It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.
I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?
If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.
Where I live, Uber is recognized as the high prices option. Once VCs stopped subsidizing rides prices went up and availability went down - it was a running joke for years that at DCA you’d see people waiting in line for 20 minutes to spend $20 more than hopping in a waiting cab.
That makes sense for me. I would easily pay $20 more to take an Uber over a cab in SF. The prices are the other way around which is convenient for me. The last time I took a cab from the airport the guy asked me which cross streets and how to get there. That's not my Uber experience. I don't want to be telling this guy how to do his job. I want personal transportation and we can chat about something else if he likes but I want him to use the satnav.
Yeah, there are real regional variations. I think the problem Uber has is that they’re valued like a high-end tech company (with locked in overhead like compensation) but they don’t have much of a competitive moat. They can have a better app and global reach is a plus for frequent travelers, but at the end of the day their profit is anchored by how much a taxi costs – even if the service is better people only value that so much, especially in a down economy like the one just created.
They've created a business model any metropolitan community can duplicate for practically nothing, and the first community that does so will share their notes with the rest of us.
People should be asking themselves if their service is a quango waiting to happen, because most of them definitely are.
That’s not a problem here (they have an app, too) but it’s definitely valid for Uber to compete on better service. I am skeptical that they will be able to get the kind of returns which their investors want that way, however.
Sure, as I said they have a potential edge in service and people who frequently travel to new places. My point was just that it’s not a very big edge: most people are not traveling to new places all of the time and if there’s a big savings they’ll switch. That doesn’t mean that Uber is doomed, just that they’re not a Google/Facebook money printing machine where local competitors can pop up easily.
they already IPOed so the original investors made out with a ton of money. if you think there's still a version where Uber evaporates overnight, I have some puts to sell you.
I’m not expecting anything like evaporating, only that things like their share price and compensation are more like a tech company than a taxi company but they don’t have a strong moat. There’s interest around things like self-driving taxis, but they don’t own the technology so it won’t open up extra margins.
Most individual share prices is buoyed by continuous pumping from 401ks and the like buying into funds, not on the fundamentals of the companies in question.
>, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.
That type of ride from a "hub" where a bunch of taxis congregate to take the next passenger -- such as SEATAC airport -- is optimal for traditional taxis and can be cheaper. But using Uber for suburb-to-suburb routes away from any hubs is cheaper than taxis and I tried to explain why that happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660517
I'm curious as to why that is. A few months ago I took a taxi from the airport in Austin (because I had neglected to book my Uber/Lyft before I got to the rideshare area and there was a significant wait) and I vowed "never again". It was about 50% more than Uber/Lyft, and everything about the experience was worse in the ways taxis have always been worse - payment is much more of a pain in the ass, you don't know how much it costs until the end, and the cab smelled.
I can wholeheartedly understand complaints about Uber and Lyft, but I don't understand at all when I sometimes see this collective amnesia about how much taxis sucked before rideshare came on the scene.
I think its less amnesia and more that many commenters were too young to have experienced pre-Uber taxis: the call for a pickup thats routinely ignored, flailing arms in the cold hoping someone stops, the smelly car, refusal to pick you up because your ride is too short or too long, getting taken for an extended ride to your destination, the credit card machine thats always broken. Oh, and if you want to complain I hope you can make an 8am hearing at the taxi commission in 6 weeks.
Seattle has added some extra fees and pay requirements for drivers that drive up the cost of a ride share. In retaliation to these laws, ride share companies have also raised prices.
An Uber from my house to the SeaTac airport used to cost about $30 5 or 6 years ago. It's now around $100. A taxi is about $80 now. Paying for parking is cheaper now than either of those options.
BART takes 2x the time station to station. Try it out right now.
The time is 1256 as of the time of this comment.
SFO International to Montgomery St. Station: Earliest arrival is 1346
Driving: Earliest arrival is 1323
My experience is that the car takes ~6 min to arrive to pick you up for Uber. You can call it earlier, but assuming you call it when you arrive and then wait that's 1322. You lose 23 minutes to BART.
And that's BART station to BART station. Change it slightly, like to my home near Caltrain and it's pointless. The cost in time is way more than $25.
What are you going to do on your phone in the Uber vs on your phone on your couch when you get home vs your phone on Bart? If you have an important in-person meeting to get to then by all means pay the surcharge but let's be real about how some of us are spending those "saved" minutes.
Thank you for doing the math - we're only talking about 23 of them? it's entirely possible to capitalize on 23 minutes, but seriously, 23 minutes?
Can use your laptop in the car safely. A friend of mine had his laptop yanked on BART. Chap ran off, my friend gave chase, and that guy threw away the laptop. Surprisingly, only dented! But I'd rather not experience that. 28 minute ride vs. 45 minute ride after 10 min wait is pretty large difference IMHO. If no traffic, that's even shorter. For me, from Caltrain station (where I live) to airport I have a record door to gate of 16 min. That's a no planning choice. If I have to make a 45 minute ride I have to plan: take the T-line to Powell, switch to BART, ride down to the airport? Crazy. No chance.
Where I live taxis are on par with Uber, sometimes cheaper when Uber has surge prices. We also have Bolt, an European competitor, which is usually 10-40% cheaper than Uber or taxis.
Every Uber or Bolt can also operate as a taxi since the regulations stipulate that any private passenger transport service is the same as a taxi, and has to follow the same regulations.
I agree! Your system is already heavily compromised if this is a problem for you.
I think the real problem lies in a lack of visibility into the state of the device. A compromised dongle could easily be transferred between machines. What we need is to make obvious what the machine/device is doing.
I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
Feels like you didn't book a taxi before Uber. Going up to them (no apps back then) and maybe they were or weren't legit, they were expensive, and they would sometimes tell you a price and then charge your differently at the end of the journey, getting annoyed if you challenged it, and you had to pay cash, and you couldn't easily speak to your driver or see where they were on the route to you...so much worse.
The last time I caught an Uber dude intentionally ignored my directions and missed a turn, then just kept cooking off into the countryside with me in the back seat. At 20 over the posted speed limit. At 3am. I spent an unbelievably tense 5 minutes seriously wondering if I was being abducted. I got home but seriously what the fuck.
I literally described my experience of booking a taxi before Uber. Many of the local services also had apps that showed the location of the car and a fixed price before Uber was available here.
Booking a courtesy car is different to most instances of getting a taxi, though. Getting a taxi is far more often things like "going to the line of taxis outside the club and negotiating prices with them" or "I landed in a foreign country on a business trip or family visit and I need a taxi to my hotel, and I don't have a local credit card". Before Uber, these things were far, far worse on average than they are now.
Because spouting off the name of one person wrongfully convicted is meaningless. I didn't deny there are miscarriages of justice in any country. Iran's civil rights record is among the bottom in the world, bested only by NK and other hell holes.
My Skylake iGPU ran everything on my PC just fine for me. That ranges from Minecraft to (apparently the most graphically intensive game I own) The Talos Principle. Sure, not always at the ultra high settings, but that's not something I care about.
Once I upgraded recently to a Threadripper I threw in an old GTX 760 because Threadrippers don't have iGPUs. The 760 also did fine. Now I finally have a bleeding-edge-ish Sparkle Arc A770, but that's only because I wanted to run a shader coding event and didn't want to force other people to care about the server having a behind-the-curve GPU.
The processors/chipsets seem to do what they're they're supposed to. However, it's far too easy for other parties to create a scenario that prevents the system from reaching deeper c-states.
Motherboards manufacturers produce boards that can't go below C3, despite showing up to C10 in the bios. The actual level of support won't ever be mentioned.
PCI devices, e.g. wifi cards, can prevent the system from reaching deeper C states entirely.
Putting devices into a PCI slot connected to the CPU lanes rather than the PCH can also prevent the system reaching the desired states. The CPU slot will frequently be the only choice.
Operating system defaults often prevent the system from reaching deeper c-states. Linux has been worse for this than Microsoft in my experience.
