Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/manufacturing focus.
> the company spent its early years building its core technology and delivering a high-end experience with significantly higher prices than incumbent taxi companies. Eventually, though, the exact same technology was deployed to deliver a lower-priced experience to a significantly broader customer base; said customer base was brought on board at zero marginal cost
Ironically, this was the plan laid out for Tesla early on. Very expensive Roadster, pretty expensive Model S. Make some cash and build a reputation for how good a luxury electric car can be. Then use that cash to go down market.
Of course zero marginal cost does not apply with the Model 3, but they did dramatically lower their own cost-of-materials by the time they released the Model 3, making it profitable at scale.
> The takeaway from that Article isn’t that Uber is a model for the rebirth of American manufacturing; rather it’s that you can leverage demand to fundamentally reshape supply
Anecdotally, I know that Tesla became an aspirational brand, a dream car for many. A status brand. So the demand was there, and if you could get a "dream car" for $35K USD then why wouldn't you?
The Uber example is also an outright lie.
They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.
Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.
> They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.
That is exaggerated. Uber was losing something like $0.50-$1 per ride in 2018.
Uber/Lyft were (and still mostly are) just _better_ than taxis.
It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.
I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?
If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.
> It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.
Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated.
> Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?
Yes.
> If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.
And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.
> Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated.
Yeah, because they’re losing the money. Meaning YOU’RE not paying it, it’s being lost.
Keep in mind this is also with:
- uber not providing the capital for their rides. Taxi companies buy taxis, uber says you buy it.
- vastly underpaying their work force.
- skirting employment laws with gig work
- relying on tips! The ride cost doesn’t include tips, despite that being a huge portion of wages!
Taxis still exist and are still more expensive. You pay for them to use bus lanes in SF and so on. Uber prices are not beyond the competition.
Where I live, Uber is recognized as the high prices option. Once VCs stopped subsidizing rides prices went up and availability went down - it was a running joke for years that at DCA you’d see people waiting in line for 20 minutes to spend $20 more than hopping in a waiting cab.
That makes sense for me. I would easily pay $20 more to take an Uber over a cab in SF. The prices are the other way around which is convenient for me. The last time I took a cab from the airport the guy asked me which cross streets and how to get there. That's not my Uber experience. I don't want to be telling this guy how to do his job. I want personal transportation and we can chat about something else if he likes but I want him to use the satnav.
Yeah, there are real regional variations. I think the problem Uber has is that they’re valued like a high-end tech company (with locked in overhead like compensation) but they don’t have much of a competitive moat. They can have a better app and global reach is a plus for frequent travelers, but at the end of the day their profit is anchored by how much a taxi costs – even if the service is better people only value that so much, especially in a down economy like the one just created.
They've created a business model any metropolitan community can duplicate for practically nothing, and the first community that does so will share their notes with the rest of us.
People should be asking themselves if their service is a quango waiting to happen, because most of them definitely are.
For a lot of people $20 is an amount that they will think about spending.
Ridiculous to think that a cab driver in 2025 is not using GPS. I don't believe that.
Been burnt too often by american taxis that won't take cards or won't give receipts or have adverts on screens as you're travelling.
That’s not a problem here (they have an app, too) but it’s definitely valid for Uber to compete on better service. I am skeptical that they will be able to get the kind of returns which their investors want that way, however.
I fly into a random city, say Denver.
I could start hunting around for a local taxi app, which may or may not work, may or may not have any cars
I could get in a waiting taxi at the airport, but then I run into issues with cash etc
I could use uber while I'm still collecting my bag and have a known car and known experience waiting for me
Sure, as I said they have a potential edge in service and people who frequently travel to new places. My point was just that it’s not a very big edge: most people are not traveling to new places all of the time and if there’s a big savings they’ll switch. That doesn’t mean that Uber is doomed, just that they’re not a Google/Facebook money printing machine where local competitors can pop up easily.
they already IPOed so the original investors made out with a ton of money. if you think there's still a version where Uber evaporates overnight, I have some puts to sell you.
I’m not expecting anything like evaporating, only that things like their share price and compensation are more like a tech company than a taxi company but they don’t have a strong moat. There’s interest around things like self-driving taxis, but they don’t own the technology so it won’t open up extra margins.
Most individual share prices is buoyed by continuous pumping from 401ks and the like buying into funds, not on the fundamentals of the companies in question.
At least in Seattle, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.
>, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.
That type of ride from a "hub" where a bunch of taxis congregate to take the next passenger -- such as SEATAC airport -- is optimal for traditional taxis and can be cheaper. But using Uber for suburb-to-suburb routes away from any hubs is cheaper than taxis and I tried to explain why that happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660517
your "hack" is just how it works for food delivery. If you don't leave a tip, they'll ignore it and itll never get picked up.
I'm curious as to why that is. A few months ago I took a taxi from the airport in Austin (because I had neglected to book my Uber/Lyft before I got to the rideshare area and there was a significant wait) and I vowed "never again". It was about 50% more than Uber/Lyft, and everything about the experience was worse in the ways taxis have always been worse - payment is much more of a pain in the ass, you don't know how much it costs until the end, and the cab smelled.
I can wholeheartedly understand complaints about Uber and Lyft, but I don't understand at all when I sometimes see this collective amnesia about how much taxis sucked before rideshare came on the scene.
I think its less amnesia and more that many commenters were too young to have experienced pre-Uber taxis: the call for a pickup thats routinely ignored, flailing arms in the cold hoping someone stops, the smelly car, refusal to pick you up because your ride is too short or too long, getting taken for an extended ride to your destination, the credit card machine thats always broken. Oh, and if you want to complain I hope you can make an 8am hearing at the taxi commission in 6 weeks.
> I'm curious as to why that is
Seattle has added some extra fees and pay requirements for drivers that drive up the cost of a ride share. In retaliation to these laws, ride share companies have also raised prices.
An Uber from my house to the SeaTac airport used to cost about $30 5 or 6 years ago. It's now around $100. A taxi is about $80 now. Paying for parking is cheaper now than either of those options.
Ah then it’s regional. In SF it’s typically 30% more expensive in a taxi from the airport to 4th and king.
it's like $40 to take a car vs like $15 on Bart into the city.
BART takes 2x the time station to station. Try it out right now.
The time is 1256 as of the time of this comment.
SFO International to Montgomery St. Station: Earliest arrival is 1346
Driving: Earliest arrival is 1323
My experience is that the car takes ~6 min to arrive to pick you up for Uber. You can call it earlier, but assuming you call it when you arrive and then wait that's 1322. You lose 23 minutes to BART.
And that's BART station to BART station. Change it slightly, like to my home near Caltrain and it's pointless. The cost in time is way more than $25.
What are you going to do on your phone in the Uber vs on your phone on your couch when you get home vs your phone on Bart? If you have an important in-person meeting to get to then by all means pay the surcharge but let's be real about how some of us are spending those "saved" minutes.
Thank you for doing the math - we're only talking about 23 of them? it's entirely possible to capitalize on 23 minutes, but seriously, 23 minutes?
Can use your laptop in the car safely. A friend of mine had his laptop yanked on BART. Chap ran off, my friend gave chase, and that guy threw away the laptop. Surprisingly, only dented! But I'd rather not experience that. 28 minute ride vs. 45 minute ride after 10 min wait is pretty large difference IMHO. If no traffic, that's even shorter. For me, from Caltrain station (where I live) to airport I have a record door to gate of 16 min. That's a no planning choice. If I have to make a 45 minute ride I have to plan: take the T-line to Powell, switch to BART, ride down to the airport? Crazy. No chance.
Where I live taxis are on par with Uber, sometimes cheaper when Uber has surge prices. We also have Bolt, an European competitor, which is usually 10-40% cheaper than Uber or taxis.
Every Uber or Bolt can also operate as a taxi since the regulations stipulate that any private passenger transport service is the same as a taxi, and has to follow the same regulations.
I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated.
In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster.
Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc.
And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue).
Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business.
American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use.
Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.
I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.
You probably know much better than I do, but that doesn't seem it would make it impossible to do sharding? You just pick a shard based on the current location of the driver/customer.
It has been a long time and my memory is based on hearing about it rather than using it, but I believe there was a notion of a rider's "home" datacenter (based on where they signed up from), and there was some complexity from propagating a rider's data from there to all other datacenters proactively, so that things would just work no matter where in the world they were. And I think the datacenter serving the area where a user was currently located could accept writes for that user, meaning that it would have to get written back to the home datacenter... you can see how this got complicated.