's a real business there post Covid-19. I'm not sure what the margins would look like though. I think an acquisition might be a good idea if it was cheap enough and it looked like competitors wouldn't be able to use vc money to offer rides below cost.

Exactly. Lyft doesn't have anything they can't create for a lot less money. And if they buy it, they get a lot of headaches: legacy code, legacy staff, legacy relationships to partner and drivers.

I could see value for self-driving/ride-sharing data collection for Google. Google wants to make a ride-sharing program, well has one now I guess, having all that data seems like a boon if Lyft is a cheap buy. They could also collect a lot of data for use with their self-driving research as well.

> The business model (also uber) as-is makes a loss.

Uber's ride-hailing business is profitable. They lose money because they subsidize Ubereats.

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