Uber

[Mizchif]

Yeah customer service wise definitely hit them straight in the Twitter, it's a public noticeboard of potential PR misery.

 

Disappointed more of you didn't sign up, nobody trusts a good thing people always think "if its too good to be true then it must be". The common quote I got on facebook/real life is "are you working for them?"

 

If I slapped £20 in a mans hand he would be like "safe" tell someone to bend over to pick it up and they think you're gonna stab them in the back

[Grafter]

Reason I didnt sign up is cos I prefer to pay cash. I like the cab services I use already. I dnt even use greyhounds automated phone service-I have to speak to the operator.

I also read a number of reviews an found that these cars aren't regulated. On top of that they can end up severely over chargin u an thats comin off ur card straight away if it goes over yr credit

All in all bun it

[Mizchif]

I've taken about 12 journeys, and I've never been overcharged. They charge per mile and send you a receipt with a cost breakdown after every ride, so its worked out cheaper then any journey I've ever taken.

 

Plus, I stress, your card isn't charged if you have credit in your account, and you can request a fare quote before you book. I don't know why i'm so agressively promoting it, this isn't going to rip you off or scam you, its just a minicab application and it is really cool

[Grafter]

What do say about the regulation?

[Thun]

What if they take the long route to your destination?

 

Dont want to be clocking every direction they going so dont go the extra mile

[Thizz]

Sky Cars >>>>>>>>>>>

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Sky Cars

[Mizchif]

Well they charge on distance, so I guess thats the same with any cab who takes the long route you'd be charged more. But thats a gamble you take whenever you step into a cab innit! The rates are literally half the price of addision lee for distance anyway's but a couple of the drivers have asked me for shortcuts. They also round down the prices rather than round up, they're not out to scam you, they want you to rate them as highly as possible as the drivers are given bonuses based on their customer rating, and eventually UBER is going to use that to determine which drivers they want to keep after this recruitment/customer drive

[Mizchif]

For example, I got a cab Sunday morning from Colliers Wood to West Dulwich. Just under 6 miles,  £13 debited from my Uber account. Same journey at 5am in the morning with Addison Lee would have been like £25, and a normal cab would be around £18.

 

It's not like they're signing you up to a direct debit, once you use your free credit you don't have to use them again! Gosh why is it so difficult to give people money

[time_bomb]

sounds good, and im the  opposite i prefer to use card never carry cash, but thinking bout it i rarely use cabs

[Mr. Martinez]

Interesting article on this...

 

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/19/uber-and-disruption

Usually an industry’s disruption happens faster than anyone anticipates. Things look like business as usual to the slow moving incumbents, who often have not faced a real market threat for a while. Then the incumbents’ business undergoes sudden, cataclysmic collapse. Uber and Lyft are in the midst of causing this pattern to eat away at the taxi industry.

Below are the typical phases of disruption:

1. Overconfidence. As the disruptive companies emerge, the incumbents view the new entrants as specialized toys that could never threaten their decades-old franchise. This is the time for the incumbents to take action and innovate, but instead they usually ignore the new entrants, or often try to delay them with regulatory actions, such as forcing UberCab to change its name to Uber. Uber and Lyft’s early skirmishes with regulatory bodies are good examples of this standard tactic. Similarly, Airbnb has been pursued by the hotel lobbyists in NYC.

2. Sudden collapse/downward spiral. Sudden realization that things have changed. Realization is typically sparked in the incumbent through a drastic turn of events – e.g. the incumbent unexpectedly misses a quarter in a big way when its business evaporates faster than anticipated. A sharp collapse in its business is often the singular signal that the industry has hit a tipping point and an irreversible downward spiral kicks in for the incumbent’s business.

This is happening right now with Uber – more taxi drivers are switching to Uber, which means there are more cars on Uber, which means more people use Uber and fewer use taxis, which means more taxi drivers switch to Uber.

To quote a telling article from Fortune on this:

“The San Francisco Cab Drivers Association (SFCDA) [...] reports that one-third of the 8,500 or so taxi drivers in San Francisco — over 2,800 — have ditched driving a registered cab in the last 12 months to drive for a private transportation startup like Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar instead.”

These sorts of downward spirals start off slowly (so the incumbents ignore them early on) and then hit a phase transition and shift into overdrive – often over the course of just a few months or a year. In Uber’s case it is a network effect that drives fast compounding for itself, and a rapid phase shift/cliff for the incumbents.

3. Too little too late. Incumbents try to take action but often don’t do enough quickly enough. For example, the SFMTA and cab companies in San Francisco are now adding new medallions to increase taxi numbers in San Francisco, but it is probably already game over in the long run. This and other actions (such as building their own on-demand taxi app), should have been taken a few years ago when Uber first appeared on the scene as a black car centric company. Instead, the taxi companies responded by forcing Uber to drop the word “cab” from its name and lobbied extensively on the regulatory side.

4. Ongoing decline. Incumbents may survive for many years post collapse, but are no longer really relevant (e.g. BlackBerry). Instead they suffer from ongoing layoffs and downsizing of their companies with a subset going bankrupt early. In the taxi example, the individual drivers will thrive as they move to Uber and Lyft, while the taxi companies themselves will suffer. For the next N years, people will still order Yellow Cabs and other taxis. There will just be fewer and fewer drivers and customers for these traditional services. Eventually, branded taxi companies will become an “old lady use case,” i.e. only a small subset of the most conservative prior generation of users will continue to use the dramatically downsized incumbents.

BlackBerry is a good example of this. Some enterprises still buy BlackBerrys for their employees so the company has not completely disappeared. However, its relevance continues to decline as its market share slides. Old incumbents may continue to exist for years or even decades in a much reduced form after the new entrants take most of the pie. I am sure there is still a horse whip and buggy manufacturer somewhere, despite society’s shifts to automobiles decades ago.

[Mizchif]

I was saying this on one of my journeys, they can eliminate the competition and then make all cabs, Uber. The black cabs have been around for so long and fucking creaming it so they didn't need to change their approach, but as soon as a competitor comes along this is indeed what will happen.

 

Ubers been around for time and I only discovered it around Christmas and started using a couple weeks ago. I say more power to them, also I heard they're back by Google and aren't currently making any profit but neither was Amazon for a long time and look at us now.

[Grafter]

See thats what I dnt like. Google in all my business now they wanna kno where im goin. Where im at ain good enough.

Elimination of competition is a bad thing for the market.

I wanna know how they will be regulated

Now Barclays av pulled out if boris bikes whos gna be the new sponsor? . Wouldn't be surprised if it was google again

I dislike change

[Mic Man]

Mischief how come u take cab so often?

[Mizchif]

Coz its free. I didn't take cabs that often before, but now I'm not paying a penny so why wouldn't I?

[Mic Man]

Fair enough, I thought you just take cabs anyway but it just so happens that you've been able to get free rides of late

[Mizchif]

I do take cabs occasionally when I can't be fucked to travel home after raving or if no ones dropping me. But free cabs was always something I was going to rinse/continue to rinse

[time_bomb]

so i dont use cabs much but it seems handy, before i sign up can u confirm what the prices are like compared to a normal mini cab? 

[dub]

Cost me £19 from XOYO(Shoreditch/Old St) to Edmonton (top of Bounces) with 4 of us at 3am. Usually that'd cost £40-50.

[Guest 90210]

how u do da?

[JOHN DOE]

Cost me £19 from XOYO(Shoreditch/Old St) to Edmonton (top of Bounces) with 4 of us at 3am. Usually that'd cost £40-50.

40-50 from old st to edmonton 

 

surely your getting bumped. thats £25- 30 cab journey if that

[Guest 90210]

£40 would be suttin like old st to putney

[Greens]

£40 from old street to north is pretty standard for early hours fri/sat night. 

[dub]

Yeah £40 is usually what the black cabs on the street ask for, Addison Lee asked for £48 at that same point.

[Thizz]

020 8573 2222

[Guest 90210]

lol wen u watch that black cab meter just rising and rising

 

its a fukin madness