[Cacti]

That would be a ridiculous bet. Autonomous driving in any wide-spread form is still years if not a decade away. Losing money for a decade while awaiting the glorious future to redeem you is a sure way to go bankrupt, and quickly.

Uber did not start with plans to use autonomous vehicles and so far their plans amount to little more than "well, yeah, we'll shift to autonomous cars when they come." Well, yeah, so will everyone else on the planet. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of this came up around the time Uber started to lose money... when they were in the black all the talk was about the "rise of the freelancer economy."

[harpastum]

As crazy as it sounds, they might not actually go bankrupt even if they continue to lose hundreds of millions per year. They've received $11.5B in total funding. They've averaged $1.6B in funding per year of operation and $4.65B in the last 3 months.

It's likely that they're actually building up a war chest at this point, getting ready for extra spending on self-driving cars.

[sdenton4]

According to the article, their world wide loss for the first HALF of 2016 is $1.2 billion. So $1.6B per year ain't gonna cut it at the current burn rate.

[dragonwriter]

OTOH, $4.65B per 3 months more than suffices...

But at some point there's got to be a limit to the tolerance of investors.

[kamaal]

>>It's likely that they're actually building up a war chest at this point, getting ready for extra spending on self-driving cars.

They are waiting for self driving cars to arrive. Not building it themselves.

Once someone does all the hardwork, they just want to buy and use them.

Not going to happen any time soon.

[misiti3780]

serious question for someone that knows the answer to it - isnt google much further ahead than UBER/CMU in the whole autonomous driving technologies ?

[probe]

Yes, but it doesn't mean that Uber cannot catch up. As Musk said, it's very easy (relatively) to get to 99% driverless cars, but it's the 1% that is truly difficult (with all edge cases). Furthermore, say driverless car technologies for all companies come around the same time (plus/minus a year) - don't you think Uber would have the distinct network effect advantage that Google would have to build from scratch? Said another way, would you rather bet that Uber can make up the 1 year technology lead (ex. aggressively hiring and more R&D) in driverless car FASTER than Google can make a uber-like driver/rider worldwide car share network?

That being said I don't think Google (who is also an investor in Uber) would - they're mainly looking to license out the software. This is also leading to problems because car companies are realizing how pivotal this is going to be and want to control the entire process rather than be downgraded to a mere OEM.