[mimixco]

Uber cannot take advantage of the economies taxi companies have in fleet purchase, in-house maintenance, commercial prices for parts, and fuel contracts. None of these scale well nationally, which is why there has never been anything more than small, regional taxi companies, even though they were possible 100 years ago.

Uber's overhead in misbelieving they are a software company rather than a taxi service has only added to the expense, not saved anything.

Because taxis rely on cheap fleets, centralized and cheaper maintenance, and volume fuel agreements, they simply don't scale.

[ghaff]

I'm not convinced the gig economy taxi service can't scale--without depending on too many drivers who don't understand their costs. But it's not going to be cheaper than the alternatives, driver networks may not be much larger, and a lot of operations (including engineering) are probably going to be mostly outsourced to low cost areas.

[mimixco]

The individual driver has no buying power to negotiate a lower price on cars, fuel, or maintenance and the big players are disincentivized to hand him one. The gig nature of the job means he pays consumer prices for everything while Uber skims off the top.

Uber is an attempt to mechanize the human aspect of driving by turning people into machines that produce for them. Unfortunately, in the fever dream that led to its creation, no one stopped to consider why "Big Taxi" wasn't a thing already.

[jacobr1]

I think Uber showed the demand curve is there, given both the lowered price and lowered transaction costs. It is certainly possible that when the dust settles there exists a larger taxi/hailing industry than before, operating more efficiently.

> The individual driver has no buying power to negotiate This is true for the full-time driver, and certainly uber drivers have by in large become this in larger markets. But where I am, most drivers are still part-timer that do it for extra income on nights/weekends. In that case, their capital expenditures are already sunk costs, and they just need fuel+maintainance to balance out, which they can probably deal with at lower margins.

One can certainly imagine a world with app-dispatched taxis (already here) that is more efficient, with burst capacity from part-timers. That is probably a world with more taxi usage proportionally to the population than 20 years ago.

[Gibbon1]

Reminds me of some shrewd comments about the Airbus A380. If there really was as much of a market as Airbus thought why wasn't Boeing selling more 747's.

So yeah in the last 100 years why are there a couple of taxi companies in each large city. I think you are right the business doesn't scale beyond a certain point.

Anecdote: Friend said he and the people he was with tried getting an Uber and balked at the $50 price. Then one them had the bright idea to check a regular taxi, $15.