Confession: I Don’t Think Uber Is Actually a Great Business (Yet)

Re:Confession: I Don’t Think Uber Is Actually a Great Busine... by Animats on Sunday December 11, 2016 @12:34AM (#13149760)

You have to park them somewhere, you have to fuel or charge them, you have to clean them, and you have to maintain them. That means infrastructure. Expensive infrastructure.

Self-driving cars as a service have all the problems of personal rapid transit except track cost. Personal rapid transit has never been very successful. There are at least four startups selling driverless PRT shuttles right now, and nobody has more than one demo installation. Still, shuttle buses ought to be driverless very soon.

(Olli, from Local Motors, is very cute.[1] It talks to its riders, and using IBM Watson, can advise on restaurants and points of interest.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9joEsWiYFEI

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Re:Confession: I Don’t Think Uber Is Actually a Great Busine... by skuhn on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:32PM (#13155071)

Well, you don't actually ever have to park them. They could run near constantly, or any schedule that makes the most return on investment. Self-driving cars, if taken to their logical extreme, result in total gridlock.

I do think that between Ford and Uber, Ford is much better equipped to handle maintenance of a giant fleet of cars. Uber has zero experience in this area, whereas Ford has a giant, distributed network of dealers. If cars are predominantly owned by the company rather than being sold to consumers, these dealers might be in a position to pivot towards fleet management rather than sales and service.

However, I don't think any of this will happen for the simple fact that self-driving cars are not as close as people currently think. Maybe trucks and buses, but even then I remain skeptical.

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