Altimeter Capital

The US robotaxi fleet on my tracker crossed 6,000 vehicles this month, roughly 2.5x where we sat a year ago. $UBER has committed $10B+ to its AV program and this week it was reported that @Waymo wants to double its fleet to 8,000 by year end 2026 and hit 20,000 by the end of 2027. Those headlines together frame two things: 1) Robotaxis are finally scaling and 2) Uber is spending to defend against disintermediation. But I think that framing gets the math backwards. The question everyone keeps asking is "who wins the robotaxi race?", but the question that actually matters for Uber is a lot simpler: Does the rideshare pie get bigger faster than 1P networks take slices of it? My base case has the US AV fleet reaching 225k vehicles by 2030, which will account for about 17% of the ride-hail fleet doing about 25% of total trips. To be clear this is not a model where Waymo or $TSLA stumble. The 1P networks still end 2030 with 145k vehicles or 64% of the fleet. Uber goes from under a thousand vehicles on network today to 70k by 2030, which is 31% of the US AV fleet and second only to Waymo. While the aggregators give up share to 1P networks (99% → 85%), the category compounding at 13% means @Uber still compounds trips at 10% a year. That's true because of three things: 1. The category grows faster with AVs than without them. 2. Humans stay a demand shock absorber that allows Uber to run AV utilization a lot higher. 3. Every AV provider that isn't Waymo/Tesla needs demand. To be clear, trips are necessary but not sufficient. Hold human trips flat and Uber trip growth is closer to 5% than 10% through 2030. Uber doesn't need to win the robotaxi race to win the trip math, it needs the pie to keep growing and for there to be successful competitors outside of Waymo and Tesla. @dkhos @_balaji_km