At that kind of volume, would it make more sense to have MB develop a bespoke car for Uber?
The S-Class is a great car, but I'm sure there are Uber-specific improvements that can be made. Why would you order some many of something 'off-the-shelf'?
I don't think you'd find any manufacturer who would tool up for a bespoke car. Uber either needs to buy an existing manufacturer with existing large scale capacity, or build out their own capacity. And we've seen with Tesla how much and long that capacity takes to build out for only 100K vehicles/year.
Uber is capital chasing a potential treasure chest. Google, Tesla, GM/Lyft/Cruise are the real players it appears.
There are contract manufacturers also in the automobile industry. For example the Finnish Valmet Automotive has been building Porches, and is now doing some MB cars.
They might do a special trim package for that volume.
That's one way a precommit makes sense to me; a contract could be structured such that Uber gets a certain price as long as they keep up with their commitments, if they don't keep up, they pay a penalty.
I could see a trim package, but if autopilot hardware is only a few thousand dollars, it would behoove Mercedes to put it in all of its vehicles. At that point, any startup could build an interface to allow any Mercedes owner with the hardware to lease out their car through a P2P ridesharing platform.
As it turns out, going from sensors to working self-driving car is a pretty difficult task, and Uber has some of the best self-driving researchers in the world working for them.
Right, but Tesla has vehicles on the road, now, with a high level of autonomy (driving across the country autonomously 96 percent of the time: http://jalopnik.com/we-set-a-cross-country-record-in-a-telsa...) that are gathering massive amounts of data (40 million/miles/month) from vehicle owners as they drive.
Its an uphill climb for Uber. They will need to fund their vehicles; Tesla funds their battery manufacturing, vehicle manufacturing, and autopilot telemetry corpus buildouts using the vehicles owners have paid for.
1. I was responding to your Mercedes/Uber scenario; the comment I was replying to literally didn't mention Tesla (which fits more aptly to Apple's position in the desktop computing analogy).
2. Interstate driving autonomy and city driving autonomy are different beasts. Gathering a ton of data about task X isn't necessarily helpful for task Y; ML isn't magical. If anyone, Google is ahead of the pack in the market Uber is vying for (automated taxis).
100k vehicles/year is 1/2 to 1/4 of capacity of a vehicle production line; any automaker would retool for 100k guaranteed sales, if the price was right.
The S-Class is a great car, but I'm sure there are Uber-specific improvements that can be made. Why would you order some many of something 'off-the-shelf'?