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by domiono 4355 days ago
I think the most important article to estimate Uber's market size is this article, where their CEO mentions that the ground transportation market in San Francisco is around $22B and this is only for 800,000 people (http://qz.com/218717/what-people-who-think-uber-is-worth-17-...). Now multiply this by 10,000 so that you are at 8B people and you have a global ground market of 220 trillion dollars. Now that number is probably too high, as the gross global product is $100T, but the transportation market can be well in the range of $10T.

So once self-driving cars are up and running, nobody will drive their cars by themselves anymore, because self-driving cars are 5 times safer than humans driving them and for that reason, insurances will charge 5 times more if you want to drive your car yourself. Where do you order get these self-driving Google cars? You order them through Uber and then you have Uber attacking the $10T ground transportation market.(http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/)
2 comments
xorcist 4355 days ago
What is your basis for the $10T valuation, except for the fact that $220T is "probably too high"?

And what is your basis to conclude that if something works in San Francisco, it works elsewhere? Is the competition there so fierce that anything that succeeds that everywhere else can be considered an easy market?

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pbreit 4354 days ago
Just about everything that works in San Francisco works elsewhere. I can't think of anything that only works in San Francisco. Can you? There are hundreds or thousands of cities with similar transportation needs, many with already substantial Uber usage.
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domiono 4355 days ago
It's a rough estimate rather giving an idea of the market. What I want to say is that the market is not the $10B U.S. taxi market, but that Uber's market is probably in the trillions over the next 10 years.
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mariusz79 4354 days ago
Or $0. If you're talking about self-driving cars, you also need to consider that more than one family may share one car without any need for Uber, or that car manufacturers or dealers may go into taxi business themselves.
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xorcist 4354 days ago
... because?
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rayiner 4354 days ago
Why would you order the self-driving cars through Uber?
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