How many cars does Uber own? I thought they offloaded all of that pesky "ownership" stuff to their custome.. I mean drivers / coworkers / employees / collaborating business owners / freelancers.
Except that currently all the drivers also manage the inventory of physical cars, and all maintenance, and all legal liability. The parent's question is a good one. Owning and operating a fleet of cars is the core competency of a rental agency, not a ride-hailing app.
People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.
If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame.
That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
Self-driving won't make a difference to this structure though ?
The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
Just a ride sharing app cannot reach the scale and revenue to justify the investments they have attracted. It is not realistic to raise $25+ Billion[1] just to be a pure SaaS startup.
Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services.
Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration.
[1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B.
[2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
Musk has already stated that Tesla will start a ride sharing service that FSD Tesla owners can participate in. It will also supposedly be exclusive (not allowed to do ride sharing for other services using FSD).
Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
I don’t know about Uber but Lyft has a car rental service. Drivers can rent cars from Lyft to drive with Lyft. If the infrastructure is already there, going from “driver turns on an app to accept/reject a ride” to “we accept that automatically” is quite simple.
