In countries where there was a reasonable taxi system uber gutted them and went around regulations taking away the few guarantees the people had like a retirement and sick leave.
In the end we the tax payer have to help these people down the road when they get sick or old and all of this for the profit of a few share holders.
In Switzerland Uber still owes drivers half a billion Swiss Francs in unpaid wages/retirement and sick leave. Where do people think this missing money will come from when these people need it later on in life?
The current system is GREAT for Uber. No vehicles to purchase, maintenance is the burden of the driver and you only need to cut off a small slice of your profits for the driver in order to keep the whole thing going. If you need more profits you simply raise rates or lower driver pay.
Sounds like a business opportunity
To the contrary, tons of people will be doing that.
There's going to be a big group of people who logistically need "their own car" for various reasons (live out in the suburbs, need stuff in a locked trunk, can't risk a delay in getting to work, etc.) but couldn't be happier to make money on it by lending it out as a taxi downtown during business hours. Or when they're traveling for a week, or whenever.
Especially when you don't even need to worry about messes/damage because internal cameras will catch and bill whoever was responsible, and the car will drive itself to the nearest garage for cleaning/repair.
Just as we now have hotels and AirBNB, I totally foresee different self-driving taxi services that are either fleet-owned or consumer-shared. I can't imagine why this wouldn't happen.
Yeah, until they get their car back and there's puke in the backseat, which requires more than a basic cleaning to get the smell out (Yes, uber charges a fee for puking, but no it doesn't cover a proper detailing that'll get the smell out). Or they find a bunch of little dings on their car from slamming the door into an unretracted seat belt. There's also the vegan pleather that'll rapidly start to deteriorate from passenger traffic that's 20x more than intended etc.
Some may still do it of course, but I don't believe most will want to destroy their car's value from the depreciation that uber will cause.
Super-strict reputation scoring solves this. Also, if you're paranoid, burgers don't puke.
> but I don't believe most will want to destroy their car's value from the depreciation
It's simple math. If you're making much more money from renting it out than depreciation is causing, then it's an economic no-brainer.
Uber churns through 96% of their drivers per year, so it's clearly not a no-brainer for the vast majority of them [1].
Self driving cars may help uber and its ilk lower their fleet costs if and when they get them, but a relatively insignificant portion of people will be willing to loan out their personal vehicle to them.
[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/how-uber-makes-mo....
No, it's just sampling.
> and not something I'd personally accept as an owner for a few bucks.
Fine, that's you. But it's not a few bucks, it's probably going to add up to thousands of dollars if you do it regularly.
> Uber churns through 96% of their drivers per year
That has nothing to do with car condition and everything to do with people changing income sources.
> but a relatively insignificant portion of people will be willing to loan out their personal vehicle
You have no basis for saying it will be relatively insignificant. People tend to be incentivized by money, that's the whole basis of microeconomics. If people can make back a decent portion of the cost of their car by renting it out when they're not using it, of course it's going to become a significant proportion of people.
I don't see how you can argue against something that's such a no-brainer. You seem to have the luxury of allowing a fear of small amounts of wear-and-tear to override any monetary concerns; but for many people, the additional income is going to take priority because they need the money end-of-story.
People can already make a few bucks by letting strangers use their car on services like Turo, and it is relatively insignificant. That self driving capabilities will change that is a baseless assumption.
Self-driving capabilities will get rid of the friction, and so the market will take off.
If we followed your logic, then AirBNB would never have happened because short-term rentals of people's homes and rooms were "relatively insignificant" in the 1990's. But of course it did, because AirBNB removed friction and provided a platform for reputation management and dispute resolution.
You don't want to rent out your personal car, I get that. But tons of other people prefer to make money instead.
The first ride was novel. Everything after felt so routine I didn't even look at the road. As far as my girlfriend and I were concerned, we got in and then talked for a while and hung out and then got out elsewhere.
The speed is the only constraint right now.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving...
Not quite. More like they're partnering with others and staying internally focused on their core competencies, like any good company does.
Section "Get to know our autonomous partners" https://www.uber.com/us/en/autonomous/
Drivers were generally very happy about their Uber earnings. When I realized it I bought shares and they are now at +60% over the buying price.
Let’s just be careful with pre-digested narratives. I am not saying that every driver is happy. But many are certainly quite happy!
There’s a lot of discussion among the driver community about how to operate to optimize earnings. People are leasing or buying cars specifically to use them to drive for Uber and depreciation, maintenance, and fuel economy are all part of the calculation.
They make it seem like it's a job you can do at your own convenience, but you can't actually do it like that and expect to make consistent money. All of them start penalizing you (by giving you fewer jobs in the future) if you turn down jobs for any reason, driving down their profitibility. It also looks like youre making more money than you are because you have to do all your own taxes (which is mostly just a hassle, but did blindside my poor friend who didnt know anything about taxes and had to go into debt to pay his taxes since he was living paycheck to paycheck).
And its very easy to not make the connection that driving all day for Uber et al increases chances of getting in a car accident, which will increase monthly insurance costs, not to mention car repairs and car maintainance from driving 8-12 hours a day most days of the week. And if your car ever needs to go into the mechanic for repairs (a famously slow process often times) thats lost wages every day youre without your car. It's like being a truck driver; Uber et al just move all the costs of fleet maintainance to the drivers, which really eats into what looks like a decent wage on the surface level.
Of course, there are going to be some people who do all the research and are ok with these risks, or game the system someone. But most people who do these driving jobs full time do it because they dont have a lot of other options, and dont bother to do all the in-depth research because "it looks easy" and they didnt have another readily available choice anyway. This isnt Uber's fault per se, but they benefit from it and do nothing to inform drivers of these risks.
(cite: have a friend who worked for all the delivery and ride share apps before losing his car and being too poor to buy a new one.)
You are expecting that because a profitable quarter happened, that it will continue to happen. It might as well not if the changes to bring this profit create a lot of churn, anecdotally I've been seeing this churn happen in real time around my social circle in different countries. I think we all need to wait and see what's the trend instead of jumping into "you naysayers were all wrong, haha"-rhetorics.
Also my memory of Uber critiques weren't that they'd never be profitable, but that as a business they aren't quite as unique and untouchable as their valuation suggested (which, given the number of competing companies that operate in my city, is correct).
Consider, eg,
>Uber on Tuesday posted a profit of $394 million during the second quarter, compared with a loss of $2.60 billion a year earlier
This really doesn't answer or refute any questions around their business model.
The final question is: what's the moat?
It's trivial to create these "automate contract labour" apps, and many now exist. It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.
I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.
They'll be left with IP that teens could compete with
Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.
But if the market you want to deal with is just one city or metro area or similar then it is not a difficult app.
I'd suggest that this is not necessarily related to how hard the tech side is. Both major incumbents have (until now!) been throwing away VC money without any clear path to profitability, so there hasn't exactly been much of an incentive to build yet another money pit.
I mean, it's a 2-sided market. That's inherently a moat.
There's a reason why it took Amazon to displace Ebay, and Facebook to displace Craigslist. It's a very expensive and difficult market to get into.
> It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.
There are plenty of industries like that. Grocery, for example. That doesn't mean that the business is a bad one by itself.
> I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.
IMO, that wouldn't change anything.
If I could export all of my Facebook data (maybe I can, I haven't checked), it wouldn't cause me to abandon the platform - I'm there because of the other people on the platform.
Riders use Uber because it has the drivers. And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders. The ability to export ride history or reputation isn't going to change that fact.
> And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders.
You make it sound exclusive, but I've seen many drivers use a few different apps at the same time, often with different phones. You just need some temporary incentives and you've bootstrapped your network, because as explained above, the problem is only the initial bootstrapping.
Concrete example: two months ago I hadn't heard of "Free Now". I've now used it twice in two different European countries, last time because Uber was exactly four times as expensive (maybe that explains their new profits? They just raised their prices, hoping users won't notice?). I'm not often in a taxi so this is just anecdotal, but there's very little friction when switching to another service.
I'm not sure many actually said that
> that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money
they were
> That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down
the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come
turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct
> I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post
see above
> they were
They no longer are, and they don't lose customers. So no house of cards, because they didn't collapse when subsidy disappeared.
> the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come
Turn out users don't seem to mind. Bookings is back to the pre-pandemic level. Food delivery is at the record.
> turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct
They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct, unless you're saying consumers are stupid. If anything they were able to control cost and increase booking. People come to them despite the increased price. Keep in mind also that they didn't have major layoff like other tech companies.
> They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct
They are more expensive than they were. So yes, the criticism is correct.
Price vs. competition is a red herring, we're discussing if the prices they initially had could be sustained in the long term while still generating a profit.
Turns out, they couldn't, hence why they were jacked way up
IIRC they got about 8B from the IPO? Still a long way to 32B.
Uber is not profitable until money out > money in, period (and we are forgiving them interest + inflation).
Even if a couple investors were able to flip the stock and made some money out of what seems to be a scam with extra steps, that still doesn't make Uber profitable, and they're still far from being a success, IMO.
Waymo and Uber have a partnership. Soon in Phoenix, when you call an Uber, you might get a waymo car.
We might see a three group market:
Waymo, Cruise, etc provide the driver. Uber, Lyft provide the platform. Hertz, Avis, Enterprise manage the physical cars/cleaning/etc.
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/05/waymo-and-uber-partner-to-bri...
At least in my country, the business is dead already.