[CalChris]

Everything else aside, and there's a lot to set aside, Uber should have focused on turning a profit with their core business model (difficult) rather than, oh look! a shiny object: automated cars. I give them no credit for growing big and unprofitable.

[ghaff]

I don't know if the autonomous car BS at Uber is deliberate distraction or delusional thinking. It should be obvious to most people that, while it pretty clearly will happen, it's some number of decades out before there will be door to door Johnny cab service. And therefore utterly irrelevant as far as Uber in the here and now is concerned.

[spikels]

Take a look at the economics of driverless cars. It is not a case of "Oh look! a shiny object" but "Oh no! We are building an obsolete business". Even the big automakers now understand this will be radical change (Ford hired away part of Uber's team).

[mcphage]

> It is not a case of "Oh look! a shiny object" but "Oh no! We are building an obsolete business".

Why? Even when driverless cars are standard, why does Uber need to spend the money building their own driverless car program, instead of just buying driverless cars from the manufacturer like the rest of us will do? Their business plan doesn't require them to build the technology, just use it. It would be like if Miss Cleo in 2003 foresaw the future was smartphones, and thought the best way to proceed was to start her own smartphone manufacturing company—instead of just making sure that she could get called from the smartphones that others were going to make.

[majewsky]

You're assuming that auto companies will just sell these driverless cars like they did regular cars. This may be true for Tesla (esp. since they're successfully marketing their not-yet-driverless cars as "equipped for autopilot" to improve sales before driverless is actually a thing), but for other auto companies, I could easily see them offering driverless cars only as-a-service.

[mcphage]

> I could easily see them offering driverless cars only as-a-service.

They do this now; it's called "leasing". But if they're going to stop selling cars and only lease them, why wait? It's a bookkeeping detail that's unrelated to the car itself.

Cars depreciate in value so heavily, I don't know why auto manufacturers would want to adopt 100% of that loss—but there isn't anything currently stopping them.

[prostoalex]

It is likely more disturbing considering that this is a shiny object in a series of shiny objects. UberChina, self-driving car, Elevate autonomous drone. From the outside it seems like attempting to cargo-cult Google except for the balance sheet.