
Uber Is Doomed - webaholic
http://jalopnik.com/uber-is-doomed-1792634203
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mikestew
Of course they're doomed. My signals are first the "self-driving" cars that
strike me as, umm, not so self-driving. Second, and the clincher for me, was
the "flying car" announcements. Now, I understand they'll need that flying car
in order to jump the shark, but that announcement just struck me as a company
desperate to keep their name in the news.

Pile on the internal problems, and $DEITY only knows their burn rate (or maybe
it's documented somewhere), and IMO they're going to have to pull a rabbit out
of the hat to keep going.

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TillE
The self-driving car thing was dumb even if Uber could make it work. They have
no advantage there. Uber's main thing is a network of freelance drivers with
their own cars. Anyone else can build a dang app and market it.

And others have huge advantages in the kind of infrastructure and technical
expertise that would be necessary to build and run a self-driving cab company.
Uber can beg for VC cash, but that's about it.

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RichardHeart
Having a massive happy userbase that likes to pay you for rides places seems
like a pretty good advantage, regardless of how the ride is executed.

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RichardHeart
The belief that self driving cars are inevitable in X short time frame is
shortsighted (literally.) It is quite possible that fully self driving cars
are incapable of safely navigating all the low speed edge cases, (human
traffic directors telling you what to do when a light is out, construction,
kids putting up fake signs that send you off a cliff.) for many years to come.

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tdb7893
There will always be a ton of things you can do to purposefully endanger
drivers (e.g. putting nails on a road) but self driving cars have the
potential to make the vastly more common case much safer. I do agree that some
of those edge cases (such as policemen directing traffic) will need some new
solutions, though.

