Tesla is making headlines for their recent press release on their new car models. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, revealed that Tesla’s three future models: the Model X, the Model S, and the Model 3 will be self-driving cars. This is of course is dependent on software and government regulations. People could argue that Tesla’s self-driving cars could be the new disruptive innovation of the car industry. Self-driving cars aren’t the main point of of this article is getting at, but rather it is one sentence in the report about Tesla trying to compete with Uber.
The sentence states that using Tesla’s cars for ride sharing for profit will only be available on the Tesla Network. Tesla declined make any comments about this post to Business Insider, but many speculations can be taken away from this. A so called “Driverless Taxi” could be coming very soon. Tesla plans to release an app for this service within the next year. Tesla’s plan for a “ride-hailing service” could be game changing for both customers and car owners. While Tesla owners are on vacation, they can connect their car to the Tesla Network, allowing it to pick up people and drive them where they need to go. This would be similar to Uber, but there would be no driver, and the owner of the car can make money while being thousands of miles away. In other words, Tesla has challenged Uber and other smaller companies with just one sentence from a news release.
Experts say that Uber has a slight edge on the new Tesla Network because they already have a well established system and network. Tesla might have a slight advantage with their name and how it is so appealing to customers. This idea can be related to Apple, and how everyone wants to have their products so they fit the norm. We will just have to see what happens.
I think that this could be an awesome innovation, but Tesla has to be careful with all potential threats to this system such as cyber attacks and driver error. If these can be accomplished, these cars could eventually take over the market. It would certainly take awhile to get used to this, but I think it could happen in the next 10 years.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-driverless-ridesharing-plans-could-take-on-uber-2016-10