That's Tesla's plan and the reason why they want to forbid to use their full self-driving system for providing rides to third party taxi services.
The same thing that largely keeps them from operating dealers (yes, now there are laws and contracts, but it was the manufacturers who wanted dealers in the first place) and rental car companies. Although there are legal impediments, companies often want to focus on a specific part of the value chain rather than having to own the whole thing.
Car2Go is a subsidiary of Daimler, though. And I suppose that being able to produce a large number of cars (all identical models and setups, all the same colour etc.) is something that an automotive company can easily leverage.
Silvercar was recently acquired by Audi, so that's an example of a auto manufacturer running an car rental business.
That's why I said largely. I think one or more of the US manufacturers may have investments in rental car companies as well. But I'll still argue the basic point; companies often don't want to own the whole chain. (Auto manufacturers also use a lot of upstream suppliers as well rather than designing and building many of their components.)
All auto manufacturers have stakes to ride hailing apps if not outright owning one or more of them.
Re:Can Uber ever make money?
by kickopotomus on Friday April 26, 2019 @04:38PM
(#19761537)
As a sibling comment noted, that is Telsa's plan. I believe GM is wanting to do something similar with Cruise.
However, I feel that both of those companies are still way behind Waymo in terms of R&D. Personally, I think that Waymo is the one to watch. If they get their first, they already have the ride hailing infrastructure/user network in place (Google Maps) and may even license the tech out to auto manufacturers.
Regardless of who is standing in a few years, as a customer I will choose to ride in a Tesla whenever possible for a few reasons. 1) safety 2) fun 3) support the transition to sustainable transport 4) if FSD is part of the equation by then I think Tesla is going to have the best implementation, based on their overwhelmingly massive lead in real data.
Vertical integration like this is generally considered bad in business. Sure it is possible, but it is better for car companies to work on making a better car than split their attention and risk not paying enough attention to either...
* They have industrial facilities to build cars
* They have dealership networks to repair cars
* They have capital or can borrow easily to do it
I can even argue that all that stops car manufacturers from operating this are government regulations -- taxi medallions as well as anti-monopoly laws. Once Uber, lyft and the like undercut those regulations, someone else can undercut them.