, Columnist
Toyota Won't Learn From Uber
Carmaker deals with ride-sharing services are about acquiring customers, not technology.
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Ride-sharing startups tend to be run by young, smart people with utopian ambitions and access to unfathomable pools of venture capital. So we might assume they have esoteric knowledge about the future of transportation that the Louie DePalmas and Thelma Dickinsons in the regular auto industry can't discern.
Sharing services "defy the very notion of a car as a personal, autonomous machine,'' the McKinsey consultancy wrote in 2014. Uber is ushering in a era when "car ownership goes away,'' its Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick told a tech conference the same year.