[Jochim]

The Uber example is also an outright lie.

They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.

Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.

[cyberax]

> They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.

That is exaggerated. Uber was losing something like $0.50-$1 per ride in 2018.

Uber/Lyft were (and still mostly are) just _better_ than taxis.

[const_cast]

It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.

I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?

If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.

[torginus]

Uber was a 9 year old company in 2018

[renewiltord]

Taxis still exist and are still more expensive. You pay for them to use bus lanes in SF and so on. Uber prices are not beyond the competition.

[acdha]

Where I live, Uber is recognized as the high prices option. Once VCs stopped subsidizing rides prices went up and availability went down - it was a running joke for years that at DCA you’d see people waiting in line for 20 minutes to spend $20 more than hopping in a waiting cab.

[samtp]

At least in Seattle, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.

[piva00]

Where I live taxis are on par with Uber, sometimes cheaper when Uber has surge prices. We also have Bolt, an European competitor, which is usually 10-40% cheaper than Uber or taxis.

Every Uber or Bolt can also operate as a taxi since the regulations stipulate that any private passenger transport service is the same as a taxi, and has to follow the same regulations.