We don't have access to their pitch deck - market size, roadmap and traction. If we were privy to that info, am sure some of this would make more sense.
Uber is best positioned to usher in self-driving cars. If they are successful at it, their market opportunity is much larger than the Taxi-cab industry.
> Uber is best positioned to usher in self-driving cars.
Fleet management is all about buying, parking, filling up, maintaining, cleaning and eventually selling the vehicles once they ran their course. Why would Uber be better at all those things?
Economies of scale that it can drive from its platform given that it will have the largest base of customers as well as suppliers. It is very close to what Amazon did to bookstores and eventually to ecommerce business.
Some of that doesn't scale rapidly. If they need to buy a thousand car washes nationwide, an owner in Omaha is not going to sell at a discount just because they already own 10 car washes in Los Angeles. Similarly with pricing for gas/electricity.
Their economies of scale are akin to those of Avis or Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and those companies are not valued at high multiples, due to high upfront capital requirements, insurance burden, fast depreciation, low barrier to entry, etc.
Current multiples for Uber are there precisely because of the lack of all liabilities associated with car ownership and maintenance.
I would be surprised if the prevalent economic models will continue to apply. Think Walmart, Costco, Amazon and how they leveraged their scale to drive efficiency through the ecosystem.
The prevailing models during those times were revisited which included prices, contracts, payments.
In your specific example about car washes, I envision a huge warehouse with multiple floors to do automated car washes which is super efficient. This will happen as there will be a metric that will show how a minute saved on the car wash floor can save the company millions of dollars because of their scale. There will be no "car wash" dealership to negotiate with.
