Well, at least they got their US Federal Motor Carrier broker registration and insurance:<p><pre><code> Date: 09/14/2016
USDOT Number: 2926893
Legal Name: UBER FREIGHT LLC
</code></pre>
They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt.<p>Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service.<p>Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber.<p>The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small.<p>Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.
This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but after going through all the comments, and reflecting back on the general ethos of 2016, it's worth saying anyway:<p>I received the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for Christmas, and there is a lot of "disruption leads to winner take all" talk in the book. I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb, but it's amazing that our lives are dominated by only a handful of companies (I'm willing to bet 90% of our daily time will be attributed to using a product made by either Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook). Now, the aforementioned companies generally do require scale, so my assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but in Uber's case... does freight really NEED scale? I've never needed to order freight, so I can't speak from experience here, but it seems like the social cost to having Uber win all may be far greater than the benefits in efficiency. I can imagine a future where we arrive at a new Era of Barons and legislation is passed to break them up (ala Rockefeller, Vanderbilt...etc.).<p>Last but not least, we seem to be push for "Universal Income" as a means to assuage the pain caused by the Winner Take All economy, but I don't think that's fair to a lot of America. I think we should solve the problem in it's root before we talk about Universal Income- I don't mean to sound negative, but it just seems like a convenient cop out to the problems at hand.
I do not live in the US. So would love some help understanding what could possibly happen here:<p>-Do people own trucks or is it corporations/shipping-companies.<p>- What happens to all the various forms of taxes (are there any?) which come into picture during long distance transporation<p>- Is there a concept of toll tax on the roads. Who would be providing those?<p>- How do you ensure legality of contents and prevent illegal transportation of goods here?<p>- The USP of Uber is the being able to get the required service in a couple of minutes.Will this be applicable here?<p>- Uber has always been in grey areas when it comes to personal vehicles being used commercially to drive single passengers. Transporting goods would cause the same issues on a larger scale right?<p>On the website: It kind of sucks that you need to give an email id to get even basic information on what this is about[1].<p><a href="https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver" rel="nofollow">https://www.uber.com/a/truckdriver</a>
Amazon is also building an 'Uber for trucking' app according to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-trucking-app-2016-12" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-building-uber-for-truc...</a>
In China, "Uber for trucking" services have off over the last year or two. The largest player, Huochebang, has registered more than 2 million drivers and is doing ~100,000 orders per day. They don't charge anything for using the platform and make money by selling other services to drivers.
I wonder if truckers will actually sign up for this, especially when it's 100% obvious that this will evolve into autonomous trucking shop.<p>Maybe the people who sign up will be similar to the type of people who sign up as Uber drivers--not your typical truck drivers..
There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license.<p>for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber.<p>who will work for uber freight?
Freight auctions connecting truck owners&drivers with shippers are quite common in Europe. Surely USA has had this kind of thing before right? Who's the incumbent?
Interesting. How will they regulate shipping illegal goods? Moving people and food is fine, but this adds a layer of grey to the already blurry line uber are skirting.
Why not just go and acquire an Austin based startup called uShip? <a href="https://www.uship.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.uship.com/</a><p>Uber has a boatload of cash. Why reinvent a wheel? uShip has a funding of $44.71M in several rounds according to crunchbase. Uber sure has a vast collection fine-tuned maps, but freight routes are different from inner city routes.
While I'm not sure how well this fits into Uber's business model (I feel like freight and taxi services are very different industries), the idea of automating trucking is great. It's a far easier technical problem, the logistics are simpler, and it's a $700 billion industry just in the United States. After acquiring Otto this year it's good to see them pursuing this aggressively. Although I'm not a big fan of Uber as a whole, there is a huge amount of money to be made in automated trucking and Uber has a good chance of taking the lead there. I feel like this is where we'll see the real competition for automated driving in the coming years.
Interested to see how Transfix will stand up to this: <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/transfix</a>
So I know of only one competitor in this space (I don't know very much about startups that do freight hauling) -- UShip.<p>Wonder if this has even registered on their radar
Old idea. I used www.uship.com many years ago (5?). Worked well. I was able to ship two pallets from the west coast to the east coast, door to door. Costs: close to nothing. I think it was something in the range 250 to 380 US dollar.
I would like to read a book about how Uber is managed. They are extremelly competent on creating good services in difficult business areas. They are hungry for new markets and keeps innovating.
A stepping stone to the unemployment of half the families in my small town. Yet, so long as narcissist STEM technocrats have money for their coffee shops the world will continue blindly "progressing".
I look forward to the breathless praise from tech news, with lots of fluff about automation and driver-less lorries.<p>I suspect that as they have to deal with real companies, with lawyers that do due diligence things won't be so smooth.<p>Delivery is business critical to most companies, so Uber are going to have to make a pretty strong pitch to get business.<p>I'm not sure who they are pitching at, companies that do lots of hauling will have decent relationships with haulage broker/companies directly. They'll do credit and guarantees.<p>The other thing is that I'm strongly suspicious of Uber business practice, as they appear they'll do anything to make a quick buck. (drop drivers, jack up prices, lie, cheat and generally break the law)<p>That's not something that I want when shipping business critical stuff. "oh sorry, the surge price on the haulage has changed, conference season you know..." or "we've dropped that subcontractor, we're sorry your pallet appear to have been lost"