[brentm]

Truly autonomous vehicles are probably the best and worst thing that will happen to Uber. One of Uber's greatest strength is having all of those drivers, it would be very hard to create a competing service and recruit that kind of fleet. If tomorrow it was legal to put truly autonomous vehicles on the road what is stopping anyone with a few billion dollars (e.g. Apple, Google, etc) to enter the market and compete on price per ride? I don't think many people are loyal to Uber, they are loyal to whatever is easiest, cheapest and quickest.

[Retric]

Autonomous cars don't solve the 'someone puked in the back' problem. So, companies will need a fair amount of local infrastructure near every city. Drivers are probably easier to find. So, I suspect 1-2 years after Ubner runs out of money is going to be the time for a competitor to show up.

Their real risk is a company treating ride hailing as a million dollar company vs. a billion dollar company and running with ultra thin margins.

[dx034]

You only need a parking lot with cleaning staff. As soon as it was detected that the car needs to be cleaned it will automatically drive there. Should be much cheaper than paying drivers full time. And in most cities finding employees shouldn't be that hard.

[taxicabjesus]

It takes at least a 1/2 hour to get back to base. Your cleaning staff can't be waiting around all day doing nothing, they need things to do. So the dirty car sits idle until the staff gets to it. Then it takes another 1/2 hour to get back to where the hoity-toity crowd likes to party.

If someone pukes in the car, it's out of service for the rest of the day.

[dragonwriter]

> Your cleaning staff can't be waiting around all day doing nothing, they need things to do.

The service staff may have more to do then cleaning, and even without major events like "someone puked in the back", a large fleet is going to have a continuous, ongoing level of cleaning and care needs (much of which, while needed on an ongoing basis, can easily be deferred when a puking, etc., incident occurs to focus on that.)

So its quite likely that there will, at least in major markets, be work for a 24/7 service staff that also handles puke-like incidents.

[jonwachob91]

Or, I could just drive the cleaning person to the vehicle in question. I'd still have those 30 minutes of downtime + cleaning time, but no time returning the car to action. So maybe I lose an hour a day per cleaning (and maybe the car should be cleaned once a day regardless, nice way to keep the cleaning team engaged) BUT a self-driving car isn't a person. It can work 24 hours a day, so I'd still get 23 hours out of it.

[Retric]

That reduces the throughput of the cleaning staff and costs you 1+ cars moving them around anyway.

Also, from a capital perspective the utilization from 2-5 AM is going to be terrible. Taking peak demand into consideration you probably average ~6-15 hours per day per car anyway.

[serge2k]

You need to charge them too.

[kamaal]

>>Your cleaning staff can't be waiting around all day doing nothing, they need things to do.

By the time full scale driving AI arrives. I'm sure we will have decently capable robots who can clean this kind of thing.

[dragonwriter]

> Autonomous cars don't solve the 'someone puked in the back' problem. So, companies will need a fair amount of local infrastructure near every city.

Well, they obviously need someplace to park the cars, and the cars obviously need to get charged periodically (which is likely to require human intervention), and it may be useful to have in-house service capacity. But a combination of internal monitoring systems to detect cabin issues that require a stop for cleaning, and stops for charging and service (that can also be leveraged for in-person cabin and exterior cosmetic inspections) seems to address this, and may require less cost and less risk of forces outside the company's control than relying on individual owners.

[PretzelFisch]

You are assuming Uber would want to own the cars. Probably they would want to let the car owner put it to work, while it would otherwise be sitting in the garage or parking lot.

[probe]

Totally agree - the Otto purchase suggests that they're looking to retrofit existing cars. I'm guessing this means you still need that driver network to at least provide the vehicles (and potentially manpower in the short run to ensure safety).

[LordHumungous]

So let me get this straight. I'm a private citizen early adopter who buys a fancy new expensive self driving car. I'm super fond of it because it's a hot new technology. Then I lend it out to Uber to have the shit beat out of it with city driving, drunk people puking in the back of it, etc. And I'm supposed to cover the costs of maintenance and cleaning. Uber better be offering me a fuck load of money, otherwise that sounds like a pretty bad deal.

[sharemywin]

There's no differentiation. a car ride is a car ride.

[madeofpalk]

If that were true then taxis would be fine and Uber wouldn't exist.

[taxicabjesus]

Taxis were fine in Arizona, but we only had 'Electronic Dispatch v1.0' [1]. The upstarts upgraded the dispatching system to v1.1. The main advantage of their upgraded system (over v1.0) was providing instantaneous feedback of the to the passenger's mobile computer. v1.1 also gave the passenger the ability to 'rate' their driver, which was also not a feature of v1.0.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/

[toomuchtodo]

Uber isn't competing with taxis. They're competing with anyone who can launch a ride sharing app.

[sharemywin]

uber beats them on price. that's not product differentiation.