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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't believe they can survive with human drivers (unit economics) and I personally don't believe they will catch up in engineering and technology of self driving cars, especially after this (but I never thought they would, too far behind from the start). So I would say maybe yes.

But there are probably ways out of this for them. They will probably chug along for at least a decade and in that time anything can happen.

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Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to operational profitability. Somewhere within 10-20%.

I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.

Uber is already doing pretty well with price segmentation in the US (the Uber Express POOL comes with a forced 2 minute wait); they can certainly:

- raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL - reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets

Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?

Taxis are usually a bit pricier and also don't subsidize a large team of software engineers at Silicon Valley salaries.

Here in NYC, the mortgage on a taxi medallion costs a lot more than the total salary of all Uber developers divided by the number of Uber drivers.

There are other costs that go into taxis that Ubers don't have. Taxis have back-office support staff too (the people you call up to order one to you).

Uber and Lyft are basically equivalent services in cities they both serve. A 15% price increase for one is enough to drive lots of people to just default to the other.

If there is a team with real software that Uber can acquire, they can catch up. GM and Waymo seemingly do not need another team. While they can outbid Uber, Uber can always close the deal by promising that the new team's software will be the new face of Uber self-driving and not shelved like it would be at GM or Waymo

Are there any teams out there besides GM and Waymo that were doing much better than Uber at this?

They can always buy their own autonomous vehicles. Or start incentives for drivers to own/lease them and drive with Uber, unless we get some laws that say you can't ride-share with an autonomous vehicle

They can probably survive with human drivers, they just won't survive with $100 bil valuation.

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