This was published before the Tesla earnings and more importantly before the conference call.
From Business Insider, Oct 20, 2024:
- Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi appeared on Friday's episode of the Hard Fork podcast.
- Khosrowshahi called Elon Musk's vision for Tesla robotaxis 'pretty compelling.'
- Musk unveiled the Tesla robotaxi — called Cybercab — earlier this month.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is intrigued by Tesla's plan to deploy autonomous robotaxis.
Khosrowshahi recently appeared on Hard Fork, a tech podcast, to discuss Uber's position in the autonomous vehicle industry.Uber partnered with Waymo in 2023 to bring autonomous ride-hailing services to Phoenix customers. The companies announced this September that they were expanding operations into Atlanta and Austin in 2025. Waymo and Uber were once entangled in a lawsuit over self-driving technology but reached a $245 million settlement in 2018.
The expansion comes as Waymo and Tesla compete to lead the autonomous vehicle industry.
During the episode, Khosrowshahi responded to a question asking if he considered Tesla a competitor following the company's "We, Robot" event this month. At the event, Musk gave the public their first glimpse of Tesla's robotaxi — dubbed Cybercab. It left former Waymo CEO John Krafcik and some Wall Street analysts unimpressed despite the hype.
Musk said Cybercabs would be in production before 2027."Well, they certainly could be, right? If they develop their own AV vehicle and they decide to go direct only through the Tesla app, they would be a competitor," Khosrowshahi said. "If they decide to work with us, then we would be a partner as well."
Khosrowshahi then called Musk's vision "pretty compelling."
"You might have these cyber shepherds or these owners of these fleets," he said. "Those owners, if they want to have maximum earnings on those fleets, will want to put those fleets on Uber. But at this point, it's unknown what his intentions are."
Although Uber has positioned itself with Waymo, Khosrowshahi said he is open to partnering with Tesla during an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month.
"We'd love to have it on the platform, but if not, I don't think this is going to be a winner-take-all marketplace. We believe in the spirit of partnership; we'll see what Tesla does," he said.
On the Hard Fork podcast, Khosrowshahi championed Waymo, saying he believed Waymo could best Tesla.
"I think Elon eventually will get to a viable scale, but for the next five years, I bet on Waymo, and we are betting on Waymo," he said....
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The stock is up $35.19 (+16.47%) at $248.84.
You may recall Uber's former CEO's thoughts on this very subject:
"We're at the very beginning stages of becoming a robotics company," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Vanity Fair Summit in San Francisco in October. "As we move toward the future, autonomy is a pretty critical thing for us. It's existential."I think he chose his words carefully, an existential threat literally threatens the existence of a firm and he has known since at least 2014 that without major breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles Uber could never be worth what they had convinced investors to pay:
-via c|net, Dec. 2016
"When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."
We have some history with this stuff. If interested see 2017's "Remember that time Uber's Kalanick said having autonomous was crucial to the company's very survival? (a deep dive)" or the 'search blog' box, upper left.