Uber is being disrupted by for example Bolt, which is their frugal Estonian competitor. An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market. They had a couple of years as the the top dog making everyone install an app but due to the huge overhead got undercut.
This is a market with a completely unregulated taxi sector as long as you follow the base regulations. Maybe sometimes a bit archaic but I could finance a car and start driving within a month.
From what I've heard the only way to make a profit is to be a business owning about 50 cars which are staffed 24/7 and on top owning your own service workshops. It's extremely cutthroat.
> An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market.
One thing that happened in Sweden though is that every single large taxi company made their own app with a big nice button for "I want a car, here, now", connected payment methods, and real-time tracking of the car you ordered.
So for me as a consumer, I can either press the button in a taxi app, and typically get a nice Mercedes or similar, with taxi plates, with a licensed taxi driver, properly insured, connected to a real taxi company with customer service representatives that I can call if anything goes wrong.
Or, I can press the button in Uber, pay the same money, but get a dude in his Toyota. Oh, and if the dude doesn't like me as a customer, he can downvote me, which results in me getting worse service in the future.
Say what you want, but at least the Swedish taxi companies out-competed Uber fair and square, instead of either giving up, or resorting to shitty political games to get Uber banned.
> So for me as a consumer, I can either press the button in a taxi app, and typically get a nice Mercedes or similar, with taxi plates, with a licensed taxi driver, properly insured, connected to a real taxi company with customer service representatives that I can call
if anything goes wrong.
> Or, I can press the button in Uber, pay the same money, but get a dude in his Toyota. Oh, and if the dude doesn't like me as a customer, he can downvote me, which results in me getting worse service in the future.
Just to be precise, the dude in a Toyota will also be a licensed driver with taxi plates with their stuff in order, although exactly to the limit of the legal requirements.
They've just realized that in general very few customers care if the car is a new Mercedes or a new Kia hybrid. The only thing which matters is the cost at the time of pressing the button.
Yeah if you do the math you end up realizing you need to run the cars like airlines run planes - damn near continuously. Idle time is non paid time, and you need to keep everything moving.
The real advantage of self driving taxis isn’t going to be the self driving, it’s going to be the 24 hour/day shifts they can pull.
That doesn't really work for taxis. No matter how much you want to distribute rides across the whole day, no discount is going to be able to get people to commute to work at midnight - most of your rides will happen around 9am and 5pm. So many taxis will have to spend a good chunk of the day idle. With self-driving taxis, at least you're not paying human drivers for some of this idle time (which Uber doesn't either AFAIK, but traditional taxis do).
This is in contrast to air travel, where with the right discounts you can get people to fly at inconvenient times of day.
I think most of rides by volume will be around weekend and special holidays. But even then limited 2h-4h slots, around bar opening and closing times. Having enough supply for these peaks will be impossible to make work.
When Uber and Lyft left Austin briefly to protest the driver background check requirement, it took no time at all for a bunch of alternatives to pop up.
In Russia and some other countries there are cheaper competitors. In Phuket (circa 5 years ago) there were way worse replacements. Thailand had managed to keep Uber out of the tourist areas for many years with their local taxi cartel.
This is a market with a completely unregulated taxi sector as long as you follow the base regulations. Maybe sometimes a bit archaic but I could finance a car and start driving within a month.
From what I've heard the only way to make a profit is to be a business owning about 50 cars which are staffed 24/7 and on top owning your own service workshops. It's extremely cutthroat.