+1

Regulation isn't a dichotomy. Even in the U.S.

http://blog.benjamin-encz.de/post/wh...-ubers-success

Maybe, the future is uncertain. But it should be noted that they have a lot of talent, a lot of money on the line and a lot of smart people who came up with their strategy which they are executing. And most things seems to be going according to plan. They are not counting on making money with human drivers, their main strategy is to become profitable once they have self driving cars.

I agree they have a lot of talent but self driving cars becoming mainstream is still 5-10 years away at minimum, assuming most jurisdictions will even allow them which is not certain yet either.

They still have a superior product so even if they raised prices to be the same as cabs most people would still choose to use them because cab service absolutely sucks in most cities. I'm not saying the cab drivers are bad as all of my rides have been fine and just as comparable, but the logistics of getting a cab in a reasonable amount of time and also knowing how far away they are is the biggest advantage Uber has, and they should raise their prices to rake in on that advantage now. Instead of waiting for that golden pot at the end of the rainbow (which might never happen) they could already be enjoying it as their product is so much better!

Jesus. Do you realize how absurd it is to think you have a better idea of whether Uber should raise their prices vs their own executives? Lower prices drive higher utilization and vice versa, so it's a powerful virtuous cycle that can become a lasting competitive advantage. They might even have actual data to support their decisions instead of just random anecdotes.

The potential market in the future (when it becomes viable for more people to forego car ownership entirely) is vastly larger than it is currently. They're clearly making the right play. And self-driving cars are inevitable at this point, any jurisdiction issues are only a matter of timing.

Jesus. Pets.com was a great idea in 1998 too! They also had their own executives running the company! Executives are Gods that can do no wrong!

Uber is burning through investor cash they have no reason to burn through. They have already saturated the market, but I guess you thought DFS would keep growing forever too? Do you think FanDuel and DraftKings have executives that don't deserve questioning?

If Uber keeps doing what they are doing they will be out of business before self-driving cars are a thing (or alternatively by the time self-driving cars become a thing their service will be nothing more than a commodity that any technological company can replicate). They need to take advantage of the huge edge they have now, and go from there. That means raising their prices to be comparable to what taxi's charge in each city, and since their service is so much better they will still get just as much business, plus they will be able to pay their drivers enough to keep driving for them at those rates.

Tonight at 12:15 AM I saw a man behaving strangely (might have gone to an ATM), shoddily dressed, doing a strange run/stumble back into the Uber building. Makes me overall more bearish because he didn't look that bright and why was he still at work?

How can you post this drivel with a straight face? You're delusional.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/u...xperiment.html

The only drivel I see is in the article you quoted. Investors are going to be left holding the bag on this one.

So now Uber is wasting their investor money on trying to build flying cars. What a joke!

Like Tesla "Fully Autonomy" and Musk's colonizing Mars, it's all about headlines and buzz and hype. None it's real, but it's clever PR. It's to get people excited and build futuristic associations with the brand in consumer and investor minds. It's very effective.

A struggling, money losing, far behind schedule car company is seen as the savior of mankind
A money burn taxi ride hailing company with questionable ethics is seen as the future of transport.

It works. People are dumb. What can I say.

Not trying to hijack, but just to be clear, are you saying:

A. We (TSLA) cannot make self driving cars? Or are you just questioning the timing of it?

B. That Elon will not go to Mars. Or that no one else will go with him. Or are just questioning the timing?

C. That we will not have "flying cars" someday? Or are you just questioning the timing?

D. All of the above?

Jokes aside, questioning the first half of the above seems silly to me. Questioning the second is reasonable. But unless you are looking at a burn rate and have some reason to believe the money will stop, I am not sure that I see the point.

SDC are here in 5-10 years. Tesla won't get there first, and even if they did, it wouldn't matter because the rest wouldn't be far behind as all are going to be deep-learning the same hardware with vast datasets. Even if you assume a miracle, the bottleneck is production speed for Tesla. They can't capture the market before a couple of trillion in capital eat their lunch.
Elon's not going anywhere. Mars is irrelevant in the next five lifetimes anyway - far too hostile to life. If you care about human survival, hardened large scale underground multi-generation-supporting colonies here are FAR superior to Mars.

With a breakthrough in fundamental physicists or cutting edge engineering breakthroughs (like an ultra compact fusion power source), we're not going to have flying cars worth anything.

Elon is a cuck. Uber is a phone-based taxi hailer. The rest is nonsense. That's all you need to know, really.

TS is smart, stubbon, but smart. He also constructs too many red herrings.

But read back to 2015, and he's pretty much right.


Uber is going to have to outsource the two things it most desperately needs to remain competitive in the future. Manufacturing and SDC software. There's only so many partnerships and buyouts you can throw at people until you just ismply run out of money, or other customers or even partners realize that there are stronger products out there. Uber is too far behind on the software side imo, when google says that in California that their drivers only need to interject themselves over SDC 1x every 10,000 miles makes you realize how laughable it is that Uber's SDCs last month ran red lights.


That's how far they are behind. And we havent even discussed the cost nightmare they will face ordering cars from manufacturers. Uber will be dead broke, and manufacturer that hasnt invested in Lyft or Tesla will contemplate buying them.

Here in London, black taxis usually protest against Uber.

Black taxis in London are BY FAR, the best in the world. They have to study something called the 'knowledge of London'. It is one amazing and grueling process. It usually takes 3 years or more to get through. They must learn every road which is something like 20,000 roads and 'point of interest' (around 30,000), which can be any bar, nightclub, police station, museum, place of worship etc. They then must know the exact route between any two points and the closest possible way. They must call every road and where the point is when they have their tests/appearances in front of examiners. I take my hat off to them.

I regularly drive in London and now there seems to be so many Uber cars. I see so many driving down one way streets the wrong way and also some dangerous Uber drivers. It seems their marketing is much better than what it is in reality.

So they are losing bundles of money in the hope that they will have driverless cars before they go broke. It won't happen (in London anyway). Far far too difficult in this city, cyclists everywhere, people running out in the road etc. I would be very happy to see that company pop....and I hope it does.

I think this is what ultimately happens. This is a great thread.

I used to live in London and I would frequently take Uber. It was so much cheaper than taxis but it took forever for them to find you. And I was asked multiple times to walk > .5 mile to find the car. (I lived on a one way and they didn't want to bother with circling around.)

It's basically a certainty Google GPS/AI will be better at navigating London than the median black taxi driver within a decade, if not sooner.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if Google, or some other well bankrolled entity (such as Uber), can roll out a working navigation system that's better than Black Taxi with a year or two. It would be some kind of automated Waze/Google GPS/Google AI that auto updates/learns road conditions as the human driven "drones" collect data all over London.

This is obviously true. But, London specifically is a weird market considering that the black taxi experience is unique and essential to capture the London experience.

So put the AI/navigation system into a black taxi shell.

I don't know who will get there first and I am not sure how much it matters. But, from my rather uninformed perspective, it seems like they are the largest primary source of data.

I agree that it is irrelevant economically (for the time being). But he is not wrong about how colonizing Mars affects the risks facing the survival of the human race.

I expect he will go. I expect he will come back. I couldn't tell ya where he will spend the last of his days.


The military already has vertical take of and landing jets. Helicopters exist. I don't think it's the physics or engineering that need to change, but rather, the economics. The economics of things can change very quickly.


I can't find the article that I read, but here is a similar one: http://www.khaleejtimes.com/nation/d...cars-this-july of course it looks like a small helicopter to me. But I think the point is that it is a mistake to dismiss these things as preposterous.

I am not sure what you mean by a cuck. But I think he is pretty insightful and trying to do the right thing. Short TSLA all you like, but I would reread Keynes famous quote first: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

You are not wrong about Uber as far as their product goes. But they have added a ton of value. They are well capitalized. If they have top notch leaders they could become more than a phone-based taxi hailer.

Regarding the flying vehicles, you should read the whitepaper by Uber:
https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf

I see people are about as dismissive of it as they were of Elon's hyperloop whitepaper. Today we have several actual large investments for building hyperloops between specific cities, propulsion prototypes, student competitions etc, so it seems it is actually happening. We will see what happens with the flying cars, it should be noted that Tesla Masterplan 2.0 hints at flying vehicles and Masterplan 1.0 pretty much happened.

Nope, he's wrong about that too...far better for the time being to build hardened (against asteroids, vulcanism) underground bases here on Earth.

It's at least 100,000: 1 that Musk will go to Mars as a result of it his own efforts.
And they're huge, burn up vast amounts of energy, and require extensive skilled maintenance.
No. The "economics" of energy density aren't economics at all - they're a fundamental limit until we have massive engineering breakthroughs like making an ultra compact fusion reactor or storing antimatter. Energy costs have increased over time, not decreased. The view you're espousing here is just completely wrong. Flying cars (in any reasonable definition of a car - obviously you can put large wings on a car or call a jet a car) are impossible and will be until major technological/core physics breakthroughs happens.

It's not preposterous at all. It's based on fundamental of space and energy storage density.
Hyperloop is a viable idea that's been done 130 years ago. It's purely down to engineering cost. It isn't a fundamental problem like energy use (not to mention noise, disruption, lack of space, etc) in "flying cars".

You're becoming a farce at this stage, heltok. The above comment makes me wonder if you're even in tech. WTF, man. Because Tesla built some prototype electric cars at a huge loss - like dozens of other car makers - they're going to bring us flying cars?

I guess this is why these tech companies put out all this nonsense PR - it gets people hyped up beyond all reason so they buy more stock.

No it has not.

Energy use is not a fundamental problem. We have plenty of flying objects that use energy. It is not like FTL communication or other fundamental problems.

The paper talks about this and propose solutions.

I am grateful that you care about me, but you should know I am pretty hardened by too much time on the internet and don't really react to these kind of statements. And I find that we usually judge other people as we judge ourselves.

I am in tech. Fwiw my background is mainly in mechatronics, control theory and sensor fusion.

I didn't say they would make flying cars, but they intend to electrify all forms of terrestrial transportation, which includes flying vehicles such as aircrafts. Once we have electrical airplanes the step to having electrical flying cars will not be an energy problem.

Reading the white paper...
As I suspected, the paper is worthless cuckshow. For a 97 page white paper which expends pages on logistics and noise, this is where they end up on energy/economics:
What a ****ing joke. This is a not a white paper, but a whitewash. You have an engineering backgound:
And you found this credible/interesting? When the single most important factor determining whether this can/will be viable is completely ignored (I'm guessing deliberately)?

Still, it's interesting. Would like to see some proper papers on this with actual full trip energy use.