[mikemotherwell]

There are way more positives than that:

# No money changes hands, so safer for drivers.

# No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times.

# Uber records all trips, so easier to work out costs to expense.

# Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing.

# Driver and passenger are tracked, so there it is easy to find who did what. There are a lot of rape charges and cases against Cabbies.

# Rating - I've been in a LOT of awful, awful cabs.

# Drivers can work 1 hour and make some money. Try that with any other job.

[thecupisblue]

It's all an Uber illusion:

# No money changes hands, so safer for drivers.

Not true in many countries where cash is supported in Uber.

# No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times.

Not true in many countries where cash is supported in Uber.

# Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing.

I wouldn't do that a lot of times - I switched a few cards on my Uber account and had to contact support a lot of times because they froze all my payment options after that. Imagine being in the middle of US as European then getting all of your cards declined by Uber because you added your friend's card.

# Rating - I've been in a LOT of awful, awful cabs.

And I've been in a lot of awful ubers - the rating system doesn't work unless people actually do rate drivers, and people don't rate as much as you think. Also, if you don't want a driver but there isn't many drivers online, you keep getting reconnected to him even after canceling and selecting it's because of the driver multiple times.

# Drivers can work 1 hour and make some money. Try that with any other job.

Not really, the amount they earn in that 1 hour - when you remove Uber's cut, tax cut, gas and vehicle amortisation is terribly low. Some say they barely make ends meet with 8 hours driving.

[Jommi]

>Cash Argument

Im not sure what you're trying to say? All Uber markets that support cash also support card.

> Card Declines Of course you will get blocked if you add an active uber accounts payment method. Thats basically a huge red signal for fraud.

> Rating Of course someone needs to be the first one to rate the drivers. Yet this is 100000x better than nothing, which is what most regular cab companies give.

>Money Not really? This is absolutely country/city dependent and the whole point is that YOU as the driver get to decide if its worth it or not. There are no upfront costs involved.

[thecupisblue]

I'm trying to say that all these "advantages" are just in specific situations.

And the card decline wasn't done with a card that already was active on Uber. And their "fraud" system got triggered months later, repeatedly, after a drive or two.

Also yes there are upfront costs in my area, in US maybe it isn't but here you have them.

I'm not saying Uber is worse than cabs. I'm saying that a lot of "advantages" Uber has aren't really all that. They are in a race to not burn their money before their AV investment can can come in, and in the end, it's just cabs with an app, not much better or worse than cabs.

3-4 years ago, the play was different, but now, it's becoming "just another cab company" in that area.

[Jommi]

Specific situations which make for a majority of their market? I don't think "specific" is an honest word here when it's mostly standard per continent.

Their fraud system is one of the best in the world, but of course it will have false positives. You know that your anecdote is not applicable to the business in general.

What upfront costs do you have? Where are you based?

I maybe get your point but I think you're vastly underestimsting the difference between a tech company optimizing digital transportation vs. A local cab company hiring a consultancy to make them a white label app.

[JimmyAustin]

> Not true in many countries where cash is supported in Uber.

I've taken Ubers in at least 7 countries, many of which have had a cash option (India and Vietnam), neither of which I took up. The average uber driver will have considerably less cash on them then the average cabbie.

> No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times.

Only if you pay in cash.

> Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing.

Uber supports having both a business and personal profile, which you can change before or during a ride. Every business uber I take has the receipt sent directly to my work email, and charged to my work CC.

[alpha_squared]

There's at least one country I've been to (Egypt), where it's cash-only. Unsure if it's the standout, but I really wouldn't be surprised if there were others.

[Jommi]

It's not true anymore, with the Careem acquisition.

[donkeyd]

I left my umbrella in an Uber in NYC once. I found the driver's number in the app and they were back a few minutes later and I got my umbrella back. This wouldn't have been so easy if it were a regular cab.

[uptown]

And? You got a $5 umbrella back. That has zero relevance to the business model of a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

[missosoup]

I left $5000+ worth of camera equipment in an uber once.

They went 40 mins out of their way to return it and tried to refuse the money I offered them for their trouble.

This would have absolutely not happened with a cab.

[donkeyd]

It's why I pick Uber over a taxi. How is that irrelevant to this discussion?

[ganitarashid]

Those are all great things. And all of them are done by the competitors. In Europe I use MyTaxi, same thing as Uber but much nicer cars

[te_chris]

You mean FreeNow or whatever... Don't understand that rebrand at all, MyTaxi is a great name. Not sexy or enigmatic, but it's a challenger brand.

[Huggernaut]

Right?! I was so confused when I was scrolling through my app list and saw this logo, I briefly wondered if I had installed some kind of social awareness app, I just had no idea what I was looking at.

[mikemotherwell]

Could not agree more. There are lots of things, easily copied, that make the Uber app great, not just the ride. The question longer terms becomes who continues to get rides, and why?

IMHO, ubiquity, especially when traveling, will ultimately be the winning move.

[sah2ed]

> IMHO, ubiquity, especially when traveling, will ultimately be the winning move.

Many of Uber’s customers are price sensitive. The minority who are not price sensitive are more likely to (be able to afford frequent) travel, but I fail to see how loyalty from this segment will translate into profits over the long term, especially since their international presence in multiple but not homogenous markets is a bet that economies of scale will yield a handsome pay off, where it clearly hasn’t as they had to pull out from direct competition in China for instance.

[henrikschroder]

> No money changes hands, so safer for drivers.

All their taxis do card payments, and have done card payments for decades before Uber.

> No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times.

They didn't have that option when they launched the app with GPS booking, but they added it later. It now works just like Uber, you have cards on your profile, it charges your chosen card after the trip.

> Uber records all trips, so easier to work out costs to expense.

Of course they can email you your receipts if you want.

> Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing.

So does this taxi app. Companies can also have accounts with the taxi company, so if it's a work trip you just use the company account that you've already entered into the app.

> Driver and passenger are tracked, so there it is easy to find who did what. There are a lot of rape charges and cases against Cabbies.

There are not a lot of rape charges and cases against cabbies in Stockholm, at all, so that's not a problem to solve.

> Rating - I've been in a LOT of awful, awful cabs.

Taxis in SF are godawful compared to taxis in Stockholm, so yeah, if you're used to the shitty cabs of SF, Uber is a step up. If you're used to pretty much every single taxi being a Mercedes like in Stockholm, Random Dude's Toyota is a step down.

> Drivers can work 1 hour and make some money. Try that with any other job.

That doesn't affect me as a customer, really. Also, when I get in a taxi in Stockholm I know I'm getting a properly licensed and insured ride, not just some gung-ho gig-economy hopeful who is driving his Toyota an hour a week.

Like I said, I understand that Uber was a step-up for the SF taxi market, but there are plenty of markets where it isn't, and where it's much-hyped technological invention just isn't very hard to replicate for local competition.

[nabla9]

The payment is non-issue in countries with mobile pay. Or payment using contactless chip without PIN for small charges. Soon non-issue everywhere. All those other things are in apps that modern taxicabs use.

[rimliu]

Nothing in this list is unique to Uber or difficult to replicate.