How will autonomous vehicles affect delivery stocks and when?
Hi all, I'm wondering how autonomous vehicles will affect the valuation of the various different delivery apps. It seems like self-driving cars are here - on any given day there are new youtube videos of tesla FSD driving tests without the vehicle disengaging. I'm not saying autonomous vehicles will be commonplace within the next couple of years, but I wonder how this would increase valuations of stock such as $GRUB? If you can book driverless delivery cheaply and across large physical distances, this would increase the demand for the product and decrease expenses. Am I missing anything? #grubhub #doordash #ubereats
Not in the next 5 years ..
It depends on what's driving the valuation of these stocks. Personally, I see it as a business with three components: the app and user habits (users have the app installed and open grub dash when they're hungry), restaurant logistics (user orders are sent to restaurants and fulfilled), and delivery logistics (driver goes to the restaurant and delivers to the customer). Autonomous vehicles would only affect the last aspect of their business, assuming they partner with a company that allows them to fulfill their orders using an autonomous vehicle fleet. Whether or not autonomous vehicle companies will expand to completely take over these food delivery companies remains to be seen. Uber has tried expanding to be a food delivery company from being a TNC but I don't think they're doing to well on that front. Tldr: in the long term, nobody really knows
This is what I am wondering about. Assuming AVs become feasible for most deliveries, do these apps have intrinsic customer loyalty? I would imagine it would be hard for a competitor to supplant these apps in a world with AVs because both restaurants and the customers would need to switch to the new app. I doubt there would be enough incentive for that.
It really depends on cost. The value proposition by the delivery apps is that you pay more (let's say $10 per delivery with fees and tip) for convenience. Would more people use delivery apps if the surcharge for delivery would be half or even less of that? Or maybe chain restaurants would have their own AV delivery (IIRC Domino's is doing a pilot of that in Texas) and forego apps altogether.
Self-driving cars are 50 years away or more. To incorporate them into our broken infrastructure would take a coordinated effort on a massive scale. Our government is gridlocked at every level by “us vs them” mentalities and can’t even agree on simple policies, not to mention the shortfalls of self-driving tech. So it’s not going to happen until maybe the end of your lifetime so I wouldn’t go big on any bets in this industry.
Uber did invest into self driving tech. Are you making these assumptions from having worked/affiliated with this work or more hypothesis? PS: trying to understand your judgement
Self driving cars ain’t close Self driving cars don’t bring food into building or even next to the door from the sidewalk Doordash and prob all other delivery companies work on many solution around automation and robotics including driving (search doordash robotics) Once those would be available if anything ride hailing would be more affected but even then… and regulations … Yeah , not that worried any time soon
Self driving cars are nowhere here. Tech over promised and under delivered. Between self driving and ai-neurosurgeon is a leap order of magnitude smaller than between now and self driving cars.