The prices will go up and then, at least in the bay area, some time will pass, then some other ride share company with a slightly different take on things will start with their own VC subsidized business model. We'll all switch to it, bemoaning how Uber/Lyft used to be so much better before they got greedy and raised the prices.
Reminds me of image hosting services and social sites.
Oh I'm sure we can make money with all these users. I mean there are so many of them. We just have to wait until the incumbent starts collapsing, and burn money until we start collapsing, and someone else figures all those users must be worth something, so they start burning money, and...
The problem with this comparison is that image hosting services have a really low social and political impact. Ride sharing on the other hand... can't really be a giant Ponzi scheme.
Regulated taxis are ponzis alright, it's just rigged by governments and investment is forced upon citizens. Absolutely no reason why an extremely commoditized good like transportation should have fixed rates set by a central planner. Uber/Lyft et al may not be perfect, but we will get there. It's tough to deregulate industries.
But, your rant does nothing to invalidate his point. Cabbies are in plus money wise. Chances are zero all taxis in the world will vanish, while Uber+lift can't subsidize forever.
Look, it's not like taxis or Uber/luft are a basic human necessity to be subsidized.
Public transport exist, and for people that actually need a car on a daily basis, cars exist.
Taxis are luxury service and not subsidized ( as that word is defined in the dictionary) by money offsets. We can derail this into whether medallions/insurance regulation should be there, but the hard cold argument here is : Money. Lots and lots of money.
Uber/luft are subsidized by hard cash just to exist.
I drive, so from the outside, this looks as if somebody was subsidizing Android watches, because they'll overtake real watches.
It's a business gamble, but many are mistakenly taking it as a fact.
So, correspondingly, expect either prices to keep rising on Uber/luft/etc, or them to go out of business.
I'm not familiar enough with the US taxi bylaws to answer that.
Is there a particular reason you are restricting scope to only the US? Taxis and "ride sharing" organizations are an international phenomenon: I'd say the majority of jurisdictions do not have medallions. And the upstream point remains - most taxis can now be hailed via mobile apps.
Uber is looking to transform its business to driverless, but any well-funded new entrant that starts with self-driving vehicles will outperform Uber because it won't have billions in losses on the books from its early days using humans to drive.
Where are well-funded new entrant going to get self-driving cars from? Uber/Google don't have to sell self-driving cars to the public, and by the time self-driving cars happen, Uber's already got an app and the infrastructure to run the app, as well as the engineering expertise in running that infrastructure. In addition, they already have the installed base of customers that default to the Uber app for their transportation needs. Self-driving cars aren't going to take over instantly, either, so there will be a slow transition period of phasing out manual-drivers.
Whether Uber's billions in losses can be amortized over that time so those losses aren't on the books so they can be competitive with a new entrant solely using self-driving cars, remains to be seen.
From all the automakers who are also developing autonomous technology?
In any case, the door-to-door 100% driverless tech that Uber/Lyft/etc. require to eliminate drivers is almost certainly many decades away. It seems unlikely they can sustain massive losses for a fraction of that time even if they did have some sort of competitive advantage once that future arrives.
That's indeed one of the reasons I'm sceptical of broad passive investing: you include many companies that are either evil or have a bullshit business model.
> That's indeed one of the reasons I'm sceptical of broad passive investing: you include many companies that are either evil or have a bullshit business model.
If you don't like a company that you're invested in through an index fund, you can always offset that part of your portfolio with a call/put option or a short (depending on your horizon).
