What happened to Uber’s vision of the end of car ownership? The report has the answers
Uber once offered itself as an alternative to car ownership. The data, however, shows that ten years into the ride-hailing revolution, car ownership is here to stay — even in places where Lyth, Uber, and Waymo are racing.
In 2023 Uber had a profitable year – the first time since it went public it started to disclose its income. So it is worth going back to the early days of the ride – to visit the beautiful future proposed by deo time deo travis kalanick. In the days when Uber was launched, it described its “idea” in a “wallpaper” like this:
So what is that idea? … It reflects our mission to turn transportation into a seamless service. It basically makes car ownership a thing of the past … If you just look at San Francisco, the market for traveling on the ground in San Francisco – where people pay to get into a car and go somewhere, even if it’s 22 billion. It’s no wonder we’re hundreds of thousands of different sizes just in SF, and growing faster this year than last year.
Uber is now a mainstay of the tech economy, and hacking is now a normal part of life, so it seems like a good time to enter Kalanick’s vision. He seemed to argue that the success of his work in San Francisco in 2011 was an indication that the shift away from car ownership was already underway. Did his dream come true?
A brief report published Wednesday, combined with census data, says, basically: lol.
The obvious details in car ownership is that not only is transportation as easy as tapping your phone, removal, and never having to worry about tire rotation, but the styles seem to be moving slowly. In the densely populated areas served by ride-hailing services, car ownership has basically been flat since the birth of Uber, or even less.
The report comes from retired automotive researcher Glenn Merler, who writes a newsletter called “car charts,” which is about car charts.
If you look at the prices of green lists without controlling for other factors, Mercer found that nationally, there were 800 cars for Americans in the year 2000, and about 8,000 Americans now – many Americans can guess.
But instead of leaving it there, he took a closer look at major metropolitan areas, focusing on their central metrics that reveal the number of “family members” when it comes to ride-hailing services. Mercer focused on some representative years from 2005-2024—before Uber, during Uber’s rise, and the most recent year with data.
At the time, these were the changes in the chart’s mature metric, with a one-point increase or decrease of the same, “one-hundredth car per household”:
- Boston: +4 Points
- Chicago: -1 Point
- San Francisco: No change
- Los Angeles: +7 Points
- New York: -1 Point
- Dallas: +10 points
In other words, there is no significant change anywhere, although the tenth increase in traffic in Dallas is somewhat eye-catching.
Mercer’s analysis is that, he does not see “any real impact on cars in each home. Even in the Bay Area, the ancestral home of all things working, there is no movement.”
With that in mind, did you know the cost of a new car in the US is now around $50,000? The Brooks 2023 report shows that young people live in fewer cars than members of older generations because they do not have enough money to buy cars. A Deloitte report from earlier this year found that 44% of adults 34 and under would agree to end their cars in a valid location.
So it looks like there’s nothing wrong with Kalanick ” It would be great. It’s just that the worst ride-hailing services have never been the way to do it. Not yet, anyway.
Gizmodo reached out to Uber for comment, and will update if we hear back.
