There is no future for Uber without automated cars. Think of it this way: as soon as someone else has an automated fleet, Uber is finished unless it has its own. This is an existential requirement.
You are missing the point. If spinoff, Uber is the parent company. Spinoff is not to remove the new company entirely, just financially and operationally. It's only telling the world "our main company - the one in IPO, will strengthen core business so we burn less money, while our research team is working in the new spinoff company." That's how I would run my company. YMMV. When UberAuto is ready, Uber can merge or have Auto license back. This should be seen as a wise move for the new Uber, given it is burning so much money in the core business already.
They can still live for 20+yrs very profitably on other markets.
Even US and high tech markets like japan and korea will take several years to transition to self-drive cars. Specially because this will start either with trucks or very high cost cars so they can offset support and iron out bugs.
And that's my guess assuming self-driving cars are ready tomorrow.
Self driving cars would be such a dramatic improvement to the public, it would be adopted much sooner than 20 years after being implemented. Cars that require a human driver would depreciate so quickly and the safety benefit would be so clear, people would upgrade incredibly fast.
We don't really know that though, do we? I mean, I can see this being true eventually but I'm still very perplex that we'll see cars able to drive autonomously in all conditions any time soon.
It's one thing to drive on the wide streets of american cities literally built around cars. It's an other to navigate the narrow, crowded streets of many european cities, with scooters and bikes zooming left and right, people parking anywhere they can, passing where they shouldn't be etc... Let's not even talk about some places in Africa and Asia where it seems that driving is more art than science.
I'm expecting self driving cars to start on friendlier turf (large avenues, highways connecting cities etc...) and then expand iteratively to "wilder" areas. I'm sure it'll take a while to completely take over though.
> Think of it this way: as soon as someone else has an automated fleet, Uber is finished unless it has its own. This is an existential requirement.
But the converse is not true, i.e. even if Uber is the first large scale company operating autonomous cars, this is by no means a guarantee for success. This is where the whole "betting on Uber" investment scheme kind of falls flat in my opinion: even if all goes according to plan, Uber does not have anything special (since by that time, autonomous driving will be open to its competitors, too). They probably bet on "hacking" the regulatory process to allow only their cars for a certain period, but this merely delays the issue of competition a bit.