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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

What's the threat of Uber going away? What's the moat? Wouldn't another company simply fill the vacuum? That is, unless Uber's whole venture is unprofitable.

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This was always the plan. Operate at a loss on both riders/drivers until you can turn the screws. In the past, you could say you'll just switch to Lyft, but here they're working together. That should tell you something about who they're competing with. Their drivers.

I heard one plan was to gain market share and eventually replace drivers with self-driving vehicles altogether, but I should note I'm spreading at least third-degree hearsay.

No, you're right, that was Uber's plan at one point. They did hire Anthony Levandowski.

That's the stock-juicing story, but self-driving cars were never going to work. At least not in time to support the company in that way.

Uber works by making drivers responsible over their time. By making Uber responsible for the drivers time they need to change their business model to that of a normal taxi service where they have more control over the drivers, since being responsible for something you don't have control over isn't a position you want to be in. And when they have to work as a normal taxi service then there is no point to Uber, they can't survive as a taxi service so they just have to pull out.

Could you point me to where and how AB5 would require Uber become responsible for their drivers time? It seems to not be the case to me.

It forces uber to employ them and pay them minimum wage and minimum benefits for their time. When you do that you start caring about how much money they make during the hours they work, meaning that Uber is now responsible to ensure their hours are spent productively instead of the worker deciding that himself. At this point there is no difference between Uber and a traditional Taxi company, since that is how Taxis operators. Uber can't survive as a traditional Taxi company since the laws and regulations around Taxis and employments are so different all over the world and they don't have the inhouse expertise to compete with local Taxi companies under those circumstances.

So the end result of AB5 is that Uber and Lift will exit California or become traditional taxi companies there. Either way California taxi state will go back to where it was before Uber and Lyft entered the market.

Both Uber and Lyft have stated they would pull out of California if they could not operate w/ contractor drivers. Any competitor left over would have to follow the taxi model, until Uber made changes to its platform to be able to come back.

This already sort of happened in Austin. Uber left, then a few years later it came back. When it did, everyone went back to Uber and a lot of the competitors flopped.

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