[CamperBob2]

And yet customers abandoned the taxi industry like it was radioactive, about five nanoseconds after the first flawed, dubiously-legal alternatives started to appear.

Only an industry that is doing almost everything wrong could have suffered the fate of the taxi industry.

[rhizome]

Customers abandoned the taxi industry because their dispatchers sucked, and drivers would refuse fares that begine or end in a location they personally preferred not to serve. This is "the dispatcher problem" I mentioned above.

[DuskStar]

To the people saying that Uber rides are heavily subsidized... What percentage would be "heavy"? Because I thought Uber's loses as a fraction of revenue were around 20%, which doesn't scream "heavily" to me

[acdha]

It’s around 50% — the main problem being that there’s no obvious way to make it significantly more cost efficient. Driver compensation is already hovering around minimum wage and there’s plenty of competition if they raise rates. If would be one thing if they were running at a loss in new markets / for new customers but trending profitable but as far as I can tell they’re banking on being able to starve the competition and jack up prices or getting self-driving cars at a price where they can afford the capital costs because they’re not paying the drivers.

[DuskStar]

$1.8 billion losses on $11.3 billion in revenue is nowhere close to 50%. (2018 numbers)

If you have different numbers, I'd love to hear them.

[xmprt]

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't subsidies be calculated on gross bookings if they were subsidizing a percentage of the cost of the ride.

[Defenestresque]

I was curious about the stark discrepancy between your numbers and the parent's, so I did some quick research.

I think you're both kind of right. Reuters writes:

>In 2015, Uber passengers were paying only 41 percent of the actual cost of their trips, according to an analysis by transportation industry consultant Hubert Horan, based on financial statements from Uber. [0]

Of course that's four years ago. What about 2018 numbers? An interesting article makes some allegations about Uber deliberately inflating their profits [1] and making it difficult to tease apart the details:

>When Uber abandoned its failed Chinese, Russian and Southeast Asian operations, the dominant local companies gave Uber equity and debt instruments to partially compensate it for providing them an easier path to market dominance. These non-tradeable instruments only exist because of Uber’s decision to discontinue operations, but Uber includes their $5 billion value in “Net Income From Continuing Operations”

>The current accounting value of these assets is based entirely on Uber’s judgement as to what paper issued by companies currently losing massive amounts of money might be worth someday. [5] If one takes Uber’s judgements at face value, one could conclude that Uber’s only profitable activity is getting paid off for discontinuing staggering unprofitable markets.

..as well as..

>Lyft’s IPO prospectus presented ridesharing unit revenue data but Uber did not. Uber only presented the sum of car service and food delivery trips, so prospectus readers couldn’t figure out what customers were paying for the two services separately, or how prices for the two services have changed. The combined data suggest that both growth rates and pricing was declining in the second half of 2018, but prospectus readers have no way to identify the underlying problems, or whether those problem are likely to get worse.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-profitability/true-p...

[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/hubert-horan-can-ube...

[DuskStar]

I think I have to point out that your link at [1] uses Uber's IPO P/L numbers (which include their sale of some foreign holdings) which worked out to a profit of ~987 Million in 2018, but their past financial statements have purposefully excluded the income from those sales in their revenue and P/L numbers. (Uber does not typically use GAAP numbers for exactly this reason)

[lhorie]

> It’s around 50%

You sound sure. Where did you get this number?

[empath75]

It works out to billions of dollars a year in losses so yeah.

[dingo_bat]

A big factor in high adoption for Uber was the fact that each ride was highly subsidised by investor monies.

[grogenaut]

Price was rarely a concern. Uber always felt fair in pricing to competitive markets like Chicago where cabs are better than St Louis or Seattle.

Seattle was the worst. Cabs were super late and never knew the city and gouged you. Took a cab 12 miles at 3am in Seattle once and it was 97$ another time (like 2012) the guy couldn't find the place 3 times and was 2 hours late. Finally showed up when I talked him there and fucker had a gps but claimed he didn't need it.

Uber and lift show up on time have good dispatch and reasonable fares.

However in Portland I always used radio can cause it was clean and had good dispatch and fair prices.

I use cabs in SF all the time from the airport cause company pays and I don't have to deal with the cf that is getting a rideshare there. Just walk out and pay $50 to downtown. It's $15-20 over rideshare but no wait. And yay moral hazard.

Anyway I love flywheel and radio can (I think related companies) cause they do it as well as Lyft and have fair prices. Cabs shouldn't be like healthcare for pricing.