Everything in that list, aside from 2 (advertising and expansion), 7 (fleet operations), and 8 (self-driving R&D, which is honestly well outside of their current business) is dirt cheap in comparison to their operating costs - paying drivers, vehicle purchasing, insurance, and maintenance, and buying fuel.
Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies.
Think about it - standard deduction is about about 50 cents per mile for vehicle costs, and actually having a human in the seat probably costs more than 50 cents per mile ($ per hour divided by average speed), and the average drive is about 5 miles. We're talking well over $5 in wholesale operating costs for each ride. Times literally a million rides per day.
The cost of a few programmers and servers is tiny in comparison.
> self-driving R&D, which is honestly well outside of their current business
According to the CEO, self-driving cars are "existential" to Uber's success. They may need something that disruptive to meet the company's sky high valuation.
as far as it goes for "world domination" I've read before that Uber's plan is to make everyone's (self-driving car) a money making machine for Uber and the car owner.
You go to work at 9am and while at work 9.01am to 4.59pm your car drives around making you both money. The same applies for when you return home 6.01pm to 8am the next day.
No drivers, only Auto-bots ;) and paying customers!
(makes me wonder how much Insurance companies will be making from this setup)(and if they are ready/preparing their numbers for this type of business)
It wouldn't be too hard for them to throw in a cleaning mechanism in there somehow.
If you find the car filthy, I'm sure a customer would too, so it's in their interest to fix it and I'm sure it's even easy to automate the cleaning process :-)
Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies.
Think about it - standard deduction is about about 50 cents per mile for vehicle costs, and actually having a human in the seat probably costs more than 50 cents per mile ($ per hour divided by average speed), and the average drive is about 5 miles. We're talking well over $5 in wholesale operating costs for each ride. Times literally a million rides per day.
The cost of a few programmers and servers is tiny in comparison.