I think Uber is great, but I don't think it's cutting out a middleman. It's just replacing one middleman with another, albeit a more efficient one.

Uber is the stepping stone to self driving cars. Their valuation will drop when investors realize that anyone can purchase a self-driving car with financing. There is an ocean of mobility demand out there, and its naive to think its going to be captured by Uber because someone installed the Uber app first.

> anyone can purchase a self-driving car with financing.

To assert this as obvious strikes me as a bit ridiculous. Let's think through one facet of what happens once services like Uber, Car2Go, Lyft, etc. have self-driving cars. Those living in urban areas would then have a very viable option to avoid ownership, maintenance, storage, parking, etc. for what's commonly cited as the second most costly (and massively depreciating) asset they own after a home. It would allow a practical shift for many people from car ownership to car sharing. The cultural transition won't happen overnight, especially in the US where car ownership is practically a rite of passage. Yet I suspect that the economics will eventually be so favorable that once the business and technology pieces are in place, the transition will happen for a large percentage of the population no matter what.

In this light, Uber is one of several companies positioned for a massive transition of transportation from a product-oriented business to a service-oriented one. We'll see how it all plays out.

You misunderstand me. Anyone, not just consumers, but businesses as well, could buy self-driving vehicles.

Uber is simply an app with supply/demand machine learning, an army of drivers who are becoming more irate by how they're being treated, and community managers. What would it cost to reproduce Uber's app and backend? $500K? $1 million?

What happens if cities simply say, "You're out Uber" and buy their own self-driving cars for their citizens? Is Uber going to build their own roads?

Ah, understood. Fair point and one which I also touched on in mentioning other competitors for this space. I think this is especially true for Car2Go, which isn't conventionally seen as an Uber competitor, but which is perhaps better positioned to take advantage of self-driving vehicles because they already maintain fleets of custom vehicles and all that goes with that. I could definitely see some urban transit systems deciding to incorporate self-driving vehicles of varying capacities. That's an interesting angle.

So I well agree that Uber's technology, for which there are already multiple equivalents, isn't important. The contest will be entirely about business models and execution. IMO, that can be a lot harder to predict, at least without considerably more depth than I currently have on the players in this market.

I don't think cities are going to be buying self-driving cars like this. What happens when citizens want to leave the city? Or the state? Or country? It makes more sense for a corporation to provide this service.

By and large, people seem to love Uber. If they fall out of favor, I think it would be more natural for competitors to put pressure on them to improve (or supplant them), not city governments.

> What happens when citizens want to leave the city? Or the state? Or country?

They use the public transit available to them where they move to? Why would self-driving vehicles not be like the postal service, a business but also an essential service?

Just because I left Chicago doesn't mean I get to take the Metra and the CTA with me.

> Their valuation will drop when investors realize that anyone can purchase a self-driving car with financing.

While personal purchase of self-driving cars will be a thing, one big value proposition of self-driving cars is a drives down the relative cost of cars-for-hire compared to personally-owned-vehicles because you no longer need an operator in the vehicle whenever it is available for use (which means that the per-trip fee no longer needs to be enough to pay not only for the maintenance on the car and the operator's time on the trip, but also the operator's down time "on call" to be ready for the next trip.)

Uber might not win the space, but I think its naive to think that self-driving cars don't shift the balance more in favor of for-hire cars.

> Uber might not win the space, but I think its naive to think that self-driving cars don't shift the balance more in favor of for-hire cars.

I completely agree. For-hire self-driving vehicles are the future, I just don't believe Uber and Lyft are going to be the platform.

Off-topic: Whenever I see analysts argue that Tesla isn't making cars fast enough to compete with Big automakers, I chuckle. Elon doesn't have to replace every car, he just has to replace the door to door trips, which he can do with only ~10-15% of the current US vehicle fleet on the road. Self-driving Tesla vehicles for hire would further fund Tesla expansions (which provides additional capital for their Gigafactory to drive down battery storage costs, thereby enabling the wide-spread transition to intermittent renewables such as solar, wind, and tidal).

Zip cars had no operator overhead and had convenient downtown and other high demand locations where parking is expensive, but in the end they wound up not really impacting overall personal car ownership, and the company was absorbed by Avis. It's not clear that driverless cars represent a huge threat to auto sales to consumers. American homes are filled with personal possessions which they don't actually need to own. Like home entertainment systems which largely make shared venues like movie theaters less of a draw.

One reason to take a cab, or uber, or a train to the airport or downtown is the time and expense of parking. But if my car can just park itself at a low cost remote structure, go home, or say earn a few bucks taking a fare, and come back for me, then it's less of a hassle to drive to the city. I don't have to worry as much about being too tired to drive longer distances, I could just snooze or read a book. I'd probably be more likely to let my car drive me to LA overnight, and perhaps take fewer flights and consequently rent fewer cars. I could send my car to pick up food or packages or friends. Overall, it seems like my car is more useful to me, not less, if it can drive itself. If I can hire it out when I'm not using it, it might make it more affordable to own, as well. I doubt most people would rent out their own car with any regularity, unless they had to, any more than they want a bunch of strangers sitting on their furniture and messing with their stuff.

Uber has very little to do with the auto industry. If anything they're in the taxi business.

For now. But if self-driving taxis become sufficiently cheap and popular, they'll have a huge impact on the auto business.

Or, less far off in the future, will the rise of paid ridesharing change how cars are designed? Perhaps they could be more businesslike in the back where the passenger sits, and more sparse in the front.

(I just realized I effectively described the car version of a mullet.)

Which is only tangentially related to Uber, unless you're confusing change now with "wouldn't it be nice if we can make self driving cars reliable sometime in the future".

erm, Uber is a middle man taxi company.

How are taxi companies a middle man in the auto industry? Is uber suddenly using bicycles or some other non auto conveyance to transport people around? Even in the taxi industry, uber is not cutting out a middle man, they are becoming one.