Tesla is preparing to compete with Uber, with Elon Musk vowing autonomous ride-hailing service this year. Both tech giants have been working on their autonomous driving agenda albeit on different approaches.
While Tesla is building its own robotaxi fleet, with its vehicles as a platform, Uber is rushing to take over the go-to-market services for companies owning autonomous vehicle fleets, writes eToro analyst for Romania, Bogdan Maioreanu.
In its latest earnings report, Uber mentioned several times the autonomous vehicles (AV) part. The key point for Uber was that while AV technology is advancing, bringing it to the commercial market will take significantly longer.
Hence the conviction that Uber will be the indispensable go-to-market partner for AV players. The company is prepared to build technical partnerships and then talk with AV companies about securing supply as their manufacturing platforms are preparing to get to scale for the next generation of self-driving vehicles.
There is a subtle change in Uber’s operating mode when it comes to autonomous driving. The company is investing in fleet supply. This is an investment that Uber has been making over a long time as these AV fleets now represent about 15% of the company’s inventory. And investments will continue as Uber is looking at acquiring the kind of depots with electrification required for charging the fleets, etc.
Uber is thus trying to build out the supply base to match variable demand. In its presentation to investors, the company mentioned that the variable demand is different from city to city but promised that we will see the Uber “magic in work in Austin coming up in a month”.
Austin was also mentioned by Elon Musk in its earnings call last week as the Texas capital will see an initial launch of Tesla’s unsupervised Full Self-Driving autopilot in June and expects California and other states to follow. But Uber’s statements are making Tesla seem late with its AV robotaxi development.
Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in the United States, announced a plan to offer completely autonomous robotaxis on its app “as soon as 2026.” In a post on X Chief Executive David Risher wrote that the company will work with Japanese conglomerate Marubeni to bring autonomous vehicles to the Lyft app. The vehicles will feature technology from Mobileye through a partnership Lyft announced late last year.
Investors are divided in assessing how the shift of the market from the current human-based fleet to autonomous driving vehicles will change Uber, Lyft but also Tesla’s business models. Some investors might consider that this AV market will belong to the first company to offer services and it looks that through its partnerships with Waymo, WeRide and Pony AI, Uber might be the one. Others are seeing Tesla having a more business-efficient proposal. There are also discussions about how expensive the systems needed for autonomous driving are and how the costs should be driven down in order to make these efficient.
Tesla is also the most popular stock among individual investors in Romania, and the second most owned by global investors on the eToro platform. Also, large investors disclosed ownership in Uber. Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund investor, said in a post on X that his fund Pershing Square began purchasing Uber shares early last month and now owns 30.3 million shares. Ackman believes that Uber is one of the best-managed and highest-quality businesses in the world that can still be purchased at a massive discount to its intrinsic value. Ackman considers this a favorable combination of attributes is extremely rare, particularly for a large-cap company. Ackman’s stake in Uber would put him among the top 15 largest holders of the ride-sharing firm.
Tesla and Uber might be on a collision course as both are preparing to offer ridesharing services, with both starting in Austin, Texas, which has offered its streets to AV companies testing their vehicles. However, Uber mentioned Tesla as a possible partner for them in this new endeavor and we will have to see how Tesla is positioning itself to face Uber in its business model after Robotaxi is moving from concept to real life.
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