I don't think "For sure, turn down spending and turn up the prices" is something that the people arguing "Uber can never be profitable" would agree with. They're arguing that this can't work, and therefore Uber is destined to go out of business once the investment billions dry up. I'm just asking why that is so, given that the taxi market is a thing, and that a lot of people like Uber better than taxis.
But then if we're admitting that Uber's unlikely to be profitable over its lifetime, why would anyone buy their stock?
That's really what people care about in these discussions. Its not "Will Uber be profitable this quarter?", its... "should I buy Uber stock?".
The last guy lost money on Uber stock and is trying to offload these shares / certificates onto someone else now. Will buying those shares at this current price (aka: very expensive: $81 Billion market cap) be worthwhile?
You can buy many other companies at much cheaper prices than that.
It's definitely not what I care about. I'm just a user, not an investor. What I care about is whether I'll still be able to use the service in the long run, albeit at higher prices.
Also, if that's what people making these arguments really care about, then I think it's misleading for them to be arguing that Uber can never be profitable and is destined to go out of business. That is not the same thing as being a poor stock market buy at current valuations, whether the latest round of investors will lose money, and so on.
The blogpost is pretty clear to be coming in from an angle of "stockholders" perspective.
> Uber didn't need self-driving cars – it needed us to think it would have self-driving cars. That way the company's Saudi owners could raise investment capital from subsequent "investors" (AKA "suckers") all the way up to the IPO, cash out, and walk away, whistling innocently.
> That's the bezzle at work – a dazzle op that keeps new money flowing in, convincing people that a pile of shit this big must have a pony beneath it. But as the years went by, the stories that Uber told us about its path to profitability got more and more fanciful.
The big gist of this entire blog post is "Hey Stockholders, I think you've been swindled by Uber's CEO". That's the thesis in a nutshell.
If you don't care about the stockholder perspective, that's fine and dandy. I'm not saying you should care. (I'm not a shareholder, so I certainly don't care very much). But... as someone who does participate in the stock market, I still find these stories fascinating. I probably will be buying stocks in the near future, so I do want to know about all of this drama going on in different companies.
And probably doesn't look a lot better than taxis for many people any longer.
And for not on demand and not price sensitive, there are always private cars as there have been all along in many areas.
Taxi companies negotiate the entire fleet purchase at one time and replace vehicles on a schedule (like rental car companies). Often, the fleet is all one brand and model. This makes it easy to hire one or two guys to work on all of them. You can also buy all your standard parts in bulk and you get commercial pricing for those. Fuel is also all bought from the same vendor on a contract.
Those agreements would be impossible for any gig worker to get. He is going to pay full price for the car, the maintenance, and the fuel. Gas stations aren't owned by oil companies; they're owned by individuals. So you'll never get national pricing on gas. Each taxi company negotiates with a particular owner (hopefully of several stations) in their area.
The final nail in the coffin (and the one that keeps it from going national, even if such agreements could be worked out for a group), is that car repair is local. You cannot operate a maintenance depot in Chicago that serves Houston. The further away the depot is from the points of service, the longer the car is out of service each time.
The "hub" nature of the taxi operation with all cars, staff, repair people, and parts in one place (and all maintained on the same schedule so fewer surprises), simply doesn't scale unless you have enough customers to build another hub.
BTW, this is the same reason there's no Del Taco in Texas (or your favorite fast food where you live). You have to have a certain number of restaurants to make the distribution hub and the truck trips worthwhile. There cannot be one isolated McDonald's somewhere that's profitable, just like there cannot be a "too small" taxi operation without a hub -- it won't be profitable. And building hubs in small cities without enough demand isn't profitable, either.
Hence, taxis don't scale.
There is no reason "a national taxi service" couldn't operate in the top 50 US metros, even if each metro managed local hub operations.
Uber's overhead in misbelieving they are a software company rather than a taxi service has only added to the expense, not saved anything.
Because taxis rely on cheap fleets, centralized and cheaper maintenance, and volume fuel agreements, they simply don't scale.
Uber is an attempt to mechanize the human aspect of driving by turning people into machines that produce for them. Unfortunately, in the fever dream that led to its creation, no one stopped to consider why "Big Taxi" wasn't a thing already.
So yeah in the last 100 years why are there a couple of taxi companies in each large city. I think you are right the business doesn't scale beyond a certain point.
Anecdote: Friend said he and the people he was with tried getting an Uber and balked at the $50 price. Then one them had the bright idea to check a regular taxi, $15.
> The individual driver has no buying power to negotiate This is true for the full-time driver, and certainly uber drivers have by in large become this in larger markets. But where I am, most drivers are still part-timer that do it for extra income on nights/weekends. In that case, their capital expenditures are already sunk costs, and they just need fuel+maintainance to balance out, which they can probably deal with at lower margins.
One can certainly imagine a world with app-dispatched taxis (already here) that is more efficient, with burst capacity from part-timers. That is probably a world with more taxi usage proportionally to the population than 20 years ago.
There’s nothing to say that Uber/Lyft don’t stabilize near a similar dynamic.