Can you point to some sources to back that up? I have always been under the impression that self driving was the end goal that they were all working towards.
Everytime someone mentioned that idea I thought it made no sense. The Uber strategy is to delegate all the cost to a 3rd party (the driver and their own car). The idea of spending billions of dollar on hundreds of thousands of cars around the world and maintain them hardly seemed like what they were setup to do. They wanted the exact opposite. Externalize all cost, labor, material, etc. and just develop a software that generates them a % of profit. This would be an entire 180° in terms of business strategy.
So if they invent the first reasonable self-driving car, they can sell those and provide service for them. Ideally TCO would be lower than a human driven car so basically a third party could buy and manage the fleet for Uber and Lyft. Neither company would need to own the cars to reap the benefits of making them.
They could, but that’s a completely different business to building middleware to facilitate unlicensed taxis. It’s like saying “AirB&B will help people rent their spare rooms out until they launch their own hotel chain.”
How do drivers make any money while keeping the overall price less than a taxi? Factor in fuel and maintenance, and drivers are already getting pretty screwed on these platforms.
They don't. Which is why Ubers cost only slightly less than normal taxis in markets like Sweden where Uber has to follow the same regulations as their competitors. The low prices they have in markets like the US are not sustainable.
Absent self-driving--which was always a pipe dream--the overall price will not be materially lower than a taxi. Perhaps people will prefer the service for other reasons. Perhaps they'll go back to transporting themselves however they were pre-Uber.
Taxi medallions used to cost hundreds of thousands (SF) to more than half a million (NYC). Nowadays they still cost tens of thousands in SF and hundreds of thousands in some areas like NYC.
Also, more efficient use of time from app-based routing.
