As you point out, drivers and riders can install multiple apps (and they often do, e.g. Lyft), but for a competitor to enter they'll likely need to jumpstart their network. Something which they'll likely have to do by subsidizing both drivers and riders. This means that whoever decides to take on Uber would probably need quite a big war chest themselves.
When Lyft launched here in NYC it was pretty dead, and they lost the initiative with the initial batch of riders. They've since rallied around driver recruiting and now the service is good. Everyone I know here has multiple ride hailing apps installed, and multiple services are competitive with Uber re: driver availability.
So yeah, it's not trivially easy to get into this game, but it's also not absurdly difficult - you need someone with deep pockets, but not that deep. This is especially true because Uber's network effect between markets is pretty minimal - people mostly take rides in their home market, so it's easy for upstarts to compete for a single market without the pressure to take themselves global immediately.
One structural weakness on Uber's part (and Lyft's, too) is that their commissions are still quite high (20-25%?) and this gives a lot of room for competition. Juno launched here successfully simply by undercutting the commission.
Additionally once Uber reached monopoly status and started raising prices, it would become more attractive to new entrants to enter the market. So even if Uber managed to beat all their competitors they still would have a price ceiling. All in all I think Uber provides a valuable service and can probably turn itself into a (very) profitable business, but I'm not convinced it will ever be the undisputed leader of all things transport that its current valuation seems to imply.
With the legal barriers in place, I was incredibly impressed with Austin's Ride Austin arrangement. Incentivizing drivers to keep more money in their pocket is going to be pretty damn compelling and unique legal environments encourage new entrants.
Uber has an incredible brand and has become the "google it" of ride sharing. That's very valuable and defensible but it risks becoming a colloquial "kleenex" for ride sharing.
The service will automatically hail from whichever service is the cheapest. Then pull an Amazon and expand into only the most profitable markets.
How many travel aggregator sites are there?
In comparison, a taxi ride might not even be the priciest purchase of the day.
All else being equal. A competitor boasting "hey, we're just like Uber, but with longer waits" probably won't get far. They could compete on
* lower price (fixed rate vs dynamic pricing, like Wingz)
* higher class of the vehicle
* support certain edge cases like kid-friendly service, bilingual service or women driver (hat tip Bojack Horseman Season 3 for that business idea)
There are more than 100 other countries out there with many cities in need of taxis.
You are also dismissing the fact that traditional cab companies are going out of business. My main counter argument against"there isn't innovation on uber anymore" would be simply pointing out what is happening to traditional players. I don't think they are coming back with the new rules of the market, any they were forced to leave this early because uber "bought" growth.
Economics are not in their favor. There's a reason taxi service is expensive. It's hard enough to provide cost-effective public transportation, much less private transport.
Once driverless cars hit the streets, then the calculus changes a bit. But that's when the competition will really begin. What's more likely is Google/Amazon will create (or acquire) a driving service broker that will automatically hail for you from whatever service will offer the ride cheapest (and probably won't even take a commission).
For less regulated cities, sure. For the more famous ones such as NYC and Boston, it's because there are a fixed number of permanent licenses owned by rent-seekers who lobby the city government to keep it that way.
http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2014...
They're cheap enough. They can increase prices by 10-20% and still be the best AND the cheapest taxi service in the universe.
What if there are no profitable "normal" capital investments left in the west, other than asset price bubbling?
My recolection is hazy, so I might be totally wrong.
Can someone build up on this?
(The railway mania wikipedia page even blames low interest rates for it! Personally I'm of the opinion that the government can set its bond coupons to whatever it likes and investors are not owed a minimum return, but there we go)
Edit: since the original comment was quite popular, I'll make some forward-looking statements: there is likewise a lot of investment which needs to be done in order to decarbonise, has major social benefits, but will not necessarily be profitable in the market. Even the highly distorted market that is energy. It may turn out that substantial negative interest rates are needed to finance the transition.
Built a half Billion dollar express railway line from airport to downtown, funded 100% by taxpayers, and no one was riding it because the fares were too expensive. Had to lower fares and now it's bleeding money (but people are riding it).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/metrolinx-to-sla...
It's not about opinions but cause and effect.
Do you have evidence that someone forgot or ignored this issue? Quotes from a particular central banker, for example? I don't think this part informs the conversation.
The question you raise, while maybe novel to some of us on HN, has been long discussed and examined in economics. There are indicators of over-investment and under-investment, and trade-offs to different central bank financial tools.
Finally, because a central bank tool increases investment, that doesn't mean the level of investment becomes too high; it could have been too low before. It's like watering a plant; it might help or depending on its prior condition the same action might over-water or under-water it. One sign there is under-investment, as I understand it, is that extremely low/negative interest rates are not stimulating inflation. This suggests plenty of under-utilized capacity.
I've read speeches by central bankers. They almost never think in terms of high or low quality investments. Instead they only see the negative impact of easy money through the lens of inflation, but this is a problem because the inflation statistics they monitor don't include the prices they're impacting, hence the "mystery" of low interest rates coupled with low inflation. The inflation exists, it's just inflation in the cost of equities, houses, the cost of yield or other things that aren't consumer goods.
How do you explain things like the .com boom when interest rates were "normal"? Uber has raised a lot of money, but it's a drop in the bucket in the world of global finance (and a very small drop at that!).
It's not just Uber of course. There is tons of money flooding into questionable tech startups with no end in sight. In 2014 bitcoin companies alone had received more investment money than the whole internet did in 1996. It's an industry wide phenomenon.
The total amount of VC money invested in the US in 2015 was $58.8b [1]. That is less than the operating income of Apple. It is a lot of money in some respects, but the potential rewards are also huge (look at Apple!). I think the huge valuations have more to do with the huge potential for global businesses than whatever Yellen is doing with interest rates.
The internet was a completely different place in 1996, I don't think any fair comparison can be made regarding investment. Something like a billion daily active users and the cash that can generate wasn't a possibility. The whole internet advertising business in 1996 was estimated at $267m [2] which is less than Google now brings in PER DAY (~$283m).
[1] http://nvca.org/pressreleases/58-8-billion-in-venture-capita...
[2] https://www.iab.com/news/internet-advertising-bureau-announc...
The answer is always going to be some variation of "the goshdurned gubmint". Maybe interest rates, maybe someone read Greenspan's tea leaves which he deliberately left sitting out to cause "malinvestment", maybe something else entirely.
Uber could just as easily be an example of what happens when the weather is nice and we grow a surplus of food and food prices fall and therefore people spend their remaining capital on bad investments like Uber.
All else isn't equal because it's not a free market. You can't just say "Oh, Uber looks good, I think I'll invest in them." It's not even rivalrous, it's simply private.
So, cheap investor money has to find an outlet some other way.
The US used to have a highly regulated airline industry. The Civil Aeronautics Board decided who could fly where. Then came airline deregulation. Suddenly there were lots of new airlines, most of which went bust. Now we have fewer airlines than before deregulation, worse service, and constantly changing fares. On the aircraft side, airlines are buying new copies of the antiquated Boeing 737, because it's cheap. The B-757 and B-767 are being phased out in favor of the old, narrow 737.
> Building a real time ridesharing engine is not hard - I did it once
So the VC's might lose money. But if the central bank is aiming for a bigger picture, Uber and Lyft have been great improvements on the market/society/efficiency overall. A car picks me up in 1-2 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes a taxi used to take. And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels, now you have the majority of Uber cars carrying at least 1 customer (sometimes 2 or 3 with UberPool/Lyft Line) most of the time.
The rest of the world, not so much.
All that's really happened is that Uber side stepped some of your shitty laws. The efficiency gains, etc is all bullshit, not much has changed here in the UK apart from now you can use an app rather than a phone call. They turn up a minute or two quicker, wow. Uber are subsidising our rides a bit at the moment so it's like 20% cheaper for now. I hear prices go up after a year or two.
As for taxis during peak time, rich people can now pay more for priority pickups with surge pricing. That's not a plus for society, it's a plus for rich people.
Maybe in the sense of economic contributions, but this is far from clear for contribution defined in a general sense.
There's also the basic observation that many big companies that provide valuable products and services pay rich people lots of money to run them or compensate them for their financial help. Would there be an Uber at all without anyone getting rich off it?
Another observation - when we need a doctor or a lawyer, we find their contributions to us to be worth so much we'll pay them more than we pay a cleaner. After all, we could do the cleaning ourselves if we had to but the barrier to start operating on ourselves or writing our own contracts is higher and those rich people have invested work in overcoming that barrier so they could provide those services to people who can't.
To your second point, there is evidence that CEO performance is negatively related to their pay: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085. Measuring competence is difficult, wealth is a appealing proxy but maybe not that reliable.
The only reason I don't use taxis is because I love paying $1-5 to commute across DC in an Uber/Lyft.
The Phoenix metro area is quite spread out. Even so, I averaged about 7 minutes to my passengers' pickup location. This included the time it took to enter the address into my phone's navigation software. Sometimes I'd arrive seconds after the passenger hung up the phone with our dispatchers.
The taxi company's latest version of its dispatching software has all the latest features, but these were not available in 2004 or in 2008, when the old computer hardware was deployed.
To see a video of how a 2008-era electronic taxi dispatching system worked, see "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0": http://www.taxiwars.org/p/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.html
> And it actually comes - taxis in SF have always been unreliable.
The cab company I drove for wasn't the cheapest company in town, but we had a reputation for being reliable. The other big companies were okay too, if you weren't in an outlying area. One time a passenger told me how he'd called a random company in the phone book. They said he was too far out of that small cab company's usual area, and to just call the company I drove for.
> And instead of most cabs driving around aimlessly empty half the time burning fossil fuels,
Where does this idea come from? The only times I was empty was in slow period during the middle of the night.
The cab company I drove for bought its first Prius in 2004. Sometime in 2013 or 2014 they retired the rest of the Crown Victorias (old police cruisers), switching the fleet to a 70/30 blend of Priuses and Minivans.
The fleet was very well maintained. The vehicles were cleaned regularly, and repaired as needed. An extensive rejeuvination was performed at mid-life, which is around 200,000 miles. The cabs were looked at very carefully at 400,000 miles - most of them were sent to the boneyard at this point. The owner-operator I drove for took very good care of her cab - it probably made it to 500,000 miles, which is the state-mandated retirement age for taxis. Replacing the battery pack twice, fixing a head gasket, and replacing the original engine with a recycled engine was cheaper than buying a new cab.
The upstarts' unfortunate drivers don't have access to economies of scale for taking care of their vehicles.
Throwing cars away at 200,000 miles [1] is much more "carbon-intensive" than maintaining them for 400,000+ miles.
[1] http://business.time.com/2012/03/20/what-you-only-have-100k-...
1. Long wait times for adhoc pickup requests.
2. Taking questionable / long routes to things.
3. Making it difficult to pay with a credit card and expecting a tip no matter what.
4. No real recourse against bad drivers. Have a complaint? Who cares!
Cabs were pretty much unusable in Seattle compared to Uber. And, they certainly weren't fresh clean cars with likeable drivers.
Into the pockets of drivers (although a portion of that comes from the pockets of existing taxi firms in opportunity cost and financing repayment).
So as a stimulant for the economy it is working. It is even trickle down economics in action !
It should also make incumbent taxi oligopolies up their game, so the customers ultimately win.
There will be losers. But that is the nature of the game.
Is Uber such a case? Maybe if it ends up with a long term, world wide monopoly on self driving taxi networks. But right now it's ultimately just a taxi firm that's burning vast sums of money giving people cheap rides. It's literally just throwing pensions and university donations onto the street without any plan for how to get that money back.
Adding to this, food delivery startups are another great example of this. I call them "VC subsidized lunches." Me and my friends installed half a dozen apps, each of which have given anywhere from $25 - $500 (!) in promotions, i.e. free lunches.
The irony was having actual lunch with investors in which they didn't pick up the tab...
For many kinds of spending, the future and the present aren't in competition. Keeping cars and people idle today won't result in more cars and labor available tomorrow.
If Uber weren't around, maybe the people writing software and driving cars could be doing something more useful. But that's competition between two different investments in the present, not between the future and the present.
If anything, low interest rates encourage people to speculate on bets that might pay off later rather than on surer bets that will pay off sooner. So that's the (possibly mythical) future competing with the (actual) present.
But what if those investments don't work out? Then you have no savings and won't be able to spend money in the future.
Being able to save money for the long term is fundamental in a society that has long lifespans. Unfortunately government policy is to essentially forbid saving, because forcing people to "invest" their savings pumps employment and GDP stats, which is largely how their success is measured.
The answer seems to be that many people feel Uber is a decent investment compared to alternatives. If Uber ended up owning some share of self-driving transportation that choice might look prescient or at least not so hard to understand. Something analogous has happened at Amazon, where an unrelated business--AWS--now seems to be driving profitability
Yes, but I'm not convinced they think this for sensible reasons. People follow a herd mentality, and invest in Uber simply because others are doing so - if that many people are doing it, it must be a sure thing, right?
Some ride sharing companies offer bonuses to drivers based on number of rides now. For example, 50 rides in a week $250 bonus at the end of that week. Using multiple apps interferes with a driver's ability to get the bonus. Many drivers use multiple apps anyways, maybe don't drive enough to get the bonus anyways, etc... but the dominant companies do have tools at their disposal to help mitigate the risk of newcomers quickly taking over a market.
Uber's size is only a benefit for drawing in tourists from other cities, each market is a separate battleground and you only need to beat Uber in your local market. And what prevents some city from setting up its own government sanctioned/required ride sharing market & app.
That's essentially what taxis are and they are (in the US at least) almost universally awful.
What? Uber is just a black hole? What about the driver? Who received most of that money for their services? That driver can now use that money to invest in the way they wish.
No, obviously zigzigzag was describing the perspective of the investors. The implication is that their return on investment is lower than the investment, i.e. their money is "lost forever".
Uber will be one of the first companies to a $1T valuation. (First two will be Facebook and Apple).
Here's why. Uber isn't about ride-sharing, at all. Uber is about rewriting your idea of needing a car. The market they're going after is literally automotive industry.
So right now, they're burning money hand over fist, but they don't /need/ to be doing that. It's a strategic choice, to drown their competitors (see Amazon, that's exactly what they do by tapping good sources of financing in the past). Uber will continue to do so until it is not viable to compete with them.
The only companies that will be able to compete is one with infrastructre and rivers of gold. Google. Google owns all the data of Ubers (maps), and they've got everyone on their own maps, they've got hundreds of millions of users that are tied into a google profile in some capacity (gmail/youtube/etc...) and a lot with linked credit cards. This makes for the biggest threat to Uber. Google can afford to lose, and Uber not buying Lyft is going to be the only potential down fall of the company. If Google buys them (which I don't think they will) then that is the headshot on Uber unfortunately.
Back to my point, basically Uber is going to burn and burn while capital is cheap, and force other players out. Makes sense. They can stop subsidizing their rides for users once they've bullied out the others, and there we end up with decently priced normal rides (Which is still ridiculously better in price and experience than a taxi). But by the time this happens (3 years-ish) Autonomous vehicles will be making their ways into cities at much more capacity. This will reduce their costs significantly, and all these price points they have which they have to pay for, will pay for itself by autonomous tech (instead of just forking out their own money to make our rides $5, the lack of labor because of the autonomous vehicles will force the COGS down essentially).
People will have a huge uproar at Uber for creating and then cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs (the drivers) - But their service and value add of an autonomous driving network will wash away everyones humanity side because it's just "too good". Leaving them in the tallest tower in the city with a penthouse office and a cat sitting on Travis' lap while he looks out the window down onto his autonomous city laughing in an evil tone.
$1T company, without fail.
RE Groupon: Groupon as compared to in the article is a different situation. Groupon had minimal barriers to entry and is only a sales machine. People, people, people, and more people were needed in order to bring in the next deal, the next bargain, etc... Uber is absolutely incomparable as they have an innovation in technology, financial defensibility, and humungous footprint of recurring revenue. Groupon had none of those so I feel the article writer putting that out there doesn't seem like a just example. The only thing they have in common is that they're losing money.
If/when self-driving cars are a thing, why does anyone need uber? GM/Ford/Toyota/whomever all make their own cars and will presumably make the cars of tomorrow. If not, Tesla would be a solid bet. Again, all companies that MAKE cars. Apple & Google are probably betting on their technology being better and licensing it to manufacturers. Why would Uber have a better shot at any of this than the other players? They have a slick app and have successfully found a grey area where they push most liability and upkeep costs onto their not-employees. In some markets, by some measure, maybe they're profitable.
Now what? To get to $1T is either going to take a monumental shift in everything they've accomplished, or it's going to take some silly investors (or financial tricks). I'd say it's much more likely that in 15 years we look back at Uber as something closer to WebVan than they get a $1T market cap.
Tesla - Doesn't make nearly enough cars to even be considered in the same spectrum of any other of the players. Autonomous, great. Ride sharing/micro-logistics infrastructure? Not enough strength unfortunately.
GM/Ford/Toyota - Great, they've got cars, let's say those cars are autonomous. Now what about the logistics management that they've got zero experience in? Uber has serviced millions of rides and learned and learned from that. The tech is not enough, the experience/data is what counts imo.
Any company looking to just "jump in" because they've got money and a car, is going to get vaporized, unless they've got data and resources (Google being the only one that fits this mould imo).
Just how Facebook and Google got vaporized in the "daily deal" market. They had more access to the businesses, and more access to consumers than the daily deal sites ever could. Yet they struggled to find any kind of market share. Another example is Google Shopping.
Resources aren't the only thing needed, experience and processes. Which is why I say that Google is a threat, but if they're buying out Lyft. Otherwise, Google will potentially compete, but more than likely cater to a different segment than what Uber does.
Time will tell I suppose :) Definitely see what you're saying, but I just don't think you're focusing on the most valuable pieces of Ubers business.
Either way, we're very fortunate to even be in a position to discuss such cool stuff! Exciting for sure :)
> That forces institutional investors to pour their money into risky investments like venture capital firms.
Are there statistics about this? Is this really the case? What is the percentage of VC compared to the rest? I only have a vague feeling that VC is tiny compared to private equitiy and even tinier compared to Wallstreet.
> their money ends up subsidising a 10 minute taxi ride and being lost forever
That actually seems like a good thing. People with capital subsidising basic services for the general population. Wealth generally has the tendency to move in the other direction.
People with capital subsidising basic services is not a good thing because pensions are so widespread - the subsidy is essentially coming from the same people taking the ride in the first place, just via an incredibly high overhead and roundabout trip!
It makes a very convincing argument that VC is a bad investment vehicle for pensions, but I can't draw the line from this article to pensions are subsidizing basic services.
Certainly with Uber, it's largely Saudi Arabia right now that's subsidizing riders. That is a very circuitous path for the Saudis to benefit or enrich their subjects, but everyone else in the uber world is benefiting.
It's actually fundamental to Portfolio management theory. [0]
> That actually seems like a good thing.
Maybe, I don't know. Uber engages in some aggressively competitive business practices, it's possible that because of their investor subsidies they've been able to undermine a number more possibly sustainable new business models around ride sharing. It's impossible to bootstrap in a market where Uber's a competitor.
There are enormous costs to acquire customers and to enter new cities. The technical ease has nothing to do with the enormous soft costs.
Uber is a bad investment to you - but a good investment to others. If in the end they successfully become one of the first firms to have a self-driving fleet, then they'll likely be able to make a tremendous return on their investment.
And maybe they won't, maybe they'll fold before then. But saying that this was all the fault of Fed policy is nonsense.
Why? Everyone's building self-driving cars these days, if they have an advantage its not going to hold up for long. Then the car producers can simply do the same via their existing ride-sharing networks (car2go, DriveNow).
I'm also not sure how relevant it is, but Uber has been successful in branding. It's not, "I'm going to ride share to the airport", it's usually, "I'm going to Uber to the airport."
But in the end - I have no idea :). It'll be interesting to see what happens!
Uber and Lyft have erected barriers by structuring their pay system so that drivers are much better compensated if they do a large number of rides for them. This effectively erects a barrier to entry, because newcomers cannot get drivers as easily.
Uber's strategy will only work if those drivers, on average, are worse than the ones making many rides.
This is not true. There are big network effects when you consider products like UberPOOL. A new app would burn through a lot of cash to subsidize rates below the rates Uber can offer profitably through pooling.
Substitute the word 'stimulate' with the word 'influence' but this is actually the job of a central bank.
According to the California DMV, after a record high number 215000 DUI arrests in 2008, the number of DUI arrests has decreased year after year. Uber and a lot of the other ride sharing apps started in about 2009. In 2013, the latest year for which I could find data on, the number of arrests had plummeted to 160000. While this information may not be all that pertinent to VC investors, it certainly has benefits for the general public. Here is a link to the data (pg5):
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/77b8b0e3-c20b-42b0...
With the options provided by the sudden ubiquity of ride-sharing apps paired with a surge of investment in public transportation has led to some residents of Los Angeles forgoing car ownership. This is a massive shift in consciousness for a city derided for and held up as the model of urban sprawl. I've even started using a combination of biking, ride-sharing, and public transportation for commuting to work/play.
From a more personal standpoint, I can not be happier to see the death of the taxi industry. Taxi drivers would routinely give me one look and pass me by even after calling ahead because of the color of my skin. The taxi industry in Los Angeles is largely dominated by recent Armenian immigrants who most likely are not that familiar with the different cultures here in SoCal. One driver who was a bit more enlightened told me that in their taxi training class they explicitly are told to avoid picking up black passengers if possible. In fact, it got so bad, that police launched a sting and the LA city council passed new laws to target discrimination: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lax-taxis-race...
Uber's bust this year is so spectacular because they pulled out in China because they went up against and lost to a consortium that included Alibaba, George Soros, GM, and a number of other interests who were scared shitless that if Uber won, they would dominate not only ride-sharing, but transportation in general...globally. That is Uber's ultimate aim. Yes, they lost a couple billion. But it was worth doing because if they were successful, they'd be the dominant global player. In the end, they lost to a more innovative company in Didi Xiang (I believe they were mixing dating with ridesharing among other features).
The dot-com bust was only a bust if you take a personal, myopic, short-term view. While a lot of people may have lost their shirts, that money didn't vanish into a black hole. The investment in infrastructure is responsible for the Internet as we know it today. It's not perfect, but it's pretty much at the level of a William Gibson novel. Honestly, I am hoping they turn car ownership into an expensive luxury option. I can finally enjoy driving in the California sunshine without any ill-suited and undertrained drivers on the road.
How was the driver side solved? SMS?
Both driver and rider logged onto the shared website. It was more like uberPOP, the intention was people registered drives they were planning to make anyway like regular commutes and then you got a kind of fuzzy geo-specific chatroom thing where you could see other riders who were interested in sharing line up. It also calculated the distance the first driver would have to go out of their way to pick you up and did some optimisation around that, and it calculated fuel costs. The idea was to let people split the fuel bills. Back then I was worried about peak oil.
The same force that keeps people searching with Google instead of Bing keeps people hailing rides with Uber instead of Lyft.
Would you still use Uber if competition was 30% cheaper? Most people outside the 5% trade off time or convenience for conserving cash.
We'll see how strong "user preference" is when Uber can no longer afford to subsidize the living hell out of every ride, but the next little service with a strong VC backing is just getting started doing so.
Uber's saving grace, if it will ever get one, will be autonomous vehicles. First the technology has to get good enough, then the law has to catch up. All while Uber is just dumping cash to fend off the aforementioned dozens of clones by artificially deflating their prices?
My bet is that they'll run out of time/money.
Uber is a bad investment. There is no barrier to entry in ride sharing. Drivers can install multiple hailing apps. Riders can too. Building a real time ridesharing engine is not hard - I did it once as a prototype years ago but it was unfortunately in the pre-smartphone era and you had to find ride matches using your regular computer.
So central banks print money in order to buy up safe investments. That forces institutional investors to pour their money into risky investments like venture capital firms. VC firms look around at a field with slim pickings but that torrent of money has to go somewhere, so it ends up being used to fight vast unsustainable price wars. And in the end people's savings that they will depend on in retirement don't end up invested in productive assets that'll yield ROI into the future .... their money ends up subsidising a 10 minute taxi ride and being lost forever.
The people who run Uber may feel that they 'have' to do this otherwise their competitors would do so instead, but that just reinforces how hopeless the situation is: they know perfectly well that their main competitive advantage is illusory, or at best, is merely a result of better access to capital flows. All it'll take is a sustained set of interest rate hikes and the end of QE, and suddenly Uber will have to charge the real underlying market rates. How will it end?