TFA and a lot of commenters here don't seem to understand that Uber doesn't want to compete with taxi services, which are a niche business to be disrupted en route to the real prize. It wants to compete with your car - imagine 12 lanes of L.A. traffic composed mostly of Ubers. That's their dream. They even admit this in public. [0]
The day they can get cost per mile one penny below what you'd spend owning a Toyota Camry, they'll open up the biggest transport market ever created (the intentionally-inefficient American built environment). They're taking all this VC money and expanding so aggressively not because they like the scale, but rather because that's the only way to compete with private car ownership.
The day they can get cost per mile one penny below what you'd spend owning a Toyota Camry, they'll open up the biggest transport market ever created (the intentionally-inefficient American built environment). They're taking all this VC money and expanding so aggressively not because they like the scale, but rather because that's the only way to compete with private car ownership.
[0] https://twitter.com/travisk/status/564065776005808128