I wouldn't be too worried about Tesla if I was Uber. Even if they get the hardware first without competition it would be a massive undertaking to build out a competitive transport business. The capital costs to create a fleet to have similar hailing times to Uber would be absolutely massive - now you have to buy the car instead of just recruiting a driver - plus they'd have to catch up on the logistics to try to pay for a tens-of-thousands-of-dollars car 5-to-20 bucks at a time.
Waymo is more interesting since things like Google Maps routing and Waze being under the same roof give them a ton of logistics expertise to potentially tap, Alphabet also has a shitton of capital if they wanted to expend it, and they could look at it as a long play where they aren't just getting the cost of the ride back, but they're also collecting all the data. (However, it's not clear to me that this is much more data than Google already HAS just from phone location history.
barring a change in interest rates, established companies with the ability to borrow should have effectively limitless capital to deploy. We're arguably at a unique point in history with respect to small businesses ability to add leverage to throw around megacap capex e.g. WeWork
Unless TSLA or Waymo decided that they didn't want to deal with a taxi network there shouldn't be any reason they couldn't form an independent company to absorb the loan risk ( with a PE partner potentially ).
Tesla's plan is to have an option, after you purchase or lease the car, to make it available as part of the Tesla network. This is something you could likely enable from the Tesla app on your smartphone. That way, they don't need to pay for any vehicles to build a fleet. They have a huge advantage, being a vertically integrated automaker.
Not really, Uber has accumulated around 3 million drivers, Tesla has around 1 million cars with FSD capabilities and growing much faster than Uber. Tesla has the advantage that their fleet would be composed with their owned cars plus customer cars, my prediction would be that they would quickly becoming bigger than Uber's fleet of drivers once they have FSD and with a click of a button you could send your car to make money for you.
Waymo is more interesting since things like Google Maps routing and Waze being under the same roof give them a ton of logistics expertise to potentially tap, Alphabet also has a shitton of capital if they wanted to expend it, and they could look at it as a long play where they aren't just getting the cost of the ride back, but they're also collecting all the data. (However, it's not clear to me that this is much more data than Google already HAS just from phone location history.