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'Uber Is Doomed', Argues Transportation Reporter (jalopnik.com)
When an Uber self-driving car ran a red light last year, they blamed and suspended the car's driver, even though it was the car's software that malfunctioned, according to two former employees, ultimately causing Uber cars to run six different red lights. But technical issues may be only the beginning. An anonymous reader writes:
Jalopnik points out that in 2016 Uber "burned through more than $2 billion, amid findings that rider fares only cover roughly 40% of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists" (covering even less than the fares of government-subsidized mass transit systems). So despite Google's lawsuit and other recent bad publicity, "even when those factors are removed, it's becoming more evident that Uber will collapse on its own."
Their long analysis argues that the problems are already becoming apparent. "Uber, which didn't respond to questions from Jalopnik about its viability, recently paid $20 million to settle claims that it grossly misled how much drivers could earn on Craigslist ads. The company's explosive growth also fundamentally required it to begin offering subprime auto loans to prospective drivers without a vehicle."
Last month transportation industry analyst Hubert Horan calculated that Uber Global's losses have been "substantially greater than any venture capital-funded startup in history."
Their long analysis argues that the problems are already becoming apparent. "Uber, which didn't respond to questions from Jalopnik about its viability, recently paid $20 million to settle claims that it grossly misled how much drivers could earn on Craigslist ads. The company's explosive growth also fundamentally required it to begin offering subprime auto loans to prospective drivers without a vehicle."
Last month transportation industry analyst Hubert Horan calculated that Uber Global's losses have been "substantially greater than any venture capital-funded startup in history."
Few companies rival the dishonesty, misogyny and downright shadiness of Uber. The quicker they are gone and a better company can fill their shoe (Lyft perhaps?), the better.
Nothing of value will be lost.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Uber is far from the only company guilty of this... MLM's come to mind as one other noteworthy category of companies that do it constantly.... it's clearly not illegal, or else many MLM's would not exist.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Jalopnik is a big step above random basement bloggers. Most car companies do respond to them.
Amazon had huge operating losses for much of its history. Investors shrugged it off because they could see Bezos knew what he was doing.
Now, the Uber CEO? Not as talented or surefooted as Bezos, certainly. But Uber is #1 in an industry that looks a lot like eCommerce did 10-15 years ago.
And notice that both companies got scorched by workplace culture exposes in the New York Times.
rube? What am I missing?
Mostly random stuff.
covering even less than the fares of government-subsidized mass transit systems
Which mass transit systems? Plenty get closer to 20% back.
Uber is a taxi company, it made a name and got support by creating jobs and employing people. Their push to automatic cars destroys the very thing that made them popular to begin with. Uber isn't a car manufacturer, and not an automotive tech company. Any beating they get is well deserved at this point, because they put social engineering above society. The CEO should, but of course won't, be thrown out on their behind.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Quit trying to make Lyft a thing.
Well they sure weren't too busy counting the beans to respond. ;)
There has been an Uber story here very day this week. That has not been unusual for the past year. Enough already, we get it. There is another taxi company out there.
Who'd have thunk it?
Uber's not special. If you want to open a lemonade stand you're free to do so. The second you start feeding people en masse then society has a right to make sure your kitchen is clean and you aren't accidentally poisoning people. They're transporting people in bulk, that means some oversight from a public safety perspective is warranted and that means everything that goes along with the rest of the economy including not lying to people about income.
The sharing economy will change things, but only so far. Is the medallion system we've used up until now for taxies ripe for reform? Sure! Why not have a sanity check to bring it into the 21st century. However, pretending the rest of the world, including vehicle inspections, truth in advertising laws and the like do not exist is not the sharing economy, it's being a dumbass.
Like Napster, this may only evolve into a different set of problems.
We'll see if taxis survive self-driving cars.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
If I were running Uber, I would have had it concentrate on an assortment of US cities that are friendly to open-market taxi service, rather than blowing its budget fighting City Hall in every monopoly city in the world. By being profitable and having the capital to treat its drivers well in the short term while getting ready for self-driving cars in the long term, it would eventually expand into monopoly cities because the customers would demand it.
Yeah... It's Gawker.. A rag one step above shitstained cum-crusted tube socks.
Amazon is subsidizing its prices with losses and venture capital. Amazon will never be profitable. Amazon's advantage over B&M will disappear after they start charging sales tax. Amazon's shipping expenditures are too high. Blah blah blah.
More or less.
If he's ever used Uber though, he should be watching his back. They have a track record of using their geolocation data to find out where journalists they don't like live and personally threatening and doxing them.
If this company dies, the sooner the better. It's hard to imagine a more evil corporation, despite the fact they had a damn good product idea.
Uber’s 10 Worst Actions—Threats, Lies, Sexism & Shady Business Deals
http://observer.com/2016/02/ub... [observer.com]
incandescent bulbs=taxis. CFL=Uber. LED=autonomous.
Threatened arent you?
I bet you got a little more turned-on with each of those adjectives...
While I respect what companies like Uber are doing, it seems they could care less about the existing rules and why they're even there. And I'm not talking about the artificial scarcity of the medallion system or taxi company monopolies or the lack of flexibility in for-hire transportation, because that does need to be addressed.
What I'm talking about is a company that repeatedly flouts existing regulatory framework because it wants to "revolutionize" for-hire transportation. Drivers don't have to undergo local training (e.g. London drivers who have to memorize the road system in London prior to licensure). Driver vehicles are not required to undergo commercial-grade inspections for safety. Drivers are specifically disallowed by Uber from purchasing commercial insurance for their vehicles, as Uber claims that they will insure passengers up to $1M per passenger. Either the Uber driver is in violation of state insurance laws because they don't have the minimum required insurance, or Uber is in violation of those same laws by not being a licensed insurer with all of the regulatory and reporting burden of an insurer in that state. Want to guess where that leaves an Uber passenger in a crash?
Even if we ignore all of that, now we come to the self-driving vehicle which, even with GPS, lasers and camera AI, has to match years of a trained natural neural network of the most complex organism known on this planet with tremendous amounts more context to make not only technical but ethical decisions and keep not only the passengers safe, but also the car they're in, other people's cars and property, and most of all other lives that are on the road.
It's not an impossible problem to bound to a certain acceptable level, but not within the timeframe that Uber hopes. When considering its fundamental underpinning is compromised by its ethics and its arrogance that is being challenged by governmental and non-governmental entities, and is subsidized by free-flowing VC money, I can't say that the prediction of the demise of Uber is unlikely.
...and it offers very little to the general public, and also "grossly overestimates how much one can make". Uber will be fine.
Uber is paying a huge cost to corner the market while it is till a new and opening market. But all of these costs are voluntary and could be given up in a day.
At the end the of the day, Uber is a very simple software company that could operate on a shoe string budget of half a dozen employees and a few servers.
But the investors are obviously willing to spend billions building an iron grip on a transportation monopoly.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Calling it a transition economy, glosses over the important detail.
It's regulatory arbitrage, ignoring laws to get a commercial advantage worked for a while, then they got lots of venture capital and that worked for a while, now they're covering only 40% of their costs and facing enforcement of taxi regulations and 'poof', their commercial advantages are all gone.
Without the advantage, you're faced with a "GrabTaxi" style taxi booking app of which there are plenty.
Remember Groupon?
It's hard to imagine a more evil corporation
Sure, but so far the evilness has worked in Uber's favor. The have repeatedly prevailed against rivals that were hobbled by ethical compunctions. Their only clear loss so far was against Didi Chuxing, which is arguably even more evil, and even there Uber came out pretty good with a 20% equity stake.
Disclaimer: I use Lyft.
They're being brigaded in the media lately. Personally, I wonder if something else isn't going on that's driving all of the "Uber is doomed" narrative...
In reality Uber don't own the infrastructure (the cars and the people), they just provide the app. There's no loyalty to apps, and the drivers look at tomorrow's paycheck not yesterday's.
Sounds like I need to be more careful on my next visit to the hardware store. Could be my inner grumpy old man talking but I can't say I'm thrilled to have to learn more specs for something so mundane as lightbulbs.
Thanks for the tips.
lucm, indeed.
Tolerant Liberal 101
For its first several years of running, Amazon.com lost money hand over fist, but when they finally did start to make money, they really did. I suspect it's the same with Uber. It's still early days and they're knocking out the competition. As long as they stick with it, they'll do spectacularly well in the long term.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The have repeatedly prevailed against rivals that were hobbled by ethical compunctions
A pink mustache hardly equates to "ethical niceness" regardless of whether the marketing psychologists have determined otherwise... and I know you're not talking about cab companies... so who are you referring to??
namely that what they're doing (treating employees as contractors) is patently illegal. It's a minor miracle they haven't been shut down like several other "It's Uber for X" services when the governments demanded they pay minimum wage, benefits and various mandatory insurances.
Uber's legal risk is monumental. I'm not sure if it's luck or connections that have kept them going but you can't just do what Uber's doing because what they're doing is not legal...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...I dislike shitty journalism even more.
Honestly, I have zero (ZERO) faith in and respect for, journalists. That's not to say all journalists are terrible. It's that there are SO MANY bad ones claiming to be journalists, and "good" ones that allow businesses to throw away their sense of ethics to pay the mortgage. It's that the profession overall is dead-to-me until it decides to apologize and "Rebirth" itself from the ashes of clickbait.
Like, I don't even know to call "outing a gay manager of Google". It's not journalism. And I can't even think of a word that captures the level-of-offensiveness, and lack of perspective of what matters, in that kind of act. Ruin a man's (who isn't even a public figure) for AD-REVENUE?
And I'm not the only one. A gallup poll shows that ALL Americans are feeling this--even if not so consciously. A mere "32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media." Even less if you don't allow the 52% Democrat approval to scale up the average from the bottom of the barrel that the right-wing and independents think of the media.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195...
And as a side note, when the hell did liberals stop caring about corporations? When did Starbucks become "okay"? When did 5 corporations owning over 90% of all US media become okay? (Thanks telecommunications act of 1995.) When I was raised as a "liberal", it meant dying for someone's right to say what was in their heart, and telling large corporations to go fuck themselves. I honestly have a hard time connecting the dots between my generation and the next.
and quick. Mostly cheap. There were so many recently out of work people who still have cars from when they had jobs that Uber didn't have trouble finding employees.
The reason they might be doomed is they're subsidizing those rides with investment capital. OTOH they might be like Amazon, e.g. allowed by investors to operate at a loss with the expectation of massive profits when they clear up their legal troubles (allowing them to pay much, much less than minimum wage while paying no benefits whatsoever) and finish crushing/buying out any competition.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Self driving cars are the future. Once there is self driving cars, the taxis will be as cheap as private cars on per mile basis when averaged over entire year. Most people would stop owning cars and large families may keep only one car. Also, this naturally leads to all electric cars as well. The taxis will take people to work in rush hour and then will charge themselves and will be ready in the evening.
Any business that depends on traditional car ownership is in peril. Gas stations, repair places, parts, dealers, car insurance, paid parking etc. Even auto makers are in big trouble because you will need far fewer taxis as they can service more people per vehicle.
Previously Amazon was allowed leeway by its investors because it had a path to profitability. What Uber hasn't demonstrated is if it has a path to profitability. A lot of issues that could be referred to a "growing pains" or "sustainability issues" haven't really Uber yet. Its entire black car fleet is still new and hasn't had to be replaced or have major repairs yet. The question that Uber has to answer is if it can wean itself off of VC money, stay solvent and maintain the same level of service as it has now. If Uber cannot demonstrate this the VC will dry up, the owners will cash in/sell out and walk away from Uber with pocket full of cash and a flaming wreck of a company behind them.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Fixed costs can be scaled. Variable costs cannot. Uber is 85% variable. According to TFAs.
Uber isn't profitable and it has no plausible path to even getting close to being profitable.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
It was completely clear by anyone that could read a general ledger that Amazon made the choice to be not profitable, but to expand and to turn their revenue back into the business. Their day to day P/L in fact looked very healthy early, it was simply the case they spend their money building datacentres / warehouses / accqusitions / (insert method of business growth here), which on the ledger for a financial year is a loss but pays dividends down the road. Remove a lot of the business expansion and you have a company that at it's core has a very sound day to day balance sheet and business plan, ie the fundamentals are excellent. Which is why investors tolerated losses or no dividends and Amazon now is extremely large and very healthy.
Uber have neither a solid day to day balance sheet nor business plan. This wont be tolerated long. Uber are burning cash with no solid outcome in sight. A ledger reading shows a company where the fundamentals are NOT good, the day to day P/L is very bad. It is now becoming clear investors are not going to tolerate this bleed for much longer.
just because someone can speak and write in an articulate fashion doesn't make them a liberal...
Maybe you haven't noticed, but conservatism is now nothing more than a cargo cult praying to a pumpkin pol pot. So yeah, in today's world, being able to write coherently does make you a liberal.
I just want a lamp that doesn't make the room feel like a near-death experience or an alien abduction. I don't want to do a college degree in lightbulbs.
During science class in high school I was usually drinking beer under the bleachers with trailer park girls; it was fun but apparently it leaves me at a disadvantage when it comes to lightbulbs. I'll do some light reading but really until I find a lamp that works I'm anti-LED.
lucm, indeed.
Yes Uber required and still requires deep pockets to get completely up and running. And investors will give those big bucks simply because the potential profits will be so astounding. The only real danger to uber is that having paved the way for a very new mode of travel another company may receive the benefits as they did not have to bear the initial deep costs of starting up the new technology. Uber paved the financial road not only for itself but also for its competition. And now drivers' pay checks will be taken out of the loop with self driving Uber cars. Fifty cents worth of gasoline can turn into a $15. dollar ride.
Yes, they had a damned good product idea.
Then they ABANDONED that idea in favor of seeing just how much shit they could get away with before the collective governments of the planet came down on them like a bag of bricks.
Seriously, it's been years since you could call Uber "ride-sharing" with a straight face.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Amazon branched out into providing compute platforms and online storage solutions - which was a brilliant move by them, and one I don't quite see Uber pulling off. Amazon sell everything, Uber just gives you a lift when you're too drunk to drive. I don't think they're in the same league.
hardly surprising that one of the chief salesmen for the currently tanking financial mess of Obamacare (where most of the exchanges have collapsed), David Plouffe, would be championing the financial train-wreck of Uber (because, like so many "progressive" silicon valley companies, Uber hired a Democrat hack from a Democrat presidential administration and made him an executive) but I see that Mr Plouffe is now over at Zuckerberg's outfit...
If the people running Uber thought Plouffe was good for anything other than misleading the public, then they probably are too economically untethered from reality to make a go of it over the long-haul.
We all KNOW what really threatens Uber: self-driving cars. Driver is in the "get your neighbor to drive you around with his horse-and-buggy" business, and the equivalent of the first automobile is on the horizon..."
Uber is a taxi company, it made a name and got support by creating jobs and employing people.
That part is correct.
Their push to automatic cars destroys the very thing that made them popular to begin with.
Wow, that is so wrong. It enhances what Uber does in many ways:
1) It allows more cars to be at places where and when real humans do not want to drive.
2) Because there is less need to draw as many human drivers to a place and time to meet demand, surge pricing can be lower.
3) It means less employment of drivers but possibly never zero, it just shifts where humans might work. Also humans will need to be employed monitoring the fleet.
4) As more and more cars are self driving, why wouldn't you simply not buy a car and instead use the increasingly cheaper Uber car that can drop by your house on a schedule?
5) Uber is one of the leaders today in self driving car research, so it's not even like they would necessarily wait for other companies to produce viable self driving cars. They are deploying them today.
The conclusion I see is that critiques of Uber are really, really wrong and fueled by a raving ignorant mob of hate that has been trying to sink Uber for years. Didn't work then, will not work now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A: Negative commerce clause.
Also all municipal power flows from state power so don't bother with your next counter argument .
If they're still burning through money after all that then there is something seriously fucked up with their product idea and their business model. I won't miss them if they go under. More likely they'll try to do an IPO and pass the buck onto some other saps. The founds and 1st round of investors will take the money and run.
You're very persuasive.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The problem for Uber is that there's absolutely nothing stopping the taxi companies adopting all of these. Many will already do fixed-price trips. If you have a corporate account, they'll happily just bill the company rather than the rider. An open protocol for interfacing with their dispatcher system and allowing them to provide locations of taxis that could be dispatched and quotes would let a federated system work. Some individual taxi companies already have apps that let you provide GPS start and endpoints.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Wow, that comment title. Now that I got you attention: it's exactly that.
Let unicorns be unicorns. If there is a market for it, let it be. There are investors, drivers, and passengers willing. So the company doesn't show a profit? Who cares. Do you know how many sports associations (with financial definitions) actually make a profit? I'll give you the European example: more than half, including the top-tier-most soccer clubs are technically bankrupt. Do you see them going down anytime soon? Hell no! And there are people investing like it's the risk capital panacea.
Now when I see an article bashing at a company with terms like "subprime", it reminds me of the 2007 real estate and mortgage crisis. Saying stuff like "fares are 40% subsidized by venture capitalists" is yet another great remark at the target of such bullshit. They WANT stock price to go down, it is widely known that saying shit about a company is the best way to bring it down. Why do you think Trump talks so much crap about China? This holds especially true when the company ahs no public stock but only a very speculative valuation, but it applies generally, and in some instances, it is considered a crime.
But more importantly, Uber is FUCKED.
I don't think Amazon has ever been so pro-active in breaking laws. That alone is a big difference between Amazon (be a huge mail order company) and Uber (illegal taxi service).
Based on published financial data...so you know facts....
It is my experience that they rather bill the company and not do it via the driver. The reason is that they only need to do it once per month. That makes things easier and that cheaper (or more profit). It also means they know they get the money and not have a driver pocket it.
There are drivers who will drive with the meter off and you will pay less. They will pocket the money and the company is left with the costs. Sure, these drivers will be fired, but they still have the loss.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Looks to me that the whole article is just claiming that the economics of ride for hire is going to sink Uber and that the "paradigm" shift of using an app isn't magic sauce that changes things. Sounds like the telecom bubble, internet bubble, tulip bubble, etc bubble. Some times it works ( Amazon and E-Bay), sometimes it doesn't. Either way there is a lot of snake oil being sold.
You tip what you think the driver deserves. If the tipping issue sends you into stasis, you've got more problems than your "ride share" (taxi service) choice.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'd mod you up if I had points.
To put it another way, Uber are a taxi company, but its the pretence that they are a ride sharing app that is supposed to make all their bad business practices look like a disruptive technology instead. If it was a ride sharing app then any monetary exchange would be a private matter between driver and passanger and not something fixed by Uber.
Unsuccessful Troll 101
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The headline should read "Is Uber Doomed?"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The subsidy that let me ride around Brooklyn for $7.95 each way gone. All my trips are now $15-16 each way which is exactly what it cost when I took regular car service cars in the pre-Uber era. At these prices they should definitely be making money since the car service cos were making money. Of course the other problem is my car service trips cost $15 each way in 2000 and they costs $15 each way in 2017 so adjusted for inflation these poor tools are making like 35% less money than they did 17 years ago....
If you care even the slightest bit about any of the things you buy, you do a little research.
I see that you haven't read your classics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Within the scope of Slashdot readership, I fall more into the gestalt crowd. This means that while I (somewhat) care about things I buy, I don't do research unless I have to.
lucm, indeed.
Thanks for showing us that you conservatives are the ultimate lying pieces of shit. You are blatantly telling people to cheat the system and screw a legit company out of money and yet will froth at the mouth and bitch when everyone else is doing it. I bet you also hire illegal latinos to do all your grunt work, pay them in cash for like five bucks, and then go vote trump to throw their asses in jail. This is why we hate you fuckers. We're tired of the hypocrisy!
What are you trying to accomplish with your message? Because it looks to me like you're engaged in a process of painting the world in black and white, and this usually indicates a lack of emotional and intellectual maturity that is not conducive to having grown-up discussions. Maybe what you need at this point is to keep a diary so you can monitor the evolution of your rants.
Also I would like to point out that there was nothing in this thread that pointed toward either a pro- or anti-Trump position, so in addition to a nice diary you should also treat yourself to a bucket of chill pills.
lucm, indeed.
What product?
From my perspective they provide a service. A service that basically has been provided for decades in cars painted-up in various livery, with the principal caveat that they undercut the price of existing players in that service.
Now it looks like they've taken their venture capitalists' money to personally profit without delivering something with any chance of profitability, and they did worse, they dragged their employees down through a company-store model to do it. For the short-term the customers benefit, for the medium-term the management who've no-doubt given themselves extra compensation benefit, but the actual owners and the employees get screwed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Their Far From Doomed Specially in ny and new finance companies are giving drivers with bad credit loans http://ubercarleases.com/