Tesla Just Forced Uber Into A Huge Pivot

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Uber upped its commitment to Lucid to $500 million plus invested in Nuro just to stay in the race. So Uber has a new strategy. So their new strategy twofold.

[00:00:10]Okay. One of them is they're actually buying investing in buying cars now. So that is I'm going to pay a car company and I'm going to buy cars from you that we're going to put into the network. So that's a big flip because they're no long they're now no longer asset light.

[00:00:25]They're now asset heavy company. but two, they're positioning themselves as a technology company that provides everything that a self-driving vendor doesn't need to do themselves. And there's a whole long list. We've covered that before. Here's a new one. They want to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies.

[00:00:46]So the idea is that every car every every Uber car that's driving they'll attach vision the cameras on there and they'll track sensor equipped cars that Uber operates a dedicated fleet and a separate from his driver oh this is separate from his driver network but the ambition is clearly much larger. Uber has millions of drivers and even a fraction of those cars could be transformed into rolling data collection platforms the scale of which Uber could offer the AV industry. So the AV industry does not need to go and send out their own cars. They can basically capture that data through this program.

[00:01:24]>> Let's pause right there. Let's pause right there on that last the last paragraph on that. It said it would dwarf what any individual AV company could assemble on its own. I can think of one company that could gather more data and has and does every single day.

[00:01:42]So that's patently dishonest. When you tell me a lie at egregious, I have no you have no expectation of me to believe anything you say. I [snorts] was covering a story the other day where Uber said we have a clear advantage.

[00:01:54]There was an article about it. We have a clear advantage and that is data. I said what data do you have? You know that people like taking rides places. That's it. You don't own the drivers. You don't own the customers. All you know is that people sometimes take an Uber home from a bar. What you don't have is data on all the drives that are currently too expensive for anyone to use. If you're going to reduce the price to expand the market, you have a big blind spot that makes your data useless. And the fact that you have the ability to rent drivers doesn't mean anything because unless you're going to tip them, you're paying them less than what they would make, not dealing with the sensors and the nonsense. Are you those would be employees that would be just hiring a fleet. Anyone can hire a fleet. And if it's not your cars, you don't have the full telematics. You don't have the wealth of data that Whimo or Tesla has.

[00:02:51]So Uber again, they're just flailing.

[00:02:55]>> I hope they're flailing. Okay, here's what's happening. So they believe the bottleneck is the data. Companies like Whimo need to go around and collect the data, collect different scenarios. So you may be able to say in San Francisco at this cool intersection, I want some data at this time of day so I can train my models. The problem for all these companies is access to that data because they don't have the capital to deploy the cars. So it's going to be pretty expensive for Uber to do this. They'll need to now upfit cars just for the business model of capturing data as opposed to the business model of actually robo taxis. But that's what they think. Becoming the data data layer for the entire AV AV ecosystem is pretty smart play according to I don't know who said that actually. I guess this is this article saying that. So the company currently has partnership with 25 AV companies including Wave. That's what they do. They partner with every AV company and we're going to provide you all the things you don't need to do.

[00:03:48]That is just one of them. Oh, we don't not make money out of this data. We want to dem democra democratize it. Okay, go back to the previous slide because that first paragraph explains why Uber has no idea what they're talking about. We need data from this intersection at this time. Which means we need data from all intersections at all times of day because children exist in places. Senior homes or uh children in neighborhoods and dogs exist in all places. You're doing something worse than Whimo's approach. Whimo's approach was to map every millimeter of the world. Yours is to map every millimeter of the world at every minute of the day. That's insanity. Tesla's approach, Xiaoong's approach, many of the new approaches is to no, just make it behave like a driver. Then it doesn't matter where you are, it'll just drive.

[00:04:40]>> And Whimo's idea here is so archaic and absurd that genu makes sense. What you're saying makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah, >> it is interesting. That's our approach.

[00:04:54]But it's honestly it's the only when you strategize what can we do if there's an autonomous vehicle future. There's all of them. Why don't we provide them the tools that they need to survive?

[00:05:06]>> Well, and with 25 partners, they're just filling up their dance card hoping somebody shows up. Great.

[00:05:13]>> Yeah. And every one of them won't will want a, you know, a slightly different customized version of what they want.

[00:05:20]But it's not going to be like, you know, here's the package, everybody get the same thing as you might think.

[00:05:24]>> And they don't want to make money. I struggle to find that credible.

[00:05:29]>> Uh it's a story that they're telling to investors. Here's Neuro. Um they've received driverless testing permit ahead of the Uber robo taxi service launch.

[00:05:39]Let's find out more. So this is the they've they're testing the Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with neuros autonomous tech on California public roads. So, vehicles that will eventually be used in Uber's premium robo taxi service.

[00:05:53]Um, Neuro is backed by Nvidia and Uber, which Nvidia and Uber, by the way, back everybody. That's the problem. Nvidia bets in anything that buys their if you buy my chips, I'll pay you money so you can buy my chips.

[00:06:07]>> And if you have a if you already have a working solution, why would you need to partner with someone who has an incomplete solution?

[00:06:14]>> They don't. Yeah. So, Uner, they're testing everything. Anything that moves, we'll move it. We'll partner with you.

[00:06:19]So, Neuro has held a driverless permit for six years, but it only applied to operate a low-speed delivery vehicle at the time, a program that was scrapped when it startup pivoted its business model to focus on licensing its technology to companies like Uber. So, Neuro is going to license this tech to Uber. So, now can test the Lucid vehicles without a human safety operator behind the wheel.

[00:06:42]>> So, I love this approach. You take Lucid, which says we do have autonomy and it is coming, but you add on your own sensor suite, which by the way, you've never road tested really. And then you partner with someone who makes tools that also don't work. You've got literally three systems, none of which work. Maybe if we make it a Neapolitan ice cream, no one will notice.

[00:07:05][laughter] This is again just I wish them luck. I want as much competition in the space as possible. But >> yeah, we just talked about how Lucid lost money. But that's the thing, they're partnering. So Uber said in July that it's a three-way deal. Uber would invest 300 million in Lucid and buy 20,000 robo taxi ready gravity vehicles.

[00:07:24]So what does that mean? Who has to upfet the cars? Yes, Lucid does. They have to spend the money to do that. that has since been expanded to $500 million and a minimum 35,000 robo taxis with an agreement changing to include at least 10,000 gravity SUVs and 25,000 EVs built on Lucid's upcoming midsize platform.

[00:07:43]>> Those will be gravities 10,000 gravities is the wrong number. That's way too many. I get that you want a premium airport shuttle, a little town car type service, >> but the town car services always used Lincoln Town Cars which were not expensive. They were a little bit more than a Ford Taurus where a Gravity is twice the price of a normal car >> minimum before you put all the nonsense on it. So >> you're right. It's way too much. Too expensive. And there's a benefit. It's a premium feel, but honestly, >> no one's going to pay.

[00:08:18]>> No one's gonna No one's going to pay triple. And then so look at this partnership. There's a three-way deal here. They have to partner with Nvidia's Drive AGX Thor computer. And then they have to of course buy new. That's the whole problem is that you have five c five partners here and you have to add all the other ones too.

[00:08:36]>> Yeah.

[00:08:36]>> So good luck. And then of course it is the cameras liar and all that. That's just not going to happen. And then Uber has also made a multi-million dollar investment in Euro. So, Lucid has delivered 75 engineing vehicles to Euro and Uber and testing and mileage accumul accumulations ongoing several cities throughout the United States.

[00:08:56]>> So, when did they do that? Because if it was in the previous quarter, that's 1% of sales.

[00:09:02]>> They disclosed it the first quarter.

[00:09:04]>> Yeah. So, that's 1% of Lucid sales last quarter was this deal.

[00:09:09]>> Uh I don't know, man. The It doesn't inspire confidence.

[00:09:15]>> Yeah. Uber's going to do whatever they need to do. Okay. So now we've got Lucid, BYD, Uber, Whimo, all burning cash. That's okay. They need to all try.

[00:09:26]>> You could say Tesla also burned cash for several years, many years before they turned the corner. This is just part and parcel.

[00:09:32]>> Yes. But no one has burned money quite like