Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…For listeners, Brad was telling us this earlier. I had no idea. I think this is super new, super interesting and I hadn’t fully thought through it. Brad, why do you think it’s advantageous and why would you think a city would legislate that? It seems like it’s only good for business. Well, I think it’s protectionism. I think that the yellow cab fleets are a major source of revenue for cities and the fees and taxes that they pay and perhaps the medallion fees. So I think that’s one reason that I think they’ve kind of tipped their fingers on the scale as like the taxi companies have done all around the world. I think the second reason is there’s a rational argument around traffic and congestion and obviously all the Chinese cities struggling with it mightily, that might be a little bit of a cover story for just protectionism. And of course, the pendulum may shift. But I think for now, Didi is kind of fighting that regulatory battle and they've reorganized, restructured their company a little bit to put more emphasis on some of their chauffeured offerings and they’re commuting alternatives like buses. I think the other thing that happened and the reason why this was a smart deal probably for both companies is, it became very clear over the last two years that this market was about to undergo a major pivot into driverless car technology and so it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to go waging a war and spending a battle for a market that is going to be changing very quickly. And now both Didi and Uber are spending a lot of that money that they might have been spending on subsidies, investigating the future, and I think that’s a smart approach. Do you know if Didi is also working the self-driving car offering?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.