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Comment by JimmyM | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the amazing ease of use to the user - get a cab in just a couple of taps of the finger - is being backed not for its own sake, which appears to be of limited use to the average individual currently, but because the infrastructure behind it could easily and far more profitably be adapted to operate self-driving cars.

So I see it as a speculative sort of investment in self-driving cars as much as in these companies. To dominate the market when self-driving cars emerge, with their increased capacity and lower overheads, would be pretty sweet.

Apologies to cab drivers for describing you as 'overheads' and 'decreased capacity' within a single clause, I realise this sounds cold but this is how it will be seen within the companies.

Also, I've never personally used Uber - I don't earn enough to use cabs in general. If it's more complicated than I assumed to order a cab through it then my other assumptions are probably wrong too.

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I was and still am a big Uber sceptic and I still resent the idea of having to use them due to their business practises. However, on a trip through London which started with a taxi driver basically lying through his teeth that we hadn't been outside, and the tubes being utterly fucked, I thought I'd give it a go. It was amazing. I could see exactly where the damn cab was, the driver was professional and gave us water, the car was clean and comfortable, and the fair was predicted in advance. No bullshitting around trying to explain where you are over a shit phone line, no wondering where the hell the cab was or when it would turn up...it was absolutely fantastic, and it made me re-think things.

There are still issues I take with Uber:

- It could quickly become a monopoly if they are so hyper aggressive with competition (even for similar things like Lyft) which will mean they just become taxi cabs 2.0.

- They should have as or more stringent background checks for drivers, especially as they seem to want to subcontract to people who run their own pools of vehicles.

- It's going to be a tall order to keep consistency and quality high.

- If they become as successful as they want, I think they will have unfair leverage over drivers and based on their ethics I doubt they are pro union.

That said:

- Taxi companies have utterly failed to innovate or improve fucking anything for decades, and so I have zero sympathy for them. - The medallion system is ridiculous.

Has no one brought out off the shelf software so that all those features are available to traditional cab companies?

You need infrastructure and whatnot to get it to work. Could work as a service though.

But if they can fight Uber for legislation, why would they give a fuck?

Reading comments about Uber here and places with a more general audience, I think thee is still a large part of the market that would prefer a local service. When I asked back home about Uber, people had no idea what I was talking about and the females I explained it to thought it "sounded a bit dodgy".

Phoning a cab company via a dumbphone was only a few taps of a finger as well. It had been that way for years. The only problem was knowing the number.

For me I am also extremely anxious on the phone (albeit getting better), but this is a niche case.

I think knowing the number is possibly the complication that Uber solves? EDIT: I'm pretty uninformed about this whole world, as I use a dumbphone and never take a taxi so my guesses may be pretty wild here...

Anyway, I suppose that you could have a number that you call that automatically delivers a self-driving car to your location as determined by GPS/voice-recognition technology but I think people would rather use an app.

It's the potential of self-driving cars to make use of this sort of company's services that looks like it'll be profitable to me personally.

And having to explain where you are to people when often you don't know, and having no idea how much it will cost, and having no idea when it will actually arrive.

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