Episode summary
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on self-driving's future, changing business model, job displacement
All-In Podcast
· · Guests: Dara Khosrowshahi
Summary
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi argued that autonomy is less a threat to Uber than a way to deepen its role as the demand layer for mobility and delivery. He said Uber already has over 20 autonomy partners across mobility and delivery, including Waymo in Austin and Atlanta, and expects more partnerships to hit the road in Texas, Europe, and elsewhere as safety drivers come out this year and next.
Khosrowshahi framed the competitive debate around sensors, maps, and compute. He contrasted Waymo-style and Chinese approaches with Tesla’s camera-only strategy, saying Uber’s standard is safety first: the company wants autonomous systems that are “multiple site times safer than a human being.” He also argued that falling hardware costs will expand the market by making mobility on demand available to many more people.
On the business model, he said autonomous fleets will still benefit from Uber’s network because the platform can deliver more requests and higher utilization than a standalone fleet. He expects the future to be hybrid, with human drivers and autonomous cars coexisting for years, while some of Uber’s capital will be used to prove out fleet economics before the sector becomes more financialized. On job displacement, he said the issue is real in the long term, but not immediately because Uber’s platform is still growing fast enough to absorb demand and redeploy workers into other on-demand tasks.
Key takeaways
- Khosrowshahi said Uber has over 20 autonomy partners and expects more cars to launch in the U.S., Europe, and other markets.
- He argued Uber’s network should outperform standalone fleets because it can route more nearby pickups and raise revenue miles per car.
- He said Uber’s safety bar for autonomy is multiple times safer than a human driver, and safety comes before economics.
- Khosrowshahi expects the AV market to become increasingly financialized, with fleet ownership shifting toward capital providers over time.
- He said driver displacement is not the near-term issue, but it could become a major societal problem in 10 to 15 years.
Notable quotes
“we have over 20 partners across both mobility and the delivery business”
“So I think their safety record is excellent. Ultimately, we think autonomous can be both superhuman in terms of safety”
“So for us um if you're part of our network, you are going to get more requests than the player who's doing a standalone”
“we announced the 20 billion buyback because in looking forward to areas in which we could invest aggressively for example in AV”
How the episode opens
The driving force behind one of America's most influential companies. Record high today for Uber. 100% up last year.
Whimo and Uber have announced a partnership. When you have a CEO that's done what DAR has done, you set the bar higher and higher. The impact we have on society is significant.
We hope to keep building on that impact going forward and I'm quite optimistic about what the future's going to bring. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Uber CEO Darra Kazer Shahi. Good see.
All right, Dar, I wasn't sure if you were aware, but I was an early investor in Uber. You I've heard you say it once or twice, and I'm curious how my investment's doing. I don't know.
Okay. Based on today, today's looking pretty good. Um, so, uh, autonomy is the discussion I think everybody wants to have in the timeline.
How many partners does Uber have in autonomy today? So, we have over 20 partners across both mobility and the delivery business. Uh, I'd say mobility now is in the field as we speak.
Obviously, we've got a partnership with Whimo, who is uh I think the best of the best in Atlanta and Austin. Uh but there are a number of other players that we are partnered with. A number of Chinese players, Autonomy in China is uh hitting the big time and a lot of these companies that want to expand outside of China, we're partnering with.
And then in the US, uh even in in the second half of this year, uh we will have a couple of partnerships kind of hit the road in Texas. uh and then in Europe and the rest of the world. So you will see we've announced a bunch of partnerships.
We're doing a ton of work with these partners.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- self-driving future
- uber business model
- lidar vs computer vision
- tesla robotaxis
- job displacement
Companies and tickers mentioned
- UBER
- TSLA
- Uber
- Tesla
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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