I thought fully autonomous cars are a decade away. I took cruise self driven taxis last week. It was incredible— flawless every time despite tough roads (sf hills) and low night time visibility. Tell me why I shouldn’t fire sale my garbage Uber stock
Drivers will do their rent seeking behavior. “But what about this one cherry picked accident” and regulate it to death so they can keep their 0 skill jobs
Cruise is only available in tiny geofenced areas and limited times of the day (mostly night when there is no traffic). The tech is nowhere close to scaling.
Those safe-critical products can't scale like metaverse. It's inherently slow and doesn't mean not possible
It’s doing a pretty incredible job on tough terrain (hilly sf) under poor visibility (nights). Sure it’ll take a while, but it’s arrived much sooner than expected
Uber is here to stay for a very long time, have faith in Dara.. cruise will take long time .
In what sense? Have you ridden their taxi?
Having just a self driving doesn’t cut it, it’s an entire process, from education to product selling, trust and safety.. uber is lot matured and operate in almost every country in the world( few exceptions) , once you scale out Cruise beyond San Francisco and actually operate it during peak hours , we can talk more, right now it’s like comparing apple and oranges.. they are different
The unit economics for self-driving cars does not work. The capex and opex are too high. I think it is inevitable that some day AVs will have significant market share but turns out a gig driver in a used Prius is pretty competitive. The other issue is network liquidity - need a huge fleet to have high availability during peak - see Capex/ opex comment above. I think hybrid networks with AV/ Gig will rule and Uber is well positioned for that.
Really? An Uber camry costs $50k/yr (incl driver pay). Over the lifetime of the car that’s $300-500k. Self driver cars will be more expensive? Agree re:network density and cost of scaling
You forgot about the cost to maintain av fleet. It could be extremely expensive once you have a large fleet. Every second something could be broken
I waved to a fucking auto driving zoox car for letting me walk (when I had the right of way). Looked up and realized what a dickhead I looked like.
Interesting prompt- I have a hard time forming a rationale for either, kind of stumped. Taking a step back- is the demand for transportation persistent and growing, also does the status quo/best alternative continue to suck? If I had a choice I’d take public transportation infrastructure buildout any day. But I guess this is irrelevant to your question 🤔
Self driving car is a technology. Taxi is one of the applications of this technology. To compete with Uber in US alone, Cruise will need to own (or get somehow) ~2M cars. That fleet would cost them close to $100B + maintenance costs; They could buy 2 Ubers for that money. And where would they keep all these cars? Operating a car for business in a city means dealing with many regulators and laws, which are different from city to city and ever changing. Finding ways of dealing with cities and bureaucracies is what Uber is (relatively) good at. It is a difficult business to operate, and tech is not the major factor. More likely model: Cruise and others will license their self-driving technology to car manufacturers. Some of the new driverless car owners will plug their cars into Uber platform. There will be a mix of both for a while. Riders will have an option to choose and will have abundant and lower priced supply. Because of lower prices, there will be fewer human drivers. Some (many) riders will still prefer human drivers for premium price, only nice and friendly human drivers will matter. Cruise, Uber and car owners will split the profit. Uber will become more profitable, because it would cost Uber less to loan a car from it's owner + pay a per ride fee to Cruise, compared to paying a human driver.
I don't know, you tell us. You are the one owning a Uber stock
What do I know, I’ve lost 30% on it