Any company that does shipping, Amazon, Walmart, truck driving companies, any company with large internal shipping, plus Uber/Lyft type companies.
Autonomy cuts out paying the driver, electrification cuts fuel costs. Uber/Lyfts future basically depends on figuring out the self driving problem, because their current structure wont work.
Ok. You don't need gas and the maintenance is still less than the part of the fare they are giving to the drivers. This shouldn't be difficult
I can see both sides of it. From a cost standpoint, it might make sense. But then they take on the insurance and maintenance. And they'll have cars sitting around doing nothing during down times. Right now they have a willing and able fleet when needed and no cost when it's not needed. They might prefer to just keep the status quo instead of becoming a true cab company with all of that overhead.
Insurance would be cheap because theres no way autonomous vehicles would be on the road if they weren't already safer than human drivers. Electric vehicles need less maintenance If you are an Uber or Lyft company the perfect car for them is an electric autonomous vehicle, it makes the most financial sense by far.
It's cheaper than gas. Uber lost 1.8b last year off 12b in revenue. Driverless Ubers is part of the long term growth forecast. You said Gas, electricity is cheaper than gas. You also said maintenance, which is also less on an electric vehicle. In 1 year, they'll pay back the car then outside electricity/maintenance it all goes to profit
An autonomous vehicle hurting or killing someone would be a multimillion $$ case for a plaintiff attorney. Juries don’t really hammer drivers for making a mistake unless they were texting or drunk or whatever An autonomous vehicle causing the same injuries would be 20x as valuable of a case
Yea I guarantee if autonomous vehicles hit the road, they will for sure have to be proven statistically safer than human drivers and everything else you just stated will be figured out by regulators.
Again, overhead is an issue. On a busy night here, say for a football game, there are hundreds of Ubers running. Tuesday morning at 6am, there might be 20. They'd have a lot of cars sitting around doing nothing a lot of the time. Perfect scenario for them is to have maybe 100 Uber owned cars in a city like Jax and then supplement at times of need with cars they dont own and pay the owner for usage. Like I said earlier, the beauty of Uber/Lyft now is they have almost no overhead. When people arent getting rides, they have zero cost going out. If they own 500 cars in Jax, that's not the case. They would have overhead sitting idle making no money. It's not as easy as just looking at profit per ride. Yes, that would be higher if they owned the car but downtime has to be factored in.
And if Uber did go to Uber owned cars for non-surge times, idk if the drivers that drive for them now would stick with them for surge times. I could see most saying "If you're going to replace me for 80% of the time, fuck you for that other 20%. I'll go drive for Lyft full-time." Then Uber is fucked. Tricky spot for them honestly. Maybe they just take the hit on surge times by not having as many cars on the road as they do now. But then how many customers stop using them if a car isnt available 100% of the time? It's definitely not as cut and dry as some of you think it is.
They aren't going to flip a switch and eliminate all drivers overnight, but it will surely be a gradual introduction into the driver base.
Right, but they risk pissing off their drivers by doing it. If someone takes a 50% paycut bc Uber owned cars start taking all the rides on a Thursday afternoon, that wont sit well with Uber drivers and they have other options. Like I said, I see where it makes sense on a per ride basis when the cars a running, but there's a lot more to it than that.
You know defects in cars have led to people being killed before, right? Yet car manufacturers still exist and companies still buy cars for fleet vehicles. This isn't some uncharted territory.
It's no different than Uber continuing to recruit drivers and adding them. Do you think Tesla has had a fixed driver base? Their revenue doubled from 17 to 18. It'll continue to do so and the cars will help with capacity
Dbl, you just average out the cost of the car vs paying the cost of drivers. The cost of paying the drivers for years is significantly more expensive than having cars, even if you had more to cover certain time periods. This article referencing the Wall Street journals numbers from Q2 2018 https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-money/ "In the second quarter, $8.2 billion of the $12 billion in bookings Uber pulled in went to drivers." 5Billion gets you 125,000 cars Uber still has overhead costs, marketing, people running the app development, etc
Bringing in new drivers to accommodate volume and replacing drivers with robo taxis are two different things. "Hey we're going to replace you with our own cars for 80% of the time but we'll call you when we cant handle the volume and you can come work then." wouldn't go across well. Someone else would just go the current Uber route and let Uber become a traditional taxi service.
No man, the volume isn't flat. There will still be fares for every current driver. As volume grows, they'll add cars vs new drivers. The new volume will be picked up with autonomous cars vs new Uber drivers. Again, 75% of their revenue goes to drivers. That was 9 Billion in one quarter.
Well yea of course they have overhead for marketing and the app, I was referring to fleet overhead. Uber is on record saying that have millions of drivers driving ever week. Obviously they arent full time 24/7 like a robo taxi could be. I guess that's the hard part, just how many cars would they need to own to keep their coverage the same as they have now? And how much of the fleet would sit idle for the majority of the time? Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't be profitable for them. Maybe it would be. I'm just saying it's a lot more complicated than "They dont have to pay the driver and electric is cheaper than gas!"
you guys almost done with your useless automated car discussion? that conversation will almost be worth having in another ten years. this was interesting: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q1v1qew51xrquwj/Morgan_Stanley_Tesla_Call_2019_05_22.pdf?dl=0 considering Morgan Stanley underwrote the raise 2.5 weeks ago
The tiny little tid bit of a problem with the driver-less Uber's is the condition of the vehicle. Have fun getting into a driverless Uber where the wasted user before you barfed everywhere.
Come on now, we both know that if they add their own cars, those cars will get assigned rides before Joe Driver. All Uber cars will have to be busy before Joe Driver gets assigned a ride. Thinking Joe Driver will be cool with that and be at their beckoning call when they need them is naive.
Do we know that?? Can you see the future and just assume they'll fuck over 99% of the drivers they need for the 1% of their new fleet?
Cliffs https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanoh...-distressed-credit-story-morgan-stanley-says/ The leaked comments come on the heels of a research note this week in which Jonas slashed his “worst-case” price for Tesla shares to just $10, which could be triggered by factors including missing estimated sales goals for China by as much as 50%. The stock plunged 6% in Nasdaq trading on Wednesday to $192.73, its lowest since December 2016. Tesla is down 42% this year. Vehicle sales “basically fell one-third sequentially from 4Q to 1Q ‘19, and if you annualize the 1Q results you get to around 250,000 units,” Jonas said. “That’s more than 100,000 units below the low end of the company’s 360,000 to 400,000 target for deliveries this year.” And while Tesla has said it’s targeting sales of between 90,000 and 100,000 units in the second quarter, the “whisper” number “seems to be in the in the 70,000s, maybe mid- to upper-70,000s,” he said.
Wait, you're arguing over 1% if the fleet? I assumed we were talking mass implementation, not 1% of the fleet. 1%
Yeah, I'm sorry you're stupid and can't follow conversations. They have about a +/-1mm drivers. They aren't going to immediately buy 250,000 cars for 10b and out them out on the road. They couldn't even buy that many EV cars at once It's going to be a gradual process. Where they'll probably introduce cars vs recruiting bonuses to attract new drivers. At most this thread has talked about an est 100k cars. That alone would take a ton of time to roll out
if my car drives itself, why am I getting an uber/lyft? there are certain markets, big cities, where it would work but every non-city person wouldn't really need an uber/lyft in this case