They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt.
Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service.
Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber.
The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small.
Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.
It's going to be a spectacular, automated race to the bottom. The losers are going to be the 10 million professional drivers in the old trucking and taxi businesses.
>It's going to be a spectacular, automated race to the bottom.
Excellent! More efficient shipping benefits a lot of people. The problem isn't the increase in efficiency — are faster CPUs a race to the bottom because worse chip makers go out of business? — it's poor policy that fails to adequately compensate those who lose from this. We should focus on electing officials and supporting policy to turn these Kaldor-Hicks improvements into Pareto ones.
(I know you're not taking a stance against automation, I just think it's important to stress that the correct response is to make everyone better off by using some of the gains to compensate the losers)
Yea it's amazing people complaining about efficiency and an increase in prosperity. I understand people arguing for the redistribution of wealth but arguing against an increase in prosperity is ludicrous
While trying to validate your 12k number (its more likely 65k and thats not long-haul, http://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10309) I found an interesting data sheet:
Thank you, that 12k number had me doing a double take. I drive more than that to/from work and around town for groceries and such. I have an old friend who runs a contracted local freight delivery service, he puts about 75k miles per year on his truck just delivering in the metro Atlanta area. His wheels are turning eight to ten hours per day, four or five days a week.
> They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt.
Okay you need to understand that laws come with consequences. And if the consequences are not sufficient to deter an action, then the law does not exist.
Uber finds the consequences possible from state governments and smaller administrative authorities to be negligible. This is an accurate assessment generally due to predictable underfunded nature, deficits, lack of case law and lack of political will that these areas have.
The federal government is not any of that and has unlimited resources to ensure compliance. It also provides the benefit of supplanting state law, good across the entire republic and helps with reciprocal agreements in other republics. So there are both adequate consequences for noncompliance and adequate benefits for compliance.
State autonomy has been irrelevant since interstate commerce became the only form of commerce, and most of the time people are just playing along.
Big boat shipping is not going to go automated anytime soon. Boat staff are a relative rounding error in costs from my estimates. There are only 39k of those boats in the world, and they are not going to be electric any time soon unless there is a revolution in battery tech that makes it economical.
Port automation on the other hand, is an opportunity I'm guessing.
Yes. For an extreme example, here's Rotterdam's container port. Zero people in the quay area.[1] This is sped up, but entirely real. Not only are the vehicles driverless, so are the cranes. A few people in a control tower oversee that operation.
If you want a good read on containerization, I'd really recommend reading 'The Box', a history of shipping containers. For a topic that might sound bland, it's fascinating.
Also, the ship's crew are doing most maintenance underway, which keeps the asset producing value. Pretty much the only maintenance done on cargo ships at a port is stuff that requires a drydock. It's actually cheaper overall to have the maintenance crew ride the ship around the world (and also do the small number of sailing tasks that would be expensive to automate) than it is to take the ship out of service at ports to, say, repaint everything, or change the engine oil.
Do you have a source for that? I once asked a captain of a 14.000+ TEU vessel if they really only needed the minimum amount of crew. According to him theory and practice are vastly different. Meaning: a news article explaining that a vessel can be run with X amount of people doesn't mean there are only X amount of people on board.
Secondly, there's all kinds of regulations. A container vessel is operated 24/7. If 7 is the amount of people working on it at a time, in practice the crew will be twice that.
In any case, your response lacks a lot. The person you replied to talked about big boat shipping and how it is not going to be automated any time soon. You only account for the crew on a vessel. There's the customers (loads of which still like to send a fax), lots of outdated governments, outdated vendors, other companies, etc.
The captains I asked was a captain for one of Maersk E-class vessels. They don't use the minimal amount. Unfortunately it's been a few years since I asked and I don't remember much of the details, just that the stated minimal crew is not what's on a vessel.
If a ship has no people, it also needs no bridge, control room, bedrooms, kitchen etc. If it has none of that, it needs to water system, toilets, lighting, heating etc.
And with all that gone, you could fit a lot more cargo on the same size boat.
Can you express "a lot" as a percentage of existing capacity? Because it seems like, relative to the amount of cargo space these ships already have, that percentage would be pretty small.
Related question: if they wanted 5% more capacity in the Emma Maersk, what kept them from just building it that way? Are the sizes of these ships a fuel and utilization efficiency optimization problem?
That's true that newer ships have more automation so crew size reduced dramatically. For example there is no man in machine rooms any more in new ships.
Another thing, crew size would be 3x of needed crew for one shift because in ships there are three shifts, one shift lasts in 8 hours.
I think that is the point that is trying to be made. If uber "captures" this industry they will become the "masters" it will be difficult to find work outside their network, giving you no choice but to stay.
The stunts are to get press headlines. Fortunately trucking and freight are a bit too boring for the ordinary consumer to relate to.
Their customers, corporations guarding themselves against risk want every checkbox checked and rechecked twice. That's why its no surprise they're not pulling off stunts here.
Too boring for the ordinary consumer, yes. Too boring for an investment banker weighing what price to purchase the stock at in an IPO, no.
Depending on how they do the accounting for this it could be huge gains to the top line, something much needed to validate a $60bn valuation in the public markets.
This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but after going through all the comments, and reflecting back on the general ethos of 2016, it's worth saying anyway:
I received the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for Christmas, and there is a lot of "disruption leads to winner take all" talk in the book. I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb, but it's amazing that our lives are dominated by only a handful of companies (I'm willing to bet 90% of our daily time will be attributed to using a product made by either Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook). Now, the aforementioned companies generally do require scale, so my assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but in Uber's case... does freight really NEED scale? I've never needed to order freight, so I can't speak from experience here, but it seems like the social cost to having Uber win all may be far greater than the benefits in efficiency. I can imagine a future where we arrive at a new Era of Barons and legislation is passed to break them up (ala Rockefeller, Vanderbilt...etc.).
Last but not least, we seem to be push for "Universal Income" as a means to assuage the pain caused by the Winner Take All economy, but I don't think that's fair to a lot of America. I think we should solve the problem in it's root before we talk about Universal Income- I don't mean to sound negative, but it just seems like a convenient cop out to the problems at hand.
We don't live in a society where we get to design the future after considering all positive and negative sides. It's been tried, and results were disastrous.
Instead, we live in a society which is shaped by comleting self-interests. You're asking of freight NEEDS scale - for whose benefit? Ubers? Yes. His small scale competitors? No. Customers? We'll have to wait and see their verdict. All of us together? We don't have enough interests in common for this virtual entity to have any real meaning.
There's a long, long way between the free-market utopia people seem to believe currently exists and Uber's "set prices at half of the cost of providing the service & set VC money on fire until we have a monopoly" approach.
The truth is the companies you have mentioned are big corporations with a lot of profit, but there are many other firms with just as much market cap, revenue, and footprints just as significant but they operate quite a bit more 'quietly.' Where would Apple be without other firms extracting the raw materials and FoxConn fabricating and assembling their devices, for example.
But the SV firms sure do seem to dominate the news (especially general business news) to the exclusion of all else.
IMHO, the solution to the "Winner Take All" economy isn't to prevent the winner from taking it all, but to make the "all" smaller so lots of people and companies can be winners of their own nonfungible markets. In effect, Winner Take All (of a niche) instead of Winner Take All (of everything).
People don't buy truck trips, they buy goods transportation. That means your company must at a minimum send stuff everywhere. Also, scale permits all kinds of cost-cutting that are the difference between failure and success on a low margin market like trucking.
About universal income, I'm curious how do you think people could solve the winner take all problem at its root.
I do not live in the US. So would love some help understanding what could possibly happen here:
-Do people own trucks or is it corporations/shipping-companies.
- What happens to all the various forms of taxes (are there any?) which come into picture during long distance transporation
- Is there a concept of toll tax on the roads. Who would be providing those?
- How do you ensure legality of contents and prevent illegal transportation of goods here?
- The USP of Uber is the being able to get the required service in a couple of minutes.Will this be applicable here?
- Uber has always been in grey areas when it comes to personal vehicles being used commercially to drive single passengers. Transporting goods would cause the same issues on a larger scale right?
On the website: It kind of sucks that you need to give an email id to get even basic information on what this is about[1].
Nearly everything in the U.S. is on a truck at some point in its transit. Most companies that make those items don't own their own trucks.
Of the roughly 3 million trucks on the road, 10% are owner operators (a person who owns his or her own truck and drives it).
Those owner operators mostly drive around the country like chickens with their heads cut off trying to source loads to transport. The owner operators will work with freight brokers (middle men) who either scour load boards or have relationships with companies that need things shipped. Some of the owner operators have a significant other at home who does the sourcing of loads for them. Deadheading, driving to or from somewhere without a paid load, kills these drivers. These drivers make on average $50+k per year.
The pre-Uber taxi scene looked a lot like this national truck load scene does today. I imagine that's why Uber sees opportunity here. In the taxi scenario you have the supply (taxis) and demand (passengers). In the freight scene they'd have to link up the supply (owner operators) and demand (any company that has truck loads of freight to ship).
Disclaimer: this is a simplification of logistics, ignores 'less than load' freight, multi-modal, and fleet operations.
Source: I founded and ran a freight logistics startup in the 2000's. Developed a web app to try and do what I said Uber could above. It was designed poorly from an empathy standpoint of both parties and most importantly it was pre-iPhone/apps. We were a successful brokerage/consultancy but failed as a startup.
I worked in the trucking industry for about seven years, so I can answer some of these.
Most trucks in the US are owned by individuals are very small companies.
I'm not aware of any taxes specific to interstate trucking. If you have a licensed and insured truck in one state you're good to go anywhere in the US. There are some slightly different regulations on trailer length and such, but there is a consistent baseline across the US.
There are toll roads but they're uncommon, especially in the middle of the country where most of the freight is moving. Those that do exist are fairly inexpensive and would be trivially easy to price in.
Carriers are generally not responsible for the contents of their cargo. If they accept a big 'ole pallet marked "cocaine" they're gonna be in trouble, but they're not required to ensure that the cargo matches the manifest.
LTL (less-than-truckload) cargo is generally delivered to your doorstep on a given day, not at a given hour.
Trucks are commercial vehicles, so insurance is going to be much less of an issue there.
I don't think Uber will try to solve those problems right away. What Uber is good at is routing and handling payments, both of which are kind of annoying as a driver and dispatcher. It will be a boon to businesses who do a lot of ad-hoc local shipping rather than scheduled or specialized deliveries.
In China, "Uber for trucking" services have off over the last year or two. The largest player, Huochebang, has registered more than 2 million drivers and is doing ~100,000 orders per day. They don't charge anything for using the platform and make money by selling other services to drivers.
"Unlike Uber, which takes a cut from every ride, Huochebang makes money primarily from selling toll cards, taking a cut from the card top-ups, and helping truckers with financing."
Technically you can go rent a uhaul without CDL. There is a hole in the regulation that could allow people to drive smaller trucks without CDL.
You are mostly restricted from towing a certain gross amount weight, which may make the mathematics not work.
Most people I've talked to in person an online that do hot shotting use a few different load boards already. however they all stay away from sites like uship and stay with places that have a higher barrier to entry.
That hasn't stopped people from signing up to drive for Uber. Unfortunately if you need to get new business, and all the customers are switching to using the new broker (Uber in this case) what choice do you have? They will be used until Uber can discard them and then their industry will quickly fade.
There is one major difference. Private people usually don't know (and don't care) about the TCO of their vehicle. So they see the money earned from doing part-time uber as pure income. Truck operators on the other hand usually do (and care)
There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license.
for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber.
> The way most shipping works for most companies today is by going through a brokerage firm, which makes calls to trucking companies and arranges the best deals for its customers. The broker takes a commission of between 15 and 20%. To start, the Uber Freight marketplace will eliminate that middleman and offer shippers real-time pricing of what it will cost to move their goods based on supply and demand.
Yes. Uber Freight is basically a freight brokerage that's being operated at break-even levels:
> UberFreight, which would not control the trucks it relies upon to move customers' freight, is building in only a 5-percent average margin for its net revenue per transaction, according to another person familiar with the matter. On average, net revenue, defined as the revenue a broker generates after its cost of purchased transportation, is around three times that for established brokers. UberFreight's other costs would then be subtracted from its net revenue threshold, leaving the brokerage business either to operate at break-even levels or be a loss leader for the San Francisco-based parent.
So if I'm understanding it properly, they are offering drastically lower prices by cutting out the broker and passing on the savings, but still need the truckers and the truckers will be forced to use them because that's where the jobs will be (not sure if they'll see any pay boost or if it will just be customers seeing savings).
Once Uber gets autonomous trucks everywhere they cut out the drivers and add that revenue to their margins while still under cutting everyone else.
I think Uber realizes if someone else has autonomous tech first, that company will cut out the drivers and they will all be out of jobs. So either way, it doesn't really matter who does it first.
And it's also why Uber is probably running towards getting autonomous tech developed, because ultimately its a fight for it's survival.
In the mean time, they will run transport markets that need people to run it until that tech comes. And it could take 5 years to 20 years for all we know.
Uber started as a limo company, competing with specially licenced drivers working for small businesses. They are into that market. I see this as comparable to what they will do to the trucking industry.
The drivers will go where the work is. If Uber lets them utilize their truck more often and/or with more certainty, and pays them on delivery without them having to send out invoices and wait 30+ days, then they'll drive for Uber instead of their local brokerage.
I'm pretty sure Uber has done their research into how to make this work. It's probably not a question of whether they can solve this, it's most likely a question of what they've already done to solve it. This announcement is probably them just getting ready to open it at beta scale. Pretty sure this isn't an MVP esque landing page where someone said "what if we did Uber for freight?" (just want to make it clear that those are my words and totally not what you said :) ). My guess is that Uber already has a list of small partners they've manually brought on. If history is any indication, they'll do whatever subsidizing they can to own this market.
Freight auctions connecting truck owners&drivers with shippers are quite common in Europe. Surely USA has had this kind of thing before right? Who's the incumbent?
There's not really one incumbent in that market. There's a million small transportation brokerage firms which intermediate between shippers and trucking companies. Generally, the shippers will get better rates going through a brokerage even accounting for the fee the brokerage tacks on, unless they're big enough to have effectively their own brokerage in house.
Interesting. How will they regulate shipping illegal goods? Moving people and food is fine, but this adds a layer of grey to the already blurry line uber are skirting.
This generally isn't an issue as a carrier unless it can be shown that the carrier was aware (or should have been aware) of the cargo.
FWIW, I've dealt with firearms being accidentally shipped to Canada. They were on a freight dock in Toronto before anyone realized. We (the carrier) were levied a fine and we shipped them back to the US without further incident. Being that it was self-reported, they didn't even send someone out.
Why not just go and acquire an Austin based startup called uShip? https://www.uship.com/
Uber has a boatload of cash. Why reinvent a wheel? uShip has a funding of $44.71M in several rounds according to crunchbase. Uber sure has a vast collection fine-tuned maps, but freight routes are different from inner city routes.
Side note -- uShip is an excellent service. I needed to get a trailer from Southern California to the bay area, and uShip was half the price of the manufacturer's shipping.
While I'm not sure how well this fits into Uber's business model (I feel like freight and taxi services are very different industries), the idea of automating trucking is great. It's a far easier technical problem, the logistics are simpler, and it's a $700 billion industry just in the United States. After acquiring Otto this year it's good to see them pursuing this aggressively. Although I'm not a big fan of Uber as a whole, there is a huge amount of money to be made in automated trucking and Uber has a good chance of taking the lead there. I feel like this is where we'll see the real competition for automated driving in the coming years.
Driving on highways is far easier than driving in cities because it's a more controlled environment. There aren't supposed to be pedestrians, bikers, traffic lights, and it's generally a more constrained problem. Logistically, you can just have truckers drive in cities, get out at certain waypoints, and then have truckers take over again at waypoints (mostly located just outside cities).
I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it's a much easier problem. You also don't have to be as concerned with public perception, as you aren't asking a consumer to get inside of it.
yes and no, it is easier to do it. but large trucks are a bigger hazard on the road the a small car, they can break the middle barrier, can do a lot more damage on the road. the fines for the drivers and the companies are allot stricter.
they have to get it 100% all the time or they cannot put it on the road. One glitch and you have a 25t missile on the highway. Imagine the chaos that can cause, and imagine the liability of the company operating that truck.
while it is easier in ideal conditions, it is not easy in real world.
Believe it or not, making sure the truck fails safe and keeping it under control are far easier problems for a computer to solve than predicting if a pedestrian will jump in front of a car.
But I'm not sure it makes any difference. You aren't "supposed" to find pedestrians in a road, but you'll certainly find them, and the truck must be able to deal with them.
At interstate highway speeds, there is no dodging an unexpected pedestrian who jumps out into the road. Swerving creates greater danger - an overturned truck is likely to cause other severe accidents. Pretty much all a truck driver can do is apply moderate braking, lay on the horn, and stay in their lane.
Except that the end to end points are not connected directly by a highway. They do have to move in the cities as well, so they need to optimise for that anyway.
The plan is to have a human drive the first and last mile (getting onto and off of the highway), while autonomous systems drive the truck only on the highway itself.
Trains are already highly automated. The largest trains have only a few workers on board so eliminating them won't cut costs much. But the new positive train control systems do lay the foundation for some level of further automation.
I have a friend who owns a restaurant equipment import business. He employs a driver to deliver ovens, refrigerators, display cases, etc. to restaurants and grocery stores around the country. He could fire his driver and hire an Uber truck on demand instead, and if he got a blast of orders, he could hire a few trucks instead of having to wait on one driver.
I have another friend who is a truck dispatcher. Her entire job is telling truckers where to go and when to be there. Trucking companies don't need to employ dispatchers any more, Uber's algorithms handle her entire job.
My uncle drove trucks delivering dairy to grocery stores. Since he was a member of the dairy trucker's union, that was the only thing he was allowed to deliver. If there was no dairy to deliver but lots of bread, sorry, that's for the members of the bread trucker's union. The whole trucking industry is carved into these niche unions which are really frustrating to deal with.
When I was a student, I worked for a construction company that had a decrepit old truck they used to deliver some of their prefab pieces, like sets of windows and doors. It broke down a lot and only one guy in the shop had the license and knew how to drive it. Now they can get rid of the truck and just hire Uber whenever they need some bigger stuff delivered.
Awesome. All makes total sense. I think the dispatcher example is spot on and very common with haulers. Unfortunately for her, her job could indeed be eaten by technology.
Freight brokerage is a common entrepreneur business model. It's also mostly localized and commissioned.
Every market has a variety of players (shippers, carriers, brokers) in the game which brings volatility to pricing and where brokers can find arbitrage opportunities to earn themselves additional revenue.
The business is also cyclical, seasonal, meaning again highly volatile and the reliance on the brokerage model to maintain continuity in the marketplace.
Past the pricing level there's also multiple levels of bureaucracy to manage. Everything from documenting and confirming loads, rates, BoL, LTL, CoC. Lots of which is still manual and tedious on purpose.
Then you finally get to the scheduling, dispatching, and invoicing, which is Uber's area of expertise.
To play, Uber needs to tackle all three levels. Re-build the software layers, re-build the processes, then throw in from their deep pockets to take over territory one by one.
There's a big industry in freight exchange. If shippers deliver to their customers, then need to return to depot empty, they have the full round trip costs to account for (which is inevitably added to their customer's pricing). If for every journey the shipper does, he can find someone who needs a load shipping back to somewhere near his depot, which can pay for the return journey overheads, plus earn some extra money, then it's a big win. The shipper would then only need to price the one way journey into costs for the customer, which could lower his pricing and give him an advantage over competitors in the market, as well as earn additional money for every return load.
I run the logistics for a FMCG company, and we own a small fleet, which delivers all over the UK and occasionally into Europe. Most of the time, we return to depot empty. We don't have the resources to act as a transport brokerage in addition to selling our own goods. At present we use returnloads.net and TimoCom, and have a close relationship with a couple of local transport brokers. We place the times and locations of our vehicles into their systems and occasionally get a response. We work on very small timescales (1-3 days) of planning, so it's not easy to find return loads.
We also use transport brokerage firms ourselves when we're busy and selling more than our fleet can handle, or if we're shipping out so far that it's not cost effective to put on our own vehicles. Pricing here can vary massively, where if we can manage to find a return load, it's usually at half the cost it would be to contact a standard shipping firm.
I can't see Uber Freight being any more useful than returnloads.net, but if it turns out to be, then I could end up being a provider and a consumer.
I work for a company that ships a lot of stuff. If uber freight is cheaper and more reliable than the shippers we use today, then why wouldn't we use it?
I don't see anything new here though. It's just a matter of them making the same-old-thing more convenient (which is basically all the Uber car service is).
There's a lot of competition in the autonomous driving space: Uber, Delphi, Cruise, Waymo, Ford, Volvo, Zoox, Varden Labs, Auro Robotics, Navya, Nuro.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Faraday Future, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Yutong, and there are others (including some in stealth mode that would rather not be mentioned).
Udacity also has a course just for making a self-driving car, and you get to use a real car.
Old idea. I used www.uship.com many years ago (5?). Worked well. I was able to ship two pallets from the west coast to the east coast, door to door. Costs: close to nothing. I think it was something in the range 250 to 380 US dollar.
I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. They are extremelly competent on creating good services in difficult business areas. They are hungry for new markets and keeps innovating.
A stepping stone to the unemployment of half the families in my small town. Yet, so long as narcissist STEM technocrats have money for their coffee shops the world will continue blindly "progressing".
I look forward to the breathless praise from tech news, with lots of fluff about automation and driver-less lorries.
I suspect that as they have to deal with real companies, with lawyers that do due diligence things won't be so smooth.
Delivery is business critical to most companies, so Uber are going to have to make a pretty strong pitch to get business.
I'm not sure who they are pitching at, companies that do lots of hauling will have decent relationships with haulage broker/companies directly. They'll do credit and guarantees.
The other thing is that I'm strongly suspicious of Uber business practice, as they appear they'll do anything to make a quick buck. (drop drivers, jack up prices, lie, cheat and generally break the law)
That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost"
There are a number of small businesses who occasionally need LTL freight, a few times a year perhaps. I do believe that market is poorly served and is ripe for disruption. The number of "logistics 2.0" tech-focused startups lately seems to confirm that others share my belief.
For those companies if your vendor doesn't have an existing relationship with a freight broker familiar with things you're in for a huge waste of time and a confusing mess where you feel you're likely being ripped off.
If you could instead spend 5 minutes typing some stuff into Uber and clicking go it wins that market segment every time.
We were this company until we got a bit larger and now have a relationship with a broker. But even now it's a little antiquated.
> That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..."
This already happens, as anyone shipping throughout the year will attest to. Rates are a lesser form of airline pricing.
> or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost"
Trivial non-problem that again already exists in the market. This has happened, and it's just as rare as you'd expect it to be.
> They'll do credit and guarantees
Why wouldn't Uber? Considering their performance here in the consumer space I would expect them to be easier to work with here than current brokers who rely on that $200 to feed their kids that week.
It's doubtfully about need. Why did they use it? Probably because they have a solid workflow already based on a React tool chain - so why not? In that case you could similarly ask, why go out of their way to create a static page if they use React for everything else and it's how their programmers are used to thinking? You can use whatever you want as long as it gets the job done. It's about comfort zones and preference.
Aren't they just throwing a lot of different things at the wall, to see what (which ones) stick? While, yes, I do have a problem with Uber's attitude, and also I'm generally more charmed by doing one thing and doing it right, I can totally see how this as a general approach might make sense (to them). I worked for XPO, then Con-way, and they have/had a business unit (Menlo) doing pretty much this: matching up carriers and shippers, using unused space, or throwing business at vehicles that would otherwise be skipping a turn. From first-hand experience, I can say that that general business could certainly use a shake-up, and that Uber stands to benefit from doing so. (Still, not liking them...)
I'm guessing that your opinion comes from your personal distaste of their practices and aren't based on any business facts or insights. I'd love to hear why you think they are going to "blow up".
They're burning investor money and have no plausible plan to reach profitability. Their best plan appears to literally be that the singularity might come early in the area of personal urban transit.
They could get the benefit of the doubt... but then you see stunts like the recent self-driving fiasco.
Fedex was held liable for mislabelling thousands of employers as contractors when they were not.
"FedEx has settled a long-running dispute with FedEx Ground California drivers. The class settlement will create a $228 million fund to resolve claims by over 2,000 FedEx Ground and FedEx Home Delivery pickup and delivery drivers. Some claims date back to 2000 and some extend through 2007. The settlement must still be approved by the Ninth Circuit, but assuming court approval, will end one chapter in a bitter dispute."
"In this case, the Ninth Circuit said that FedEx controlled the drivers and that they were independent contractors in name only. It was a major blow to FedEx, which has fought about its so-called independent contractor model of operation for many years. The financial benefit of the contract arrangement was big. For years, FedEx has been able to shift to its drivers the costs of FedEx branded trucks, FedEx branded uniforms, FedEx scanners, fuel, maintenance, insurance, and more. Drivers were not provided pay for missed meals, rest periods, overtime compensation, etc."
I think their opportunity to turn a profit on ride hails in enough local markets to justify their valuation is limited by [current and future] competitors operating on the same sell VC-subsidised rides at below cost business model. I think the longer they continue to grow revenues and vanity metrics and raise more capital, the more numerous those competitors get...
Yes, but eventually the subsidy will run out and companies will turn a profit or stop operating. Or maybe the investors will never stop the subsidy. That's fine, too.
Valuation is misleading. The later investors likely have enough clauses to protect their capital that they're not thinking of the investment the way a public investor thinks about buying a share. I think you're right that the valuation will become a lower market capitalization if/when they go public.
I actually don't think the self-driving announcement and implementation was a fiasco. Message got out there, media ate it up, and any potential "controversy" only further strengthened their positioning efforts against Google, Tesla and Apple in the self-diving market.
Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service.
Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber.
The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small.
Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.