"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 14:36:46 on Sat, 1 Apr 2017,
tim... remarked:
the one thing about the taxi trade is that they can't monopolies the
market through lower fares and then hike them when the competition pulls
out

the barriers to entry for a taxi company are so low that if you take your
fares back up to the regulated maximum the competition will soon pile back
in again.

to keep the competition out you have to keep your fares low forever

which is fine if your costs of operation really are low enough to support
that, but does mean that operating an unsustainably low fare to grab
market share doesn't work.

Except Uber is trying that.

I know

So your theory crashes in flames.

but as it hasn't got to the "lets put the fares up again" bit, how does,
where we are now prove that it will work?

There is a theory that its real MO is,

1) force out the competition

2) replace cars with self driving cars and put the fares up

But I don't believe that model will work either as:

a) I believe the date that driverless cars will be routinely available is 10
years beyond what the optimists think the date will be. (We have discussed
this before and you were in the same place as me), Uber can't survive that
long subsidising fares.

b) It will change the Uber business model from one of the owner-driver
financing the cars to Uber financing the cars, and I don't believe that the
financial markets will give Uber (FTAOD any one company, whoever they are)
the money to finance 100% of the world's taxi-cabs[1]. So there will still
be room for other companies to finance self-driving cabs and come into the
market and compete on a country by country basis. Uber does not own any of
the necessary IPR in self driving. There's nothing here that cannot be
replicated by someone else.

tim

[1] a finger in the air figure of about 250 trillion pounds, 400 times
Uber's current valuation