[HN Gopher] Uber and Lyft's new road: Fewer drivers, thrifty rid...
___________________________________________________________________
Uber and Lyft's new road: Fewer drivers, thrifty riders and jittery
investors
Author : elsewhen
Score : 168 points
Date : 2022-05-28 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| scarface74 wrote:
| Shocker! A product is more popular that is sold below cost and
| you actually need to charge more for a product than it costs to
| produce?
| black_13 wrote:
| lumost wrote:
| I think we're about to see a lot of tech ideas with questionable
| economics come back to earth. When the cost of capital was below
| a single digit, "parking" money in a growth bet could vaguely
| make sense. After all, someday Uber would figure it out, or get
| AVs, or .. something? Better than leaving the money in a .01%
| money market for 10 years, or parking the money in something with
| no path for growth like industrials.
|
| This problem isn't restricted to startups however, even big tech
| has big expensive forays into questionable markets. Meta is
| building something for a few billion a year, Google has hundreds
| of strange an unprofitable businesses, and B2B SaaS is full of
| startups which may actually just be consultancies.
|
| A 10-12% cost of capital means that you either need to have a
| real plan to turn profit in 3 years or investors won't care. Just
| breaking even means an opportunity cost of 30%.
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| Three different flavors of big bet. Meta realizing their core
| business, while massive, has peaked, loudly reorienting their
| business around a dubious moonshot bet.
|
| Google burning cash in a moonshot division, dubiously betting
| that creating startups within Google is easier than outside of
| it.
|
| Uber/Lyft subsidizing customers for a long while to take over
| the market, which... pretty much worked? Of the three "big
| bets" this seems most promising. Even if the market decreases,
| it's not going away, nor is it going back to regional taxi
| companies.
| lumost wrote:
| Its worth considering that 3 is actually quite common within
| large companies as well. I can think of a few industries
| dominated by big tech that have never turned a profit or even
| positive free cash flow.
| ghaff wrote:
| The thing that actually puzzles me is that in the post-
| Kalanick era, Uber didn't more aggressively pivot to
| essentially being a taxi company where drivers supply their
| own vehicles. You've got a working app--how many people do
| you need to maintain/enhance it? Self-driving isn't
| happening in an economically interesting time horizon--
| certainly not reliable door-to-door in cities. So raise
| prices, cut costs, and have what's a fairly attractive taxi
| business for many places.
|
| Of course, that may not have been what investors wanted to
| hear.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I think you're right. I couldn't imagine using taxis when
| traveling for work ever again. Uber sends the receipt
| straight into Concur for me.
|
| Pre-Uber I remember having to get Taxi drivers to write me a
| freehand paper receipt to expense.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Exactly right! An unintended side effect of the artificially
| low cost of capital was that labor seemed expensive. All the
| long shot ideas that tried to "improve productivity" - whether
| by replacing drivers with driverless cars, or robots flipping
| burgers are entirely uneconomical when cost of capital goes up.
|
| Now, capital has become more expensive and labor is also more
| expensive. It's a perfect shitstorm for a lot of projects.
| websap wrote:
| Comparing Meta and Google, to Lyft and Uber isn't an apples to
| apples comparison. The former have cash cow businesses and have
| captial that they can deploy to find the next $100 billion
| dollar business. Its essential for their long term survival to
| keep diversifying and reinventing themselves.
| halJordan wrote:
| I think that's the point. That even these well funded,
| relatively sovereign companies will be punished for their
| moonshots and that means the future will be devastating for
| these magical unicorns.
| sfblah wrote:
| One wonders what government policies preventing this from
| happening are doing to the future. I don't have any way to
| objectively measure this, but my general sense is each day
| interest rates remain artificially low, the downside
| becomes greater. I'd be curious if you know a way to
| quantify this effect.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Interest rates are not being kept "artificially low":
| central banks have already raised rates, and have
| signalled that they intend to continue raising rates.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Let's not forget that this kind of venture also destroys the
| business it was meant to disrupt, at least while the venture
| money is flowing.
|
| Uncreative distruction.
|
| Somehow it seems wrong that people can make enough money to buy
| an island without actually making money.
| seibelj wrote:
| Taxi cabs pre-Uber were awful, at least in the 3 cities I used
| them most (NYC, Boston, Vegas). Dirty cars and often
| unmaintained. Regularly taken in circuitous routes to raise the
| meter charge. "Broken" credit card machine. Very difficult to
| find a taxi if you weren't in popular areas. Calling a
| dispatcher for a taxi only to wait an hour and have them not
| show up.
|
| Having apps solved all of the above problems. I would give 0%
| chance of any similar improvements under the monopolistic
| medallion system that exists in the old regime. Uber forced
| innovation that was so much better the politicians folded
| despite intense lobbying from the old hands.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That however is why they were cheaper. It seems, from the
| article, people don't actually want to pay the premium for
| that better level of service.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Which was cheaper? In my experience, in addition to being
| much worse in many ways (love to be called and told my cab
| driver is ready to pick me up when I am already boarded and
| sitting in a plane, after the dispatcher repeatedly told me
| they were 10 minutes away for an hour, and then I managed
| to just street hail a cab at 5 am) cabs were also about 50%
| more expensive.
|
| However, my local cab company got an app, it's a piece of
| shit, but it shows where the cab is in a map as it comes to
| you, which really was the killer feature for Uber/Lyft for
| me. So good riddance Uber, you served a purpose for a time,
| but normal cabs stepped up their game just a little bit,
| and I have basically negative loyalty to you.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In NYC the call taxi companies were cheaper than
| uber/lyft even in the prime discount days of those apps.
| Of course the user experience was much worse.
| vkou wrote:
| In NYC my user experience with Lyft has been much worse
| than taxis.
|
| Cost more, longer waits, cherry on top of a Lyft driver
| waiting five minutes on the other side of a long block
| away from pickup, and canceling the ride because I
| allegedly refused to show up. That I had to talk to CS to
| reverse the charge with.
|
| I took taxis for the rest of my time in NYC, and I can't
| see any reason not to keep doing so.
| ghaff wrote:
| >people don't actually want to pay the premium for that
| better level of service
|
| See air travel in general.
| logifail wrote:
| >>people don't actually want to pay the premium for that
| better level of service
|
| > See air travel in general.
|
| At least in Europe, currently having a provider get you
| from A to B as per your booking is the key, "premium" /
| "better level of service" is completely irrelevant.
|
| I'm back to booking everything as cheap as possible. If
| it's all going to go wrong, I want to have paid peanuts
| for it so I can just walk away and not bother having to
| try and claim anything back.
| ghaff wrote:
| I admittedly do relatively few short-haul flights. With
| some exceptions, 5 hours is about the floor so I will pay
| for more comfort/relaxation.
| johnisgood wrote:
| In Eastern Europe there is no Uber nor Lyft. Waiting time is
| 2-10 minutes on average in a fairly large city. Cars are
| definitely not dirty nor unmaintained, they have the
| reputation of having cars that are almost new, and so forth.
| Prices have increased of course.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I don't see the problem. The cab companies needed to die. Uber
| and Lyft will raise their prices to become affordable - back to
| the price of cabs - and still be a lot better than what they
| replaced.
| cj wrote:
| We're killing hundreds (thousands?) of individual cab
| companies so that we can consolidate the entirety of the cab
| industry into 2 tech conglomerates. I don't see how that's a
| win.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Those cab companies offer worse services and are
| monopolistic and the whole medallion system.
|
| There are plenty of horror stories where minorities can't
| get a cab in the middle of NYC.
|
| https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-
| fines-...
|
| This is not a problem with Uber.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I would take hundreds regional monopolies over one global
| monopoly any day. At least if you're banned from the taxi
| service in Boston you can still catch a cab in New York.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the number of global ride
| sharing companies.
| soared wrote:
| My city didn't have taxis, but we have Lyft and Uber.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If you're big enough to be a Lyft and Uber market, you're big
| enough for taxis. Outside of NYC they're usually just not
| that visible; normal cars, dispatched via phone.
| aeturnum wrote:
| People are pointing out that Lyft and Uber often brought car
| service to towns without taxies and that is true (and good I
| suppose).
|
| But I do not think that's the business we should be sad about
| disrupting - Lyft and especially Uber have been fighting hard
| against all sorts of public transit systems across the US
| because they view them as competitors. It's unclear how
| effective they have been, but I also have no love for their
| intention - which is to lock the public into their service.
| rvz wrote:
| Totally unsurprising and still both unprofitable businesses
| (Lyft, and Uber) 3 years after IPO. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21328967
| munificent wrote:
| My favorite feature of Uber and Lyft the last several years is
| that it's essentially a crowdsourced way to transfer wealth from
| VCs to random users.
|
| Operating every drive at a loss means the rider and drivers
| benefit and the person holding the bag is some VC who apparently
| has more money than they know what to do with. Given how many
| financial structures today seem to flow in the opposite direction
| and skim a little money from everyone to transfer it to the
| already-rich, it's nice seeing a system that (completely
| unintentionally) flows the other way.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I felt the same way until the IPO.
| walrus01 wrote:
| the drivers don't really benefit that much, because after you
| subtract the cost of the purchase of a suitable car,
| repairs/maintenance, tires, fuel and so on to calculate the
| fully loaded cost per mile of operating a lyft car for several
| years, the wage remaining for the driver (after subtracting the
| US income tax as a 1099) is often under the minimum wage (and
| _far_ under the living wage) in many major metro areas. Using
| Seattle as an example and its $15 /hr minimum wage.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If it didn't work for them, they wouldn't drive.
| aetherson wrote:
| It's a strong labor market. Nothing stopping lyft drivers
| from getting jobs in food service or warehouses or a variety
| of other jobs that have few requirements to qualify for.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I think there's a big reliance on the part of these
| employers in recruiting and retaining employees who are
| either less literate, less informed, more gullible, or more
| servile than the average service industry worker.
| black_13 wrote:
| AYBABTME wrote:
| You don't need a work visa to drive an Uber.
| missedthecue wrote:
| According to various online calculators, the average
| operating cost for a Prius is about $0.11 per mile. Includes
| fuel, depreciation, repair, maintenance, etc...
|
| Uber drivers are doing way better than $0.11 per mile.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Aaaand the disruption to the faltering regulated Taxi system,
| eating that for lunch.
|
| Travis K is still out there. Doing things.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| The early VC's cashed out and made billions. Retail investors
| are paying for these losses.
| mperham wrote:
| The VCs made plenty of money in the IPO. It's the shareholders
| who are left holding an empty bag.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| VC funds are constantly being spent like this. The main
| unavoidable flow in the other direction is taxes and inflation
| from printing money.
|
| VCs get rich, but they risk a lot of their own money doing so.
| native_samples wrote:
| VCs are generally not risking their own money these days.
| They raise funds from many other people, and sometimes that
| includes <gulp> pension funds.
| astrange wrote:
| Spending your own money is called angel investing. VCs
| spend other people's money.
| s5300 wrote:
| I once had uber x drives (that's what the solo is called
| right?) in San Diego going... at least 5 miles. Sorrento
| Valley/La Jolla.
|
| After a month or two I started having rides discounted to
| literally as low as $3.12
|
| All I could think was that "somebody is definitely losing a lot
| of money here & it's not me"
|
| Was very interesting. I know the driver wouldn't be doing that
| if he was making $3 for the trip.
| rglullis wrote:
| It could also be seen as a very convoluted way to subsidize the
| car industry and to stall the push for better public transit.
| rzz3 wrote:
| I always see people coming back to public transit in
| discussions like this, but there seems to be some kind of
| fundamental disconnect. Uber/Lyft are for people who don't
| have that kind of time.
| rglullis wrote:
| Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand:
| https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis
| tonguez wrote:
| the fundamental disconnect is you aren't actually more
| important than other people just because you were given
| more money
| hef19898 wrote:
| Drivers work gogs, as in not being employees. Traditional taxi
| companies, as shitty as their service might be some places, are
| risking of being driven out of business. Legislation has been
| ignored. Thebonly ones not holding the bag are the VCs, and
| users. Everyone else is. And all that in the pursuit of an
| elusive monopoly fuel by cheap, and later dumb, money. Oh yeah,
| talking about dumb money, retail investors are holding the bag
| as well.
| Permit wrote:
| > Traditional taxi companies, as shitty as their service
| might be some places, are risking of being driven out of
| business.
|
| This is not the downside you think it is. So help me if I
| could snap my fingers and make this happen I just might do
| it.
| gcheong wrote:
| But what makes them so awful? Most likely it was the
| medallion system that limited competition in the market so
| maybe there is a system somewhere in-between that and the
| unprofitable ride share systems that work well for
| everyone. I just got back from Madrid and taxis were
| plentiful and metered with a flat fare to and from the
| airport. They all have the same markings so you can tell
| they are taxis but there are a variety of vehicles from
| Teslas to bare bones stick shifters being used. Uber was
| barely a thing there but there was an app called Free Now
| that many of the cars had on them.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| So basically they had Uber but as a different brand.
|
| If you remove the medallion system, let people drive
| their own cars, and coordinate with riders via an app,
| you have Uber.
| gcheong wrote:
| The difference is there is some regulation around it
| because they are all metered so everyone is charging the
| same rates and I suspect it's a better deal for the
| drivers and customers overall. Btw I didn't use the app
| once as it was just easier to hail from the street.
| Permit wrote:
| Off the top of my head:
|
| - Lying about the debit/credit machine being broken in
| order to receive cash.
|
| - Being unwilling to drive to/from certain neighborhoods.
|
| - Not turning the meter on in order to take advantage of
| people not from the city/country.
|
| - My (possibly incorrect) perception is that they are
| harder to hold to account. I do not always know the
| number of the taxi that picked me up and dropped me off.
|
| - Calling a taxi dispatch does not guarantee one will
| arrive. If service is slow you end up in a strange limbo
| of "Is that taxi late or have I been abandoned at
| 2:30am?"
|
| There's probably more but those are the ones that spring
| to mind based on my personal experiences with taxis. Even
| if Uber was only offered as a premium service I would
| still order one over a taxi.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Isn't that how a majority of inflated startups work? VC money
| moves the bus for a quite a long time and if profitability
| can't be figured out, it will come out in the form of layoffs
| and downturns.
|
| Take Doordash for example, every delivery they do with is
| powered by VC money.
| dasil003 wrote:
| DoorDash IPO'ed 18 months ago.
| lukifer wrote:
| The P2P transportation market is an ideal one for a workers'
| cooperative. The fact that Uber and Lyft are running at a loss
| (...for now) does not make them any less rent-seeking in their
| business model.
|
| https://drivers.coop/
|
| https://ridefair.io/
| itake wrote:
| > ideal one for a workers' cooperative
|
| I am sorry, but there is not way a workers' cooperative can
| build a safe product for passenger and drivers. All of the
| leading rideshare companies have invested 10s if not 100s of
| millions into safety platforms that leverage the latest face
| recognition, fraud algorithms, and more to ensure that everyone
| can have a safe ride.
|
| Both passengers and drivers robbed and murdered each before
| these investments were made to keep the bad guys off and the
| good guys safe.
| igorkraw wrote:
| ...you know why they need to do that? Because they have an
| incentive to let basically anyone join and have an
| adversarial relationship. A workers cooperative can be a
| faceless organisation, but unlike a company it is also an
| _actual_ community, so things like vetting who let in I 'd
| much more feasible to do you'd do in a community than in a
| "startup family" trying to squeeze their drivers. It could be
| as simple as requiring somebody to vouch for you and being
| responsible for whatever fuckups you do.
| tested23 wrote:
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| From the jobs page of the first link for a software engineer
| position: "The position is salaried up to $72,000 a year
| depending on geography. Fixed-term contracts are available."
|
| Sorry, but you're not buying competitive talent with 72k/year
| salary. Uber can squeeze out tons of marginal efficiencies via
| better routing/matching, price discrimination, and surge
| algorithms. Implementing those algorithms means hiring good
| talent, especially in ML. Having a fancy frontend is only 10%
| of the picture if you want drivers to have good utilization.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > edit: and the second link advertises using Postgres, which
| will never scale past the size of a single US state
|
| to be fair depending on the exact implementation details you
| probably could do everything you need, including management
| using Spanner and BigTable.
| hackernewds wrote:
| this assumes Uber can only hire silicon valley engineers.
| $72k is plenty money in a cheap gas/food/rent no state tax
| city like Dallas
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > which will never scale past the size of a single US state
|
| People live in a city and take cabs in that city. Build a
| city-scale app. For extra credit, add federation APIs to
| interoperate with other city-scale worker-owned co-op apps.
|
| Only a tiny 0.1% of people (including Uber's dumb investors)
| think that being able to use the same app in every city on
| earth is a killer feature.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You don't even need multiple apps. Even if a Postgres DB
| only scaled to a single city, which is wrong to begin with,
| you could shard it per city/state/country pretty easily.
| [deleted]
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I think most of those efficiencies can be done better by a
| human dispatcher. The key thing which made Uber take off was
| a combination of convenience and better cars. Solve the
| convenience and that can take you a far way for many people.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I don't really think humans are better equipped to route
| 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences
| for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attractiveness to
| drivers, and traffic. See this research on human solutions
| to the vehicle routing problem: "When comparing the human
| performance with the optimal solution and classical
| heuristics (nearest neighbor, savings, and sweep), we see
| that participants typically perform better than the worst
| heuristic and worse than the best heuristic" [1]. All of
| these algorithms are pretty naive baselines and you can do
| a lot better with actual routing software. And this being a
| low margin winner take all business, Uber being slightly
| better with algorithms makes it substantially better as an
| option compared to the coop.
|
| Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of
| consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good
| dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to
| the entire US?
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S
| 03050...
| mathgladiator wrote:
| All postgres needs to handle is a large metro area and then
| is trivial to shard and scale out.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I would like to read an explanation for how Uber and Lyft can't
| be profitable when taxicab companies can be.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Overhead. Taxi drivers get a return on their time. Uber needs a
| return on payouts which is hard money.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| It is in the article: "Uber and Lyft have been a crude
| proposition all along: Subsidize unprofitable taxi rides with
| venture capital money, claw for market share, and eventually
| figure something out that will make such taxi rides profitable
| despite the huge corporate structure of well-paid executives
| and engineers, a thing traditional taxi companies with already
| razor-thin margins didn't have."
| karaterobot wrote:
| I read the article, but that's not the level of explanation I
| want. I want to know how, for example, at the scale Uber and
| Lyft are operating at, the salaries of executives and
| engineers are more than the efficiencies it seems like they
| would gain. On paper, you shouldn't need to add a linear
| amount of overhead every time move into a new city: with taxi
| companies, you have to add physical buildings, admin,
| dispatchers, service personnel, and a bunch of other costs
| every time. You'd think Uber and Lyft could be a lot leaner
| than taxi companies, even though engineers make more than
| dispatchers: why not?
| yuliyp wrote:
| taxicab companies aren't spending billions of dollars a year on
| bubble-inflated tech salaries.
| smelendez wrote:
| Less overhead. Maybe an office and a garage in a cheap part of
| town and a few dispatchers and potentially a mechanic, etc.
|
| Uber has to maintain its servers and has a massive crew of
| white collar workers in expensive cities writing code,
| maintaining the servers, designing apps, marketing, lobbying,
| litigating, modeling potential business models, etc.
| ashalhashim wrote:
| Taxicab companies don't have to pay the Bay Area salaries of
| engineers, data scientists, MBAs, etc. nor do they have massive
| advertising and marketing overhead.
| relaunched wrote:
| The broker model has a yes out in the transportation industry,
| before Uber and Lyft were a twinkle in someones eye. It's a low
| margin business and has gained efficiency through tech. Once we
| understand that the gross margins are probably 20%, you are
| scalping the drivers and no driver can exist successfully living
| off brokered rides alone, Uber and Lyft will price like CH
| Robinson.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 25. Uber and Lyft Are Out of Ideas, Jacking Up Prices in
| Desperation for Profit (vice.com) 127 points by elsewhen 2
| hours ago | flag | hide | 179 comments
|
| Above is what I saw on the HN front page minutes ago. Then I
| started reading the comments thread and suddenly the submitted
| article has changed. It is now pointing to WSJ instead of VICE.
|
| Looks like the original VICE article has even been scrubbed from
| HN entirely.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=vice.com
|
| Below is the original article.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vmpb/uber-and-lyft-are-out...
| beeboop wrote:
| weird
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the current business model passes off nearly all of the costs
| of actually running a taxi company onto drivers who pay for their
| own cars, fuel, and insurance, whereas AVs would have meant both
| companies would be paying for those things, but that's a moot
| point now
|
| I know that Vice is a meme these days, but I can't resist. Where
| do they think the money is going? Mostly to the fees that are
| paid to drivers. If those costs are baked in and they are still
| losing money, it's because they're paying the drivers more than
| they can afford. They were banking on not having to pay AV
| drivers wages, sick leave, pensions, have them go on strike, etc
| etc. Just provide customers a good service for an amount these
| companies could sustain.
|
| Now, that was a wild bet for sure, but not a bad one for humanity
| to have tried.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Now, that was a wild bet for sure, but not a bad one for
| humanity to have tried.
|
| I think there is a _very literal and material_ sense in which
| it was a quite bad bet for us to have tried. How many tens
| thousands of people skipped medical procedures, lost birthdays
| and holidays with loved ones, and didn 't live as well as they
| could have because of these companies' cynical abuse of their
| labor?
| zouhair wrote:
| > but not a bad bet
|
| What was good about it? They could have worked with existing
| taxi companies to sell their technology to create a better
| market, that would have been a good bet. Betting on making
| everything worse and hoping to profit from it was a horrible
| bet.
|
| If they continue what they are doing, I can't wait for them to
| crash and burn.
|
| Fuck the "Gig economy".
| alar44 wrote:
| They tried that and the big taxi companies weren't
| interested. Similar situation to Blockbuster and Netflix.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Here's my question: how much will this hurt AWS? Oh, Uber and
| Lyft alone won't, of course, even though IIRC their IPO's
| revealed staggering AWS bills. But, there are a lot of goofy
| ideas out there masquerading as companies, and the VC spigot just
| turned off. That spigot was pushing VC money, via a very complex
| system of middlemen, to AWS.
|
| If AWS has half their customers disappear, what does that do to
| Amazon's bottom line?
| hackernewds wrote:
| same for Stripe. and Twilio. and Segment
|
| b2b companies that coasted on free reign will struggle a ton
| hotpotamus wrote:
| A lot of those goofy idea companies convinced everyone else
| that they should spend nearly unlimited amounts on AWS because
| of opex or other reason, and now everyone believes they need to
| migrate to cloud as well. Maybe they do, what do I know? I
| don't feel a need to contribute to that huge margin that AWS
| makes, but based on their growth and the interest from lots of
| legacy businesses in moving to the cloud, I wouldn't be too
| worried about them.
| ajross wrote:
| AWS revenue is mostly per usage, not per customer. A handful of
| ML plays excepted, all those startups were tiny things with
| very little actual resources required. Most of Amazons money
| surely comes from giant customers like Netflix and Facebook
| (hell, even Uber and Lyft are probably lost in the noise, they
| don't stream anything).
| moralestapia wrote:
| >If AWS has half their customers disappear
|
| Nah, they're not even 1% of AWS. Plus AWS is profitable AF.
| hackernewds wrote:
| if 0.01% users are 1% of their revenue, that's a huge
| concerning consolidation. AWS IS indeed in this situation
| when the full discretionary spending sector struggles.
|
| AWS might be super high margins, but it does not exist in a
| vacuum. AWS cross subsidization powers AMZN retail to be able
| to run at a <1% margin.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I don't seem to grasp your point.
|
| >AWS cross subsidization powers AMZN retail to be able to
| run at a <1% margin.
|
| I've never truly understood that number, how come they have
| such low margins where most of the products I see there
| have a 10-20% markup (at least) vs. the same product in
| classic "offline" retailers (costco, walmart, etc...)?
|
| "But they send it to your home", yeah but they charge you
| for that too.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| Of course they need to make money, they cant subsidise everyone
| forever
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vmpb/uber-and-
| lyft-are-out..., which points to this.
| jonthepirate wrote:
| Former Lyft engineer here. I'm convinced they will go out of
| business or sell the scraps to someone... however smart acquirers
| like Elon wouldn't go near it. Rideshare sucks.
| grej wrote:
| If you're arriving at an airport or other high traffic area, you
| will almost always get a better price and timelier service by
| simply jumping in a standard taxi. I'd say this has been the case
| for at least 6-9 months.
| ww520 wrote:
| The airport taxi hates short hop ride. The taxi drivers got
| visibly frustrated and angry after hearing my destination is
| not long distance. I just get a Uber/Lyft to avoid the airport
| cartel.
| mjcohen wrote:
| We live 10 minutes from LAX. Taxi drivers get somewhat
| annoyed, but we give them $20 and that seems to make them
| feel better.
|
| Also, we have a favorite taxi company we use to get to LAX.
| We make reservations a few days in advance, and they have
| always showed up on schedule.
| throwoutway wrote:
| My coworker got yelled at by a taxi driver recently at DCA
| airport for this.
| brokenodometer wrote:
| Which is dumb because DCA is like 10 minutes from downtown,
| so I'm not sure why they would expect most travelers to be
| headed to the suburbs.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Well plenty of fliers will live in the DC suburbs. Only
| the visitors will be going downtown.
| rzz3 wrote:
| That may be true, but I'd much rather ride in an Uber or Lyft
| with less timely service and a higher price, than in a nasty
| yellow Crown Victoria from the dawn of time itself, with that
| ugly, rough, stained interior that smells like cigarettes and
| vomit. Taxis don't even offer phone chargers or water.
|
| IMO, Taxis would have long since died as an industry if it
| weren't for governments propping them up artificially.
| adrr wrote:
| The last Uber I rode in was a beat up Prius that smelled like
| pee. Uber has lowered their standards.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I would ride in a professionally-serviced Crown Victoria over
| a Prius with bald tires, obviously ruined steering joints,
| and no windshield wipers, which is a true and faithful
| description of the last Uber I suffered.
| trimbo wrote:
| Last time I tried taking an Uber from SFO to SF, the quoted
| price was $150.
|
| Taxi downstairs was $40 and was waiting for me to get in.
| Didn't smell like vomit. But if it did, I'd roll down the
| window and remember I'm saving $110 for a 20 minute ride.
| alkonaut wrote:
| A taxi for me is a maximum 1-2 years old black typically
| German car summoned and paid in an app.
|
| If your taxi is a monopoly using old cars, where card readers
| are "broken" and who don't have apps - it's your taxi that is
| broken, not the concept of taxi. Many US and European cities
| have bad taxis, but many also have good taxis.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's not at all my experience in Raleigh in particular.
| Walk to the cab line, get in, pay with card. No fussing
| around with an app and waiting.
| largbae wrote:
| That works when you are at the first point in your trip.
| Now get that taxi to show up in a timely manner at your
| house or the house of someone you visit.
| ghaff wrote:
| I do usually use Lyft for the return. But I'd have no
| trouble using a cab or some car the hotel has contracted
| with for going back to the airport.
| missedthecue wrote:
| By "fussing with an app" you mean about three clicks?
| ghaff wrote:
| Invariably there's some wait which I don't want. Business
| travellers basically want zero friction.
| seunosewa wrote:
| They'd still exist because there is a demand for the service.
| Someone would satisfy the demand.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| Depends on the airport. Cab services in some cities are very
| poor.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/bt3bA
| foobaw wrote:
| I think we need to stop comparing Uber to Lyft. To me, this is
| more of a Lyft problem as Uber has diversified way more.
| gsibble wrote:
| I've had over 10,000 Uber rides, all black, some SUV since 2011.
| I would have no problem if they just focused on the higher end of
| the market where there's profit to be made. I never thought their
| going down market was a good idea.
| hiq wrote:
| > I've had over 10,000 Uber rides, all black, some SUV since
| 2011
|
| 10000/11/365 = 2.5 per day, is this your main means of
| transportation?
| theHNAcct wrote:
| This was always the idea. I remember Jason Calacanis saying on
| This Week In Startups months ago that Uber is in growth mode,
| eventually when push comes to shove they'll increase the price to
| get to profitability and have the market share to stick it out.
| efortis wrote:
| Increased by how much?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Uber is just a dumpster fire. I scheduled an airport ride with
| them and each driver continuously just kept canceling it when
| they saw where it was going. Can't imagine how bad it is for
| someone going to a lower level neighborhood.
|
| Can't count on it anymore - going back to manually calling taxis.
| HappyTypist wrote:
| I just do not understand how ridesharing cannot turn a profit.
| Let's look at unit economics:
|
| ~25% take rate on a ride ($15 average): $3.75 take
|
| Payment processing: 2.5% + 30c = $0.68
|
| Servers / datacenters: $0.20 (for a margin-sensitive business,
| you should be colo'ing your own servers, or using cheap
| alternatives like OVH/Hertzner)
|
| Customer support: Automate as much as possible (auto refunds up
| to a certain point; for lost items, connect directly to driver);
| assume 1 in 50 rides require manual human support with a $3 cost
| = $0.06 support cost per ride
|
| Fraud/refunds: Assume a 2% fraud rate that cannot be reclaimed;
| thus $0.30 cost for fraud. Refunds for things like driver
| purposefully took a longer route can be clawed from the driver.
|
| Gross COGS: $1.24
|
| Gross profit: $2.51
|
| What am I missing?? Marketing? Fuck marketing when you can't turn
| a profit. Everyone knows about Uber or Lyft already, you need to
| turn a profit, not waste $30 per CAC.
| dsr_ wrote:
| You're missing roughly 30,000 employees to run a service that,
| at steady state, probably needs about 30 software developers
| and a few hundred second or third level customer support folks,
| with first level being handled by outsourced local-language
| companies.
|
| And then there's Uber self-driving. Uber AI; Uber electric
| airplanes. Uber freight, Uber restaurant delivery, Uber grocery
| delivery, Uber this and Uber that. Oh, and Uber scooters.
| deeptote wrote:
| oldgregg wrote:
| hope they disinfect between rentals
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| polote wrote:
| The Uber app alone would probably need much more than 30
| developers, see here :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
| michaelt wrote:
| A lot of that is optional complexity, though.
|
| Uber eats? Scooter integration? Mass transit support?
| Scheduled rides? Commuter cards? If you were building the
| app with 30 developers you'd simply not bother with those
| features.
| shukantpal wrote:
| Why are you ignoring the regional differences & the other
| stuff listed above those points in that post?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Companies like eBay have a global footprint and
| send/receive money in dozens of countries. eBay has apps
| for all devices and a website.
|
| Uber has 3x the headcount as eBay.
| true_religion wrote:
| eBay can get away with relying on third parties for
| advertising, selling, and transporting goods. They are
| just an online marketplace.
|
| Uber has to market themselves which needs local
| expertise, if nothing else to liaise with a local PR
| firm. Then they need local legal expertise to actually
| operate in the country (eBay transactions happen online,
| and the transport agency hired by the seller figures out
| how to get the package to its destination). Uber then has
| to have maps for every country it operates in, as well as
| change their standards to match local expectations.
| michaelt wrote:
| I will agree that 'receipts' is part of the core product
| and should be retained. I didn't mention it because I'm
| sure we can agree it's within the capabilities of a
| 30-person team!
|
| I ignored the other stuff because I don't know WTF
| "pickup special cases" or "on-trip experience business
| logic" or "growth features" are. So I'm not informed
| enough to guarantee they aren't part of the core product
| offering - although you can probably guess my intuition
| on the matter.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I can only see giving up on Uber Eats as being foolhardy,
| that is a profitable business with a solid business case,
| yet lacking those other features would not really cause
| me to prefer traditional taxicabs telephone dispatch over
| using an app.
|
| There's legitimately a reasonable argument that Uber
| rides has a worse business case than Uber Eats. If I were
| in Uber's shoes I would be clinging onto both.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's interesting. Because of the aggressive expansion
| from VC money they now have too much bloat making it more
| difficult to be profitable.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Just like Twitter is one guy hacking on RoR for two days...
| we've heard this old canard before.
| redisman wrote:
| It's just some text on the web! And they wonder why
| software engineers are bad at estimates
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| IIUC, Uber employs 2000 engineers. I'm not sure how that's
| only 6% of the company.
|
| If you're looking to trim fat - surprisingly - there might be
| better opportunities outside of engineering.
| paulcole wrote:
| > What am I missing?
|
| Don't forget about lawyers, compliance, lobbying, lawsuits,
| etc., etc. It's also likely your assumptions are very wrong.
| Just think about what will happen when people figure out you
| auto-refund everything below a certain point.
|
| > Fuck marketing
|
| Possibly the bravest thing ever said on HN.
| criddell wrote:
| Uber has a compliance department?
| seydor wrote:
| But then Uber wouldn't be a Tech Company, they would be another
| lowly profitable company.
| hackernewds wrote:
| driver cost is a lot more than $3.75. you think really drivers
| are working for 75% of a $10 ride per active hour? they're
| publicly measured to make 4x that
| hyperhopper wrote:
| He said Uber is taking 3.75. that means the driver is getting
| 11.25.
|
| You flipped the values. The driver is making a bunch, and
| that's per ride, not per hour
| boatsie wrote:
| You're missing very large categories like G&A, R&D etc but just
| look at their most recent SEC 10K or 10Q filings and you can
| see where the money goes.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| I don't think he's missing that. Why does an app to connect
| drivers to passengers that's been around for a decade need
| R&D?
|
| Now this is not about self driving or whatever else, it's
| about a ride hailing app. The point is there is no reason
| ride hailing can't be profitable.
|
| Now, using any company to prop up r&d and investor hype for a
| moonshot, that's a whole other idea...
| tyingq wrote:
| From Uber's Q2/2022 report: Revenue
| 6854 Cost of Revenue 4026
| Operations and Support 574 Sales and Marketing
| 1263 Research and Development 587 General and
| Administrative 632 Depreciation & Amortization 254
| Total Costs 7336
| pid-1 wrote:
| What does Cost of Revenue means?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Mostly the payments to drivers.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Sales and marketing should be labeled price discrimination.
| It's all incentives to match driver earnings and rider costs
| to respective minima (maxima).
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I wonder (and am too lazy too try to find out) what portion
| of sales and marketing is driver-focused. One could maybe
| argue (as the grandparent did) that they should be spending
| less on rider marketing, but marketing to get drivers in the
| door seems pretty important. Dunno what their driver churn
| rate is, but keeping the pool of drivers large is critical
| for their service.
| jelling wrote:
| Bingo. Andrew Chen, formerly of Uber, says exactly that in
| his excellent new book The Cold Start problem. The driver
| side is the hard side of the market and must be constantly
| tended.
| redisman wrote:
| Interesting because the taxi business had all that
| figured out already. It was a profitable business and
| drivers stuck around for decades. Does Uber have too much
| overhead to ever be profitable?
| airstrike wrote:
| Didn't drive stick around because they dropped thousands
| on medallions?
| mattzito wrote:
| Depends on the city/locale. In NYC most drivers don't own
| their medallions, they drive shifts for someone else's
| medallion.
|
| In fact I've had a lot of conversations with Uber and
| taxi drivers who started as taxi drivers, switched to
| Uber when the bonuses were lucrative, and then some of
| them switched back because they liked the predictability
| of a fixed shift and not being ordered around by a
| machine. Others felt exactly the opposite.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| From what I've come to understand you are right on the
| money. All these "sharing economy" models rely heavily on
| churn and burn like many other less than solid business
| models like MLM.
|
| I would love to see the breakdown of drivers and their
| immigration status, because from what I can gather, what is
| happening here is not any different than in the past of
| America's history where the whole business model relies on
| the exploitation of "immigrant" labor that knows no better
| and is easily exploited, aka their unrealized labor value
| is converted into profit, or better states, benefits and
| riches for the executives.
| mjevans wrote:
| Slash Sales and Marketing by 50% and they'd be profitable.
| josefx wrote:
| If I remember correctly they spend a lot of money on
| marketing campaigns against any law that could hurt their
| business model. So slashing marketing might actually hurt
| them even more.
| underwater wrote:
| Sales and marketing affect revenues, you know.
| tomrod wrote:
| Typically not enough to offset 50% of budget once the
| brand is known.
| endisneigh wrote:
| based off what?
| mjevans wrote:
| At this point who hasn't heard of Uber?
|
| They only need some occasional reminders that might be
| targeted at the few people that haven't used or heard of
| friends or family using an Uber before.
| onion2k wrote:
| _At this point who hasn 't heard of Uber?_
|
| Marketing is as much about keeping your customers from
| going to rival providers as it is about finding new
| customers. If you don't want people to leave you need to
| remind them why you're better than the exciting new
| company that's spending VC money to take your market
| share.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Couldn't you say the same for Coca Cola? Yet I'm fairly
| sure that maintenance budget is fairly big.
| treis wrote:
| Coke is somewhat of an impulse purchase. At least it
| needs to be in your mind to buy it at the grocery store.
|
| Conversely, I'm not going to take an Uber ride tomorrow
| because they showed me an ad today. When I need to get
| somewhere I'll look at my options and choose the best. So
| long as Uber meets the minimum level of me being aware of
| it then theyre good.
| bombcar wrote:
| Coke (and Pepsi) marketing is mainly concerned with
| affirming that drinking soda makes you sexy and keeping
| restaurants et al from changing their supplier.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| "Marketing is crucial" is the most important marketing
| message.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Marketing is not what you think it means.
|
| It's a clever way to disguise their unit economics to look
| better.
|
| Their marketing budget is mostly going to pay drivers.
|
| Put another way - you could be saying - why not pay drivers
| EVEN less? Well, they're paying them the least they can
| already. You can be sure of that.
|
| If they did actually paid the drivers more and not disguise
| it as marketing - then their unit economics wouldn't look
| good - and when the business as a whole doesn't look good
| either - that's not a good look.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| They can't, that "S&M" is heavily focused on getting low
| information drivers into the service by smoke and mirrors
| about how wonderful it is to drive for them. They have to
| keep the rate of influx of new drivers at least above the
| rate of people realizing what a bad deal it is for them,
| aka churn.
| tyingq wrote:
| Fyi, should say Q1/22, the report from March/22.
| thraway3837 wrote:
| christophilus wrote:
| I've been in the industry for 20 years. Colo or even running
| your own datacenters. Makes sense at their size.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack in comments. Making
| substantive points without swipes is essential to the kind of
| forum we're hoping to have here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| astrange wrote:
| Uber doesn't make money. The bigger their enterprise is the
| less money they make. They should be firing anyone who says
| they need more complicated systems to scale when the idea
| could run on a PC under their desk.
| rdxm wrote:
| tonyhb wrote:
| Uber's take can average ~45% depending on the day:
| https://missionlocal.org/2021/07/as-rideshare-prices-skyrock...
|
| I agree and am not quite sure where it's going (other than
| software).
| throwoutway wrote:
| They have nearly 30,000 employees, mostly SDEs from what I
| understand. Its been discussed (and rationalized) here, but I
| still don't understand how that many are necessary. I read
| somewhere else that their engineering tend to need to rewrite
| their software every two years to keep up with the scale, so
| maybe they need them? it still seems insane to me.
|
| Lyft only has 4500 employees
| ProjectBarks wrote:
| Uber has 3500 ish engineers. Then a huge amount of
| operations personal.
|
| Best source I could find:
| https://www.themuse.com/profiles/uber/team/engineering
| mathgladiator wrote:
| This blows my mind. I used to use Uber a bunch, and I
| built relationships with drivers such that I could just
| text them and get a ride at a certain time for a
| discount.
|
| Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if
| drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build
| a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if
| drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build
| a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
|
| Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just
| that.
|
| I was going to provide just one example, but a web
| search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a
| variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web
| search results here.
|
| [0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=ride%20share%20coo
| perativ...
| dopidopHN wrote:
| 2 city unions did that in France. In marseille and Lyon.
|
| Last time I tried the Lyon app it was barebone and not
| really up to par with Uber by a large margin. But still.
| nerdponx wrote:
| My impression is that this is what the Curb and Arro apps
| were supposed to be. I don't know anybody who uses them.
| rzz3 wrote:
| You're missing the cost of engineering, for one thing. Also
| "host Uber at OVH" isn't remotely realistic.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| For a simplified version of the app with arguably no worse
| user experience, it's not THAT farfetched.
|
| Uber has an absurd amount of logging & analytics.
|
| If the app was simply drop a pin, get a ride - it wouldn't be
| that crazy.
|
| Uber has 3.9M drivers world wide. There's probably very
| rarely more than 1M drivers active at any time. Probably less
| than 300k people looking for a ride at the vast majority of
| times.
|
| Assuming you can update the driver's location 1 time per
| minute - that's ~1.5B requests per day - less than 25k
| requests per second (including user bookings).
|
| That's like ~2TB of bandwidth per day. That's less than $200
| per day. Almost everyone spends more than 5% of their cloud
| bill on bandwidth. Meaning, the rest of a drastically
| simplified (but nearly equally useful) Uber _could_ run for
| ~$4000 per day in server expenses.
|
| That's a $1.4M / year data center. Uber has revenues of
| >$11B.
|
| They _could_ be making a lot of money. They just aren 't
| because they're spending AT LEAST 50x more on servers and
| product engineering than they NEED to.
|
| They paid for growth for a long time. They have a monopoly
| now. There's not a lot of growth left to get. At some point
| the axe will come down.
|
| Lyft is even worse. They're ~1/3rd the size.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| It's also a denial strategy. The bleeding edge that also
| forces your competitors out of the market because they
| cannot get past the network effect and name recognition
| hurdle is worth its weight in gold.
|
| Most people will say they're going to get an Uber, even if
| they end up having to use Lyft, no? Ubers, as well as
| others', expressed strategy has long been not only first
| mover, but also monopolization of all aspects of their
| space, expressly anti-competitive. Part of that is not only
| being the leader, first to mind, but also draining the
| enemy/competitor's resources and undermining their efforts
| to even challenge you. It's a total market domination
| strategy that shouldn't even be allowed, but they've also
| paid off politicians and captured government in other ways
| too, so don't expect anything from there either. There used
| to be other ride sharing services, I don't even know if
| they exist anymore, but even before the Great
| Monopolization, aka COVID, they were barely scraping by on
| crumbs in a few local markets while the likes of Uber
| worked in basically every market, especially in the high
| spending business travel and entertainment segments.
| joneholland wrote:
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I'll build you a better, leaner, Uber-clone for the low
| low bargain price of a mere billion dollars. VCs PM for
| term sheets.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Comments like _this_ , boring and dismissive and with
| absolutely no effort put into them (often responding to
| one that _does_ have a lot of effort in it), are _not_
| big HN energy and don 't belong here. Zero value.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's a horrible business - why would I even want to enter
| it? And if I was insane and did, why would anyone use my
| Uber app?
|
| Uber is a monopoly that already has all the drivers and
| spent $10B+ to aquire them - plus all the riders -
| they're already trained to open that app - already have
| it downloaded. No one can compete with that without
| spending $1B+ - at which point - you'd need a 50% margin
| for years just to return the value. Maybe I'm uncreative,
| but I cannot think of a worse business to enter.
|
| It's equally amusing to me that you seem to assume Uber
| is efficient just because it's a public company.
|
| Sure, GE and IBM don't waste money either.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| It is a terrible business at large scale.
|
| A smaller and leaner model could work at small scale by
| focusing on via drivers focusing on their returns with
| word of mouth marketing.
|
| If you use Uber a bunch, then it is a great way for good
| drivers to get repeat business privately. A simple
| platform which is driver-friendly which focused on the
| whale customers (like myself when I was spending $500/mo+
| for commuting) could squeeze the Uber even more. When I
| started working with a few drivers via text, I was able
| to save money whilst the driver made more money
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Surely you don't think a modern and complex app requires
| just a single API endpoint that triggers once a minute? And
| that it's that simple a thing for the driver/ passenger?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Surely you don't think there's another endpoint that's
| getting hit an order of magnitude more to change the
| point?
|
| Multiply by 3 for redundancy & availability. Multiply by
| 3 for other endpoints. You're not even 10x...
|
| And this was not Uber as it exists. This is a simplified
| version of Uber that gives the user a nearly equal
| experience.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| You're way overoptimistic in your expenses calculation -
| Maintaining a "real-time" app is 100x more complex than
| that.
|
| 100x, bringing their opex to hundreds of millions on
| billions of revenue. They should still be able to cut the
| fat and actually turn a handy profit, but they won't.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No one needs real-time (above 1 minute) driver locations.
|
| Riders never see the driver's location before booking.
|
| Uber doesn't need the exact location to get a decent
| match.
|
| And anyway - they send the ride to several drivers and
| the lowest / first bidder wins.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| What is the set of information that makes you say this?
| Because I would put money that Uber's data team has run
| an experiment with lower realtime status updates
| (realtime is expensive, these companies aren't filled
| with idiots, they test things). And based on that, I
| think it's reasonable to assume that critical metrics are
| negatively impacted by not having realtime updates.
|
| So I'm curious if you have any knowledge, or if what you
| are saying is "I don't need realtime", or perhaps more
| charitably, "I can't imagine realtime being valuable to
| users". I push back on the 2nd, and I strong push back on
| the idea that someone with can reach the conclusion that
| Uber is wasting money on things that don't drive user
| value.
|
| Unless, of course, you work/worked there and worked on
| these projects, and saw firsthand that Uber decided to
| waste a bunch of money internally.
| lumost wrote:
| In a major metro like Boston 1 minute further down the
| road could mean a 5 minute longer wait. I think your
| point stands however with 6x traffic increase to once
| every 10 seconds.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| You only need to update the location if the driver is
| moving. IIUC, most drivers are stagnant while they wait
| for rides.
|
| They're in the business of saving gas. Not cruising
| around idly while they wait for a ride.
|
| Sure - some drivers are finishing a trip nearby. But you
| know the route they are taking...
| HappyTypist wrote:
| Okay, OVH is not realistic, but at Uber scale, you can
| certainly roll your own data-centres and get costs lower
| than, or similar to OVH, even when including the cost of
| sysadmin and maintenance.
|
| Yes, it means you won't get all the shiny quality of life
| services offered by cloud providers, but you're in a _margin
| sensitive business_. Deal with it. Optimize every cost.
|
| Also, you don't need expensive engineers re-inventing the
| most basic things (I know Uber had a huge not-invented-here
| syndrome). Use the boring tools for the job. Only reinvent
| what is necessary. You don't need engineers practicing
| resume-driven-development.
| bthrn wrote:
| Uber _does_ use its own data centers.
| rockarage wrote:
| It can turn a profit, but not the sort of profit the investors
| and top stake holders want i.e. Microsoft and Google type
| margins and profit.
| modeless wrote:
| I recently got a ridiculous coupon code for 50% off Postmates
| (Uber Eats) orders, when I did a Google search for Postmates. 5
| orders, up to $100 savings on each order, and the code worked on
| my wife's account too so we get 10 orders. For weeks I've been
| ordering $200 meals from fancy steakhouses and paying $100, with
| leftovers for days. Somehow they haven't stopped subsidizing
| their customers yet.
|
| The code is FEAST if anyone cares to try it. Probably expired by
| now. It doesn't seem to work on Uber Eats, only Postmates.com on
| desktop web.
| 0x53 wrote:
| Wow, just looked this up and this is insane. Guess I'm gonna be
| eating out for a bit. Thanks for the tip
| lumost wrote:
| If they stop subsidizing, then revenue growth may slow, stop,
| or turn negative. If the latter happened to Uber/Lyft for even
| a quarter, they may struggle to continue operations. After all,
| what's worse than a business losing billions of dollars? A
| shrinking business losing billions of dollars.
| tablespoon wrote:
| So have they hit price-parity with traditional taxis, yet?
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| ravenstine wrote:
| I've been noticing more drivers going independent. When I landed
| at LAX recently and waited at the taxi area for a Lyft, there
| were a bunch of drivers coming up and offering people rides, but
| not through Uber or Lyft. I thought "why not", took one of these
| independent rides home, and paid the guy through Square. It
| wasn't a "cheap" ride, but it was cheaper than the Lyft ride I
| cancelled and I'm sure he made a greater profit than through a
| "ride share" company.
|
| That's just one example, but I've noticed this drastically
| increase in the last year. Whether I'm at the airport, a train
| station, or a bus depot, I've been seeing way more independent
| drivers.
|
| What's stopping more drivers from doing this? If it's the "trust"
| aspect that comes from Uber, then surely there's some system that
| can meet us halfway that doesn't apparently need large sums of VC
| money and high fees but at least provides trust and safety for
| riders.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Doesn't that make you an illegal taxi?
| paulcole wrote:
| What do you think Uber was for years and years?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's different when you're a large company with a legal
| team doing something not clearly illegal - than when you're
| a single individual doing something clearly illegal.
|
| You didn't have to have a taxi medallion to be a black car
| driver and pick people up at locations upon request -
| which, originally, is what Uber was, exactly.
|
| The whole point of a taxi medallion is to be able to pick
| people up off the street - which is what these independent
| drivers at the airport and train stops are doing.
| paulcole wrote:
| > It's different when you're a large company with a legal
| team doing something not clearly illegal - than when
| you're a single individual doing something clearly
| illegal.
|
| If this is sarcasm it's too subtle for me to recognize.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's not.
|
| Black cars picked up people upon request. They weren't
| taxis. That was Uber's core business. It wasn't
| regulated.
|
| They don't pick people up off the street. That's the taxi
| business. It's heavily regulated.
|
| It was never clear Uber was an illegal business, and it's
| never been ruled that it is.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| I'm all for scrappy bootstrapers but the middle aged adult in
| me just sees a licensing and insurance nightmare.
| almost_usual wrote:
| There's the risk they take you somewhere and rob you. Happened
| to someone I know in NYC.
| loceng wrote:
| So does this mean it's going to begin to become cheaper to use
| the services of old taxi organizations, who arguably aren't going
| to have the shareholders to appease to to pad revenues with
| profits?
|
| I really think, in all cases of online platforms, that laws
| requiring the platform to be transparent with all costs -
| including how much they keep as a platform, how much they give
| the actual driver, how much the restaurant gets (if doing
| delivery) etc. would be highly beneficial, if not necessary, to
| not only society but also to potential investors.
|
| E.g. How sustainable are their prices, and are the billions
| invested simply subsidizing lower fares to outcompete based on
| price for a temporary time while fighting over to capture as much
| of a market (artificially and temporarily?) until the
| shareholders come knocking asking for the profit tap to get
| turned on?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Why? It was "transparent" from the day that Uber and Lyft went
| public that they weren't profitable and losing billions .
|
| They were always Ponzi schemes and retail investors who naively
| believed the hype were the "biggest fools".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Wait a minute! That was just temporary while the service
| hyperscaled. I read on HN that Elon Musk's fully self aware
| self-driving would take over from drivers starting in 2019
| and cost like $9,000!
| loceng wrote:
| It's the VC-finance industrial complex, where the incentives
| aren't aligned with the sources of the money.
|
| Arguably being transparent at the per-transaction level which
| allow everyone and their mother to then do simple math to
| understand that such a business model isn't sustainable - but
| they're not currently paying enough attention, just in a very
| shallow way - they see Uber or Lyft on the news plenty, maybe
| use the services themself - until it's too late.
|
| All of this should be educating people giving their money to
| institutions or stockbrokers to make sure their money and
| whomever they're giving the power to dictate where it goes is
| aligned with long-term results, and arguably not at all on
| per-transaction buy/sell actions.
|
| I think a lot of our problems today stem from there being
| such an abundance of wealth/riches that enough people could
| become lazy and relatively inattentive with their money,
| blindly trusting others without understanding the underlying
| mechanisms enough - and perhaps blindly believing government
| institutions like the SEC would protect them - instead
| perhaps trusting long-time existing brand names as some sort
| of measure of trust.
|
| Bitcoin et al are the next evolution the VC-finance
| industrial complex has latched onto quite successfully, so
| far.
| scarface74 wrote:
| For the most part, unsophisticated investors aren't buying
| individual stocks. They are buying mutual funds and most of
| them are buying index funds. Neither Uber or Lyft are part
| of the S&P.
|
| Only "qualified investors" are allowed to buy pre-IPO stock
| and they should know what they are doing. If they lost
| money, it's on them.
|
| Even if you did what you suggested, how should a company
| allocate fixed expenses? Allocate per mile?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Uber cratered the value of the taxi medallion. The main benefit
| the medallion gave you was the right to pick people up on the
| street, unlike other kinds of car services that you had to call
| for. Since anyone using a taxi could probably afford a cell
| phone and a credit card, taxis were vulnerable. Does this mean
| that the cost of entry into the taxi business is lower? Sure.
| Will it matter? WHo knows.
| loceng wrote:
| These industries usually get captured via regulation imposed
| by lobbyists of the biggest players, to make the barrier of
| entry more costly to keep out potentially new entrants.
|
| I know a few taxi drivers who are medallion holders - which
| are now worthless - they of course have been put in a shit
| position, and the Cities don't particularly care anymore
| because whatever lobby structure that got the medallions in
| place to begin with basically no longer exists - they're not
| necessary to get today's lobbyist funded politicians into
| play, positions of power.
| d23 wrote:
| Seems unsurprising. The check had to come due eventually. It'll
| be interesting to see whether riders keep using it in enough
| volume to keep them afloat.
| tootie wrote:
| Aside from them spending money on boondoggle after boondoggle,
| these guys both still have no moat. They had to burn a ton of
| cash buying up competitors and there's absolutely nothing
| stopping a third player from entering and eating their lunches.
| The core premise of hailing taxis via GPS is very simple and
| very appealing. The could have run these as lean, low-margin
| businesses and earned a tidy profit forever, but instead they
| decided to play the valuation game.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It wasn't about taxis, man, it was changing everything.
|
| Listen to the old Ben Thompson podcasts from when Uber was
| taking over life itself. Private cars, self driving, blah
| blah blah. Why go to a restaurant when Uber can fly one to
| you?
| walrus01 wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see in a number of cities where
| traditional medallion licensed yellow taxis almost entirely
| disappeared, and the drivers went to go be Uber or Lyft for a
| period of some years, how much of it reverts back to the
| traditional system of taxis. I can foresee something like a lot
| of heavily used 300,000 mile Honda Accords with all city miles
| on them getting sold cheap. Buyer beware.
| tootie wrote:
| The medallion system was completely broken before the ride
| apps appeared. Traditional car services were reliable and
| easy to reach via phone. A lot of them have still survived.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's more expensive but I always use a traditional car
| service to get to the airport. Super-reliable, comfortable,
| clean, good drivers. They're always pre-scheduled (which is
| fine for the airport) but I've never had problems with
| getting them to make changes when flight stuff happens.
| jeffbee wrote:
| What are they going to do when they can't get parts for
| those Lincolns?
| walrus01 wrote:
| the same thing all the car services in NYC are doing now
| with luxury SUVs with leather seats and such? you rarely
| see an actual _town car_ now.
| bsder wrote:
| Every "car service" I know of has changed over to some
| level of electric/hybrid car.
|
| The gasoline economics were far too compelling even
| before this round of gas price gouging.
| walrus01 wrote:
| In Vancouver BC where petrol costs have always been
| considerably higher than the other side of the border in
| WA, taxis switched almost entirely to Prius as far back
| as 2004. Even before that it was very common to see CNG
| modified taxis.
| ghaff wrote:
| Why would it be any different from auto/auto part supply
| chains in general? (Which, yes, from personal experience
| are a considerable issue at the moment.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's different because they stopped making Lincolns, so
| the clock is running.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| There are plenty of other vehicles. Yes, the limo
| companies liked the unibody limos but there's no shortage
| of different models they can use. I'm certainly not
| especially picky in general.
| seydor wrote:
| So they made a full circle ... back to taxis?
| walrus01 wrote:
| > The fundamental problem Uber and Lyft keep running into is that
| most people are not willing to pay the fares it would cost to run
| a profitable taxi service with the overhead Uber and Lyft require
|
| [surprisedpikachu.gif]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You mean this was all a scam to enrich early shareholders and
| incinerate $30B+ in capital!?
|
| _pearl clutching intensifies_
| carapace wrote:
| You left out the part where they're siphoning capital from
| their drivers:
|
| > Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the
| "sharing economy").
|
| > They don't pay the cost of their capital.
|
| > The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the
| depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the
| drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum
| wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not
| enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
|
| > These business models are ways of draining capital from the
| economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors
| and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money
| now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total
| costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash
| now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
|
| https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-
| the...
| walrus01 wrote:
| yeah sadly it seems to be a scam on the people who don't do
| the fully-loaded cost per mile of operating a modern sedan
| in city traffic, including the purchase cost of the car,
| repairs and maintenance, fuel, tires, subtracting the
| eventual small resale value of a 250,000+ mile "used up"
| ex-Uber car.
| moralestapia wrote:
| always_has_been.jpg
| walrus01 wrote:
| Writing as somebody who was working in network engineering
| and IT/tech stuff during the dotcom 1.0 VC funded boom and
| crash from 1997-2002 none of this is particularly surprising.
|
| it sure has been amusing to watch, however.
|
| maybe we can pay for future uber and lyft rides in beenz and
| flooz
| dotcoma wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
| ghaff wrote:
| The incineration was just a byproduct.
|
| I do wonder in so many of these cases, how much is:
|
| - Completely cynical fleece the suckers
|
| - Irrational optimism that things will be different because
| self-driving or whatever
|
| - Fake it till you make it (which is related but slightly
| different)
| IgorPartola wrote:
| More or less, though it did move the needle forward. Now most
| taxi services are easier to use thanks to Uber. But they were
| always in the business of selling dollar bills for $0.90.
| Soon as they want to make a profit it turns out to be more
| expensive than running a local taxi service and they aren't
| price competitive. In the meantime taxi services got their
| own apps/app integrations while maintaining their competitive
| advantage.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on where one leaves.
|
| I am yet to board a Uber and have used taxis quite a lot in
| the last 30 years.
| [deleted]
| alphabettsy wrote:
| This was inevitable without automation right?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Inevitable even with automation. As the article points out,
| automation would mean they'd have to actually own, maintain,
| insure, etc. the cars.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Automation was always a form of "investor story time". Going
| from a software company to a logistics company that has to
| buy, store, and maintain a fleet of vehicles across hundreds
| of cities was never going to happen even if they figured out
| full self driving.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Western countries have such a weird problem
|
| A seemingly boring business seems unviable.
|
| For example, food is expensive, and we have to tip, but
| restaurant is tough business, and the servers don't make enough
| for living. Like why the heck is this not viable?
| alar44 wrote:
| Well, that's just not true.
|
| I'm in the Midwest and a server at a decent restaurant can pull
| in $300/night in tips.
| ergocoder wrote:
| I have been told that we tip because servers can't make a
| living.
|
| If we don't tip, we are killing them.
|
| Why do we tip 20% again? It seems like we can tip 5% and the
| servers would still make bank.
| [deleted]
| slaw wrote:
| At markets where Uber has competition. I know Brazil and Mexico.
| DiDi pays driver more and charges client less. So DiDi takes less
| cut than Uber and is still profitable.
| daenz wrote:
| Are traditional taxicab services still alive? How did they
| survive until this time?
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They win bids for Medicaid car services and airport
| concessions.
|
| Plus, there's a 50 year old woman making $19/hour to smoke
| cigarettes and dispatch cars, a mechanic, and a bookkeeper.
| woodruffw wrote:
| They're still alive (albeit damaged) in NYC, and in most large
| cities I've visited. The answer is simple: they don't have
| thousands of expensive software engineers doing god-knows-what
| as overhead.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Or all the servers etc.
|
| They just needed a (usually tiny) little office and 1 person
| to answer the phone.
| gruez wrote:
| >They just needed a (usually tiny) little office and 1
| person to answer the phone.
|
| That also makes for terrible ux. One of the things
| ridesharing apps got right was the ux, ie.
|
| 1. being able to hail a cab via app, and see its ETA in
| real time
|
| 2. being able to pay with credit card, without fear that
| the machine "broke"
|
| 3. a rating system to weed out bad drivers
|
| 4. after-ride support
| woodruffw wrote:
| All of these things can be (and are) true _and_ it can be
| true that Uber and Lyft appear to have an order of
| magnitude more engineers than they need.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- in my city the remaining cab companies have contracts with
| hospitals/the city/companies - can always find a cab outside
| the dialysis clinic - when I asked why a driver told me the
| dispatch company accepts a chit from the clinic --
| bdcravens wrote:
| Sometimes they offer a better service. Flew to Honolulu, called
| Uber. No one grabbed it for 15 minutes. I grabbed a cab that
| was there at the airport.
|
| Also many cab services have started leveraging apps like zTrip.
| bitwize wrote:
| zTrip sounds identical to an app I envisioned in 2010 I
| called "Yo Taxi!" It would take your phone-reported GPS
| location and send it out to one of the affiliated taxi
| services (depending on who serves that location, cost, etc.)
| who would dispatch a cab to that point.
|
| I'm kind of glad "Yo Taxi!" exists in some form now, what
| with the wheels (figuratively) falling off Uber and Lyft.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my experience by cutting corners wherever possible but that
| leaves a bad reputation. Cars that were beat up, sometimes just
| didn't show up, no GPS or knowledge of streets, cash payments
| to avoid some taxes, avoiding unprofitable locations or rides,
| etc. Uber and Lyft aimed for a better brand image but that is
| at odds with cheap costs.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I've never had a beat up taxi, but NYC might be an outlier in
| that regard (due to the yellowcab fleet + TLC regulation).
| The part about avoiding unprofitable locations is certainly
| true, however.
|
| OTOH, I've taken a decent number of sketchy Lyft and Uber
| rides: ones where the driver was clearly not the person on
| the account (possibly a relative?), where the car didn't
| match, etc. All in medium to large US cities.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| A lot of people pool these services.
| Uber/lyft/DoorDash/etc.
|
| There's a ton of hustles. Sometimes they'll hang a bunch of
| phones in a tree near a strategic location to get gigs.
|
| It gets to the real problem. If you get in an accident in
| an Uber and get hurt, there's a high likelihood that you're
| fucked.
| dagw wrote:
| NYC has some of the most beat up taxis I've seen, only
| place I've been that compares is probably Cairo.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The comparison to Uber in NYC isn't yellow cabs but the
| call taxi companies which were as I described. Yellow taxis
| were non-existent outside Manhattan and even then couldn't
| be scheduled conveniently. Even the yellow cabs often
| refused to pick up people based on appearance/race, refused
| to drop off outside Manhattan and had conveniently broken
| credit card readers. That's not even getting into the true
| "gypsy" cabs (as they were called) which had no TLC
| licenses.
| vips7L wrote:
| > refused to drop off outside Manhattan
|
| I recently had a taxi refuse to take me from the Vegas
| Strip to a friends house on the North side. It's because
| they'll have to drive back to the city center without a
| ride.
| bitwize wrote:
| In the Boston area, taxi drivers often ask you two things:
|
| 1) Where you goin'?
|
| 2) How do you get there?
|
| Which is... if you're new to the area or going someplace new,
| how do you answer that second one?
| rzz3 wrote:
| That's to scam you. Either you know how to get there, or
| you don't and they'll take the long way to run up the
| meter.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I wonder how much of this transfers to the music industry. It's
| much more complicated than the taxi industry, but in broad
| strokes, VC-subsidized companies basically undercut the
| combination of record publishers and musicians, setting the price
| and revenue-per-listen to levels much lower than they would have
| been without subsidization. But it's also been happening for
| longer, so I think that it's more like as-if all the taxi drivers
| had already been driven out of the business and the taxis junked.
| With taxis, you know if there are no rides available, but with
| music, you don't really realize all the great music that isn't
| being written.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I always figured by now there would be some sort of centralized
| "trust" entity, ala credit bureaus, where you can build apps on
| top of that using the same "trust".
|
| Supposing such a thing existed, then drivers could simply offer
| their own driving services by themselves. Perhaps that's the next
| evolution here.
|
| I used to drive a pretty boring, but predictable route in the
| morning and in the late afternoon. I would've loved to drive
| people who are near my destination both ways, but without anyway
| to trust them, no way.
|
| Surely someone has tried to implement this before and failed and
| I just don't know?
| curiousllama wrote:
| It totally exists, it's just not a tech company
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slugging
| endisneigh wrote:
| huh. I've never heard of this. thanks for the link. though,
| what I'm describing ideally could be beyond driving. the same
| sort of "trust" would also be helpful for selecting someone
| to take care of your children, clean your house, etc.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I swear this country is going to try to implement all of
| the worst aspects of China's authoritatiran system and
| claim it's all 'ok' because it's capitalist and to serve
| business instead of the govt.
|
| Implementing a Chinese style societal "social credit"
| system is not a good thing. Even if it would make it a bit
| cheaper to undercut Uber. Making every action and
| interation you have in life tracked and rated is not a net
| plus. The constant visibility and permanance of everything
| is part of why middle school and high schoolers are having
| such trouble now. They can't develop as teenagers as they
| are already part way to living in '1984' with every action
| tracked via social media.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-
| system-p...
|
| > The Chinese Communist Party has been constructing a moral
| ranking system for years that will monitor the behavior of
| its enormous population -- and rank them all based on their
| "social credit."
|
| > But at the moment the system is piecemeal and voluntary,
| though the plan is for it to eventually be mandatory and
| unified across the nation, with each person given their own
| unique code used to measure their social credit score in
| real-time, per Wired.
|
| > The exact methodology is a secret -- but examples of
| infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking
| zones, buying too many video games, and posting fake news
| online, specifically about terrorist attacks or airport
| security.
|
| > Authorities banned people from purchasing flights 17.5
| million times by the end of 2018, according to the National
| Public Credit Information Centre, as the Guardian reported.
|
| > And in July of 2018, a Chinese university denied an
| incoming student his spot because the student's father had
| a bad social credit score for failing to repay a loan.
|
| *Please* fellow tech people. Whether you work in ML, DS, or
| software for a random business or open source project
| please think through the societal impact and long-run end
| state of what you propose and produce. We really have to
| move past the days of "I'm just an engineer I'll only focus
| on the tech and ignore the impact of my work on society".
| Implementing China's societal wide social credit system is
| a bad path. And of course the argument will be, "well
| anyone who doesn't want to use it doesn't have to". And
| then that will turn into, "well most companies offer
| discounts if you use it." Then to "well most companies
| offer higher rates if you don't use it". Then "most
| companies won't serve you if you don't use it". Then it's
| universal in society just as if govt mandated, but people
| will consider it less horrific because it was slipery slope
| implemented vs via a mandate.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's not about capitalism - it's about trust. If you're
| meeting up with strangers how exactly can you do so
| safely?
| hackernewds wrote:
| Through a credit system that is centralized, just like
| China's credit system. Except it's not even run by
| elected officials so there's no representation.
|
| it's a terrible idea and Boiled Cabbage makes a very good
| point
| endisneigh wrote:
| So you're against the idea of Uber, eBay, Care, Lyft,
| etc? Since what I'm describing already exists. Not to
| mention the credit bureaus. You'd prefer arbitrariness?
| If anything a single place for the trust would be better
| as it would be more thoroughly examined.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are there any open source solutions that could enable this to
| be offered as a non profit platform?
| synu wrote:
| That was really common at Microsoft in the late 90s (and may
| still be) to be able to use the HOV lanes when driving from
| Redmond to Seattle. It worked well because you were picking
| up colleagues, which sort of established a certain level of
| trust.
| filoleg wrote:
| I don't know how it is now, because I've left since then.
| But in pre-covid times, Microsoft was pushing/advertising
| this carpool app they partnered with called Scoop. Similar
| idea, except it can include workers from other companies as
| well, and it isn't for making money for the driver, but
| just to cover the cost of gas + to be able to use the HOV
| lane.
|
| As a passenger, you schedule your approximate time to go to
| work (or from work, or both, depending on how you want to
| use it), and the app matches you with a driver for the next
| morning who is going to about the same area, but maybe a
| different building. So they pick you up, drop you off, and
| go along their merry way, and you are only out of about
| $5-7 or so (that was the rate for going from Seattle
| downtown to Redmond, which is about a factor of 6-8 cheaper
| than an uber/lyft was at the time).
|
| I used it as both a driver (a few times) and as a passenger
| (many times). Feels like a pretty great idea that worked
| well. If I was driving, I didn't mind a 5 minute reroute to
| pick up or drop off someone nearby, and those $7 + (more
| importantly) HOV lane access were totally worth it. I
| estimated that the HOV lane access alone saved me
| significantly more time than I lost by going out of my way
| to pick up/drop off the passenger. And the fact that those
| people are guaranteed to not be randos, but either other
| MSFT employees or employees of other nearby companies made
| it much more trustworthy for me (the app required work
| email to sign up).
|
| Obviously, this wasn't meant to be an uber/lyft
| alternative, as it is only useful for going to/from work
| and only during specific days/hours. And you gotta
| schedule/get matched with a driver the night before, you
| cannot just wake up and spontaneously get a ride. Which
| makes sense given the context, because people typically
| want to have their commute to work planned the night
| before.
| woodruffw wrote:
| My understanding is that it's also still very common in
| DC's beltway, for similar reasons (lots of civil servants
| going to similar areas, living nearby each other).
| bdcravens wrote:
| I've had many Uber drivers give me a business card.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The whole point of Uber is that you don't have to call around
| for a ride, though; a rolodex of business cards is not a good
| substitute for Uber.
| bdcravens wrote:
| At the end of the day all we want is reliability and
| convenience. Sometimes one-to-one business gives you that.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| > reliability
|
| > Sometimes
|
| I garuntee you the reliability of the Uber network of
| drivers is higher than a single person who may be asleep
| when you need them.
|
| I've lived in NYC and I've lived in < 2k person remote
| towns where business card drivers are more common than a
| Lyft. Trying to deal with the individuals in the small
| towns is always a nightmare
| angmarsbane wrote:
| Waze Carpool!
| arkokoley wrote:
| I used to do that with QuickRide in Bangalore. Very popular and
| fairly simple to use. As a rider, you can put up your origin
| and destination points. You are shown people with cars who have
| a high overlap with your origin-destination route and you can
| send them requests to join. Usually 1/4th the price of a cab
| and the app has information about where each rider/car owner
| works (mostly MNCs), that works as a trust factor.
|
| https://quickride.in/
| hackernewds wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to kidnap victims with high paying
| jobs
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Surely someone has tried to implement this before and failed
| and I just don't know?
|
| In Europe there is BlaBlaCar
| Raed667 wrote:
| In France, there was an attempt at something close to this
| concept[0].
|
| Despite having thousands of people doing my same commute, I
| have never been able to to get anyone to drive me to/from work.
|
| [0] https://blablacardaily.com/
| baisq wrote:
| That works in Spain and it's more or less the same. Of
| course, Spain is a much poorer country, so it makes more
| sense to share a vehicle there.
| marwatk wrote:
| Isn't this the plot of a Black Mirror episode?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| A chicken and egg problem of data acquisition. If I'm a user,
| why would I share data to such a service without concrete
| services to unlock? If I'm a service provider, why would I pay
| for a service without users?
|
| Really such data is obtained only by service providers, credit
| bureaus being an edge case. And if I've built a service that
| acquires such data, why would I sell it rather than build more
| services to sell?
| ghaff wrote:
| At one point, I think people did this crossing the Bay Bridge
| in SF. It didn't need a VC-funded startup with a bunch of
| expensive engineers though. I think people just parked in a
| known location and people pooled.
| zten wrote:
| I remember there being signs on Spear St at Folsom with
| specific destinations for carpools. I can see them on Google
| Street View in 2021, but they appear to be removed in 2022.
| (or maybe they're designated on the paper you can't read on
| street view right now?)
| ghaff wrote:
| Never had a need myself but a friend in the East Bay way
| back when mentioned to me once.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Never used it myself but I think it is this:
| https://sfcasualcarpool.com/ Found that at
| https://511.org/carpool which includes a few alternatives
| as well
| memco wrote:
| There was Waze carpool, which I used as a passenger. It was not
| meant to be profitable as a source of income for drivers, but
| helped cover the cost of gas and such. I don't remember the
| exact sign up requirements but both the driver and rider had a
| decision in who to pick up, when and where. Not sure if it's
| still in existence but it sounds like it would be worth a look
| for you.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Waze was bought by Google. They're allowed to coexist, but
| got squashed as a competitor into irrelevance
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| I can proudly say that I've NEVER ONCE used these NeoSlavery
| services and never will.
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