Except that currently all the drivers also manage the inventory of physical cars, and all maintenance, and all legal liability. The parent's question is a good one. Owning and operating a fleet of cars is the core competency of a rental agency, not a ride-hailing app.
People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.
If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame.
That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
Self-driving won't make a difference to this structure though ?
The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
Just a ride sharing app cannot reach the scale and revenue to justify the investments they have attracted. It is not realistic to raise $25+ Billion[1] just to be a pure SaaS startup.
Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services.
Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration.
[1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B.
[2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
