I’m not sure what their overall losses have been, but Lyft lost $911 million in 2018 (against $2.2 billion in revenue).
It is an example of what I asked for. I am still skeptical that Uber can successfully become that kind of business, but you are correct that the business model exists and is functional.
A lot less? I mean, I don’t know for sure, but it’s interesting that we take very different positions on that $10 billion number. You see it as a major competitive moat. If Uber had to spend that much to get its user base, then it will be really hard for a competitor to come in. I see it as evidence of weakness. The only way Uber got those customers is by selling services at less than their costs. They chose the most expensive way possible to get people to install their app. And as soon as they stop being able to sell below costs (or, as soon as a competitor comes along who can beat them on cost structure), they are in serious trouble. They will have pissed away billions with little to show for it.
It is worth noting that Ford and General Motors each own a majority share in a self-driving car company that’s running a taxi service. Now, it’s obviously early days, so that doesn’t mean they won’t end up leasing cars to other services. But I think the allure of capturing the entire market is going to be pretty captivating.
If we do end up with with separate manufacturing/leasing/operations companies, we still have to make the case that Uber will somehow win a lot of that market and be able to extract lots of excess profits from it. That seems pretty unlikely to me. “70 million people have an app installed” is not a $10 billion moat.
I think it was in early 2000 that some newspaper columnist made a firm prediction that Amazon would be out of business in 6 months. And there was lots of speculation of the kind, would Amazon ever turn a profit?
Of course, lots of online companies did go out of business. Prediction is hard, especially of the future.
Of course, this isn’t the first time there’s been a Utopian attempt to replace private car ownership with shared ownership. It didn’t work out so well in the Soviet Union:
Though to be honest, when I was in the Soviet Union in its final years I rarely used a taxi for transportation. Most often it was for after-hours off-sale of vodka.
The sticking point for me on giving up a car is getting to work. Everyone works approximately the same hours, that’s why we have rush hours. There is no way that there will be enough self-driving cars available to take each person to work, unless everyone owns one.
That assumes that “everybody” continues to work outside the home and at approximately the same hours. Will those assumptions hold water if telecommuting, freelancing, and other non-traditional arrangements continue to gain ground and cubicle cities decline?