Autonomous cars being generally available lowers the barrier to entry for competitors to Uber, and makes their position worse, not better. Uber's bet is Uber controlling the autonomous car market, which is a different and much harder thing.
Why do you think that's true? Uber is investing heavily in autonomous cars because they want to be very early to the market (hence "Uber's bet is autonomous cars"), and because when you have autonomous cars high utilisation is important, they are in food delivery, and interested in shipping and courier services.
I think you're also overestimating the complexity of recruiting a load of former private hire drivers and underestimating the complexity of developing scaled fleet management solutions for entirely autonomous vehicles.
> Uber's bet is Uber controlling the autonomous car market
I think most reasonable people would be able to impute some sort of first mover or early mover advantage into what I was saying.
Do you really think with this many players, that anyone is going to get a huge market? They're not. Uber, even if they manage to survive their lawsuit and build a working system, has plenty of fast followers in the self-driving systems market. So the competition will be at most 24 months behind. Not nearly enough time to acquire and retrofit a fleet of vehicles, and then deploy the fleet in numbers big enough to make a difference to their current cost structure. (Keep in mind the fleet acquisition is a capital expenditure.)
Second, they won't have a large market to distribute this technology, because they don't make cars, and the people that do make cars are already players in this space. I find it hard to believe that Volkswagon, Toyota, or General Motors would simply ditch their internal projects and license with a newcomer that has no manufacturing experience to be a supplier, especially when they themselves would be close to making their own solution which would be able able to be manufactured at scale.
Look, everyone knows that auto manufacturer navigation and entertainment systems suck, yet they still roll their own instead of wide partnering with Apple, Microsoft, Google. My Acura's infotainment system is awkward, slow, and outright user antagonistic, yet there it is.
At most, Uber's self driving kits could be what Alpine is to car stereos. Sure people buy them, but most don't, and if you already have one that works, you probably won't swap it out.
> I think most reasonable people would be able to impute some sort of first mover or early mover advantage into what I was saying.
I think most reasonable people are deeply sceptical that Uber is going to win first-mover advantage against the likes of Google (who's been working on the autonomy tech for what, a decade, now?), traditional automakers (who have deep experience actually building vehicles), and Tesla (who've been working on the autonomy for at least as long, while also developing manufacturing experience, and have many more vehicles on the road gathering data). Let's not even bother quibbling about that nasty lawsuit.
Sure. Not anything to do with my point, though.
