Many people believe that Tesla robotaxi will not happen for years. However, the CEO of Uber Dara Khosrowshahi says Uber would love to partner with Tesla on the Robotaxi platform.
NEWS: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says competing with Elon Musk is 'no easy matter' — and would love to partner with @Tesla to get Robotaxis onto his platform. pic.twitter.com/hmR0a0EfIW
— ALEX (@ajtourville) October 15, 2024
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Elon described how Uber can do that. All they have to do is buy robotaxis, or work with people who own robotaxis.
What Elon didn’t address is that this is insane from the Tesla investor perspective. If robotaxis work, they should be valuable – worth $100k or more.
Why in the world would a Tesla investor be willing to let them be sold for $30k?
$30 000 for the vehicle
$10 000 a year for the software
Its called a loss leader
There will be no robo taxi for YEARS. It is obvious if one looks at the failure rate of self driving cars. It could even take decades. Uber need not panic, at least not in the foreseeable future.
As a side note: I challenge Elon to “self drive” in a big Indian city where I live.
Tesla would first need to import/build a lot of vehicles in India and collect a lot of NN training data on driving there from human drivers. The challenge is just as great to a human who has never driven there even if they are a very good driver in LA. There are different implicit traffic rules that have to be learned,
yup. Tesla FSD in India is several years away.
Next year they will likely launch in Europe & China, but they have a much stronger position in those countries, India is still pretty 3rd world.
No offense to Uber…but what would they bring to the table?
Tesla has vehicles, FSD software, and has already teased their mobile app.
Existing Customers, Capital, a good understanding of the business, an App that is pretty evolved, drivers who may want to transition to Robotaxi herding franchisees. It depends on how fast Tesla wants to scale, how quickly regulatory permission opens up, how humble Uber is about recognizing that Tesla could just eat their lunch over time if they don’t make some deal.
The customers will flock to use the Tesla Taxi if 50% cheaper.
Tesla has the funds.
Understanding the business is probably the best case, but not enough.
Tesla is great at software, and their app will be better then Ubers.
I think a partnership would likely speed up scaling, but I don’t enough to justify a partnership which entails splitting profits.
Tesla has no desire to use it’s own capital if it can use other people’s, it wants to control the platform and scale as fast as possible not hog all the profits. I assume customers will flock to it. I assume Tesla can create it’s own app, but it still doesn’t know the business as well as Uber. Uber can make a case for a deal. This is similar to Tesla licensing it’s entire FSD tech to any other OEM. Tesla would still control the platform but it gives them a way to survive building hardware. Uber would have to be pretty humble about making itself useful and adapting to whatever Tesla wants to justify a deal. The story makes it seem possible they understand this.
Uber has $175 B in market cap and is destined to quickly lose most all of that when the Tesla Network goes live and self-driving vehicles automatically undercuts Uber’s business model. Rather, Uber could use its value to pay for Tesla to build its first 5.8 M? Cybercabs and yes, gain some of the profit from those cabs.