Uber Eats might end up playing a key role in its parent company’s robotaxi business, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said.
The ride-hailing app is working with multiple companies, such as Alphabet-backed Waymo, to make self-driving cars available through its app. Waymo’s robotaxis have already proven more efficient than most human Uber drivers in cities such as Atlanta and Austin, Uber has said.
One big question hanging over robotaxis, though, is what happens to the vehicles during times of the day when demand for rides is low, Khosrowshahi said on Uber’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
He pointed to one solution: Have them drive orders to customers through Uber’s food delivery and freight businesses.
Some delivery services, such as DoorDash, are also experimenting with robotaxis for food deliveries. Uber offers both ride-hailing and delivery, meaning robotaxis on its network could shift between the two as demand for each changes, Khosrowshahi said on Wednesday.
“Having delivery and freight as part of our logistics ecosystem gives us an opportunity to actually use these vehicles at a structurally higher utilization than anyone else,” Khosrowshahi said.
While ride-hailing accounted for over half of Uber’s revenue in the fourth quarter, its delivery business grew by 29%, a faster clip than the 18% growth rate its ride-hailing segment posted in the same period.
How efficiently companies use the autonomous vehicles that they put on the streets is one of the challenges hanging over the technology.
Safety is another. Last month, a Waymo car injured a child near a school in Santa Monica, California, the latest in a series of accidents involving self-driving cars. Waymo said it is cooperating with a federal probe into the accident.
While it doesn’t operate self-driving cars directly, Uber is experimenting with ways to train the AI behind robotaxis using data it collects from human drivers, Khosrowshahi said. Uber has a partnership with Nvidia to collect that data, for instance. Last month, Uber said it would launch AV Labs, an arm focused on similar training efforts.
Khosrowshahi said the goal is to make self-driving cars more reliable and avoid situations such as last year’s Waymo blackout in San Francisco, when a power outage prompted the company to suspend services. “The real world can create unexpected circumstances,” he said.
Robotaxis also require infrastructure to store, charge, and repair. Some companies, such as startup Voltera, are building depots for those purposes in anticipation of a robotaxi boom in the coming years.
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