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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] threadPile 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.
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.