>HOWEVER: What's stopping the car companies from simply running it themselves and cutting out uber as the middleman?
Ignoring tesla for a minute:
1) Engineering prowess. User-facing software in cars is notoriously poor, and the idea that the same people that greenlit the nissan cube can deploy and scale an uber rival seems generous to say the least.
2) Exclusivity/overcrowdedness. Uber and lyft don't have strong opinions about brand of car (though the prius is the default, and they care about newness). This is likely not true of more traditional car companies. This leads to one of two scenarios: in the first, companies try to limit their ride hailing to on-brand cars, meaning you can only hail fords with ford-uber, etc, requiring that users have multiple apps and pit them against each other. This seems silly. In the second, they allow others brands to be hailed as well, and then you've got mostly identical ride hailing apps, each from a different car company, and the car companies are now competing on experiential nuances that aren't even centered around their vehicle offerings. That's nutty too.
This wasn't my thought going in, but having written all that, tesla seems like a much better buy all of the sudden, because it's the only player that feels like it has the software skills to solve 1, and the apple-esque brand clout to solve 2.
You seem to ignore that those car companies have such services already in place and run them successfully. Car2Go from Mercedes was first and started with the Smart. It is now being supplemented by higher-end models.
BMW has the same service running together with SIXT in Europe with BMW Mini and other smaller models.
Also VW started the same just a few years ago, but is not widely used, AFAIK.
What you miss is that most car companies have a really akward company structure. What I've read in german teach forums after the bad thing happened to VW, it's really good to understand why that happened. It's really fearful to look at such org charts
We've got DRM on batteries (Renault's electric vehicles) requiring a renewal with unknown terms and conditions.
What's to stop vehicle manufacturers from slapping on a Personal-Use Terms of Service to their vehicles which prohibits the Commercial Use (under different ToS), or Restricted Commercial Use Policy which prevents self-driving passenger rides outside their approved apps? They would be able to enforce it by remotely disabling the battery when such practices are found (Renault can do that already).
Because people who want to rent their self-driving cars won't buy those, and companies with lower marketshare (therefore, less likely to be able to form a competitive network by themselves) will have an incentive to go after those buyers.
> companies with lower marketshare (therefore, less likely to be able to form a competitive network by themselves) will have an incentive to go after those buyers
Ignoring tesla for a minute:
1) Engineering prowess. User-facing software in cars is notoriously poor, and the idea that the same people that greenlit the nissan cube can deploy and scale an uber rival seems generous to say the least.
2) Exclusivity/overcrowdedness. Uber and lyft don't have strong opinions about brand of car (though the prius is the default, and they care about newness). This is likely not true of more traditional car companies. This leads to one of two scenarios: in the first, companies try to limit their ride hailing to on-brand cars, meaning you can only hail fords with ford-uber, etc, requiring that users have multiple apps and pit them against each other. This seems silly. In the second, they allow others brands to be hailed as well, and then you've got mostly identical ride hailing apps, each from a different car company, and the car companies are now competing on experiential nuances that aren't even centered around their vehicle offerings. That's nutty too.
This wasn't my thought going in, but having written all that, tesla seems like a much better buy all of the sudden, because it's the only player that feels like it has the software skills to solve 1, and the apple-esque brand clout to solve 2.