The self driving car idea won't help Uber or Lyft for two reasons. First, neither company has the tech experience to build one. Second, and more importantly, both companies would have to buy and maintain the cars which isn't financially viable.
Uber/Lyft both hope they can get to self driving cars before the drivers figure out the true cost after the car they provided to Uber for free is involved.
The problem is that self-driving cars will change car ownership needs, and that there could be entirely different companies in the space when it does finally come around.
It is unrealistic to expect that to be a moat-profitable income source for Uber, when you can rent that same SDC to Lyft -- or Tesla, for that matter [1] -- who will offer competitive terms.
[1] If they offer it for their own cars, they could probably extend the platform to allow outside cars, perhaps with different branding.
Is there any other market where random consumers are basically acting as financiers for a commercial fleet of equipment? What's the reason for the fleet operator to involve those customer-owners at all?
In terms of immediate cost, it will be cheaper as a customer just to use the ride sharing service yourself, since you won't have to pay car payments you'll just pay the rideshare fee. Especially if the self driving software gets priced in the $10,000+ range as Tesla has suggested it will end up.
So anyone in the "budget" category will just be buying rides not vehicles. They'll have to wait 5 minutes for a vehicle, and they won't get to have their vehicle of choice, but they also won't have to deal with the hassle of running a mini carshare business, whatever that will entail.
Most people in the "premium" category isn't going to want random drunk people fingerblasting each other in the back seat of their nice car, so that cuts out the top of the market.
That leaves what... people who want to save some money but also really want to own their own car, but also are comfortable sharing it with random people?
Seems like a weird segment. Why wouldn't the fleet operator just buy cars and own them? They're going to be burning through these vehicles every 5 years anyway, what's the point of parking them in a random owner-operator's garage and having them taking it out of the fleet when they feel like it?
[#] Except Hubert Horan who destroyed all their BS with his series, "Can Uber Ever Deliver?"
Edit: Dangit, I thought my reply got eaten, but I was looking at a different branch. See the rephrasing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19880565
Also: while the drivers have physically taken over maintenance, Uber can’t push the economic cost on to them, because they have to pay enough that drivers want to continue to work even given those costs. If anything, maintenance is cheaper when handled by a big org.
To the extent they realize a savings, it’s because they’re using the spare hours of existing vehicles and don’t have to take on all the dead ours they’d have from owning the cars not because they’re getting maintenance free in any meaningful sense.
They have the experience to distribute software to millions of devices on a regular basis and run a logistics platform and a consumer app.
That's something automakers will struggle to do.
Automakers can build cars.
That's something Über will struggle to do.
Seems like a fairly straightforward partnership to me. There are many automakers and most of them (anything vaguely in the budget category) will be struggling mightily if robotaxis ever work.
Mightily struggling automakers like to make deals where they get to make autos.
Uber can't afford to run a national taxi service at scale for the same reasons no one else has ever done so. The economics of a taxi fleet don't scale to that size. Owning their own autonomous vehicles would only further erode their non-existent business model.
> The economics of a [self driving] taxi fleet don't scale to that size.
I'd be interested in hearing your analysis! I haven't heard that one. Tesla claims these vehicles will pay themselves off within two to three years once they can operate fully autonomously.
Although I've often speculated if you could have had an Uber-like service in the 80s, where you register with your credit card on file, and then call a number with a location to get an estimate pickup, and then they page a driver to get you, perhaps with an authentication code.