[mikeash]

That would be fine if the article was just about his personal costs. But it's not. The last paragraph makes it clear that he thinks this calculation applies to enough people to make a difference of billions of dollars in Uber's valuation.

[rdl]

There's an argument that while Sam's living in the future, other people will be joining him.

[mikeash]

I really hope the future doesn't involve an order of magnitude increase in the cost of car ownership.

[plorkyeran]

Not to mention that if the cost of car ownership does go up an order of magntiude, the price of uberX would probably also go up quite a bit.

[mikeash]

That's the big problem I see with getting any significant number of people to use the service. Most people use cars to commute. An UberX driver is generally only going to be able to handle one person's commute, since most people commute at roughly the same time. Most of them won't find any work at other times, because demand is much lower. So for that to work out, most UberX drivers would effectively be one person's private chauffeur, and somehow this is supposed to be cheaper than owning a car yourself, even though you'd effectively be paying for your own car and a driver.

I'm sure it can scale up more than now, but how much farther?