Sachin Kansal: prediction

Transcript context

…I remember. And we decided that we're going to take a partner-oriented approach and that is the approach that we have taken since then. Over the last year, we have signed about 15 partners. In fact, we just announced another partner earlier this afternoon called May Mobility. So we have been announcing many, many partners when it comes to AVs. Now, that's our strategy. Now, what does that actually mean? What do these partners do? What we are building is we are building a hybrid network. The hybrid network has a hybrid of human drivers and AVs on the same network. And we work with partners. We have a set of APIs that we have built. It's a very rich set of APIs and we have partners who basically integrate with those APIs and get access to this hybrid network, this hybrid marketplace. And let me explain why that is beneficial. These cars are expensive. These are assets that need to be utilized. And if let's say a city has 500 Avs. When it is 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday mid-morning, we know that demand is going to be really, really low and you may have a lot of these vehicles actually sit underutilized. Whereas when it is Friday evening at 6:00 p.m., you don't have enough cars to fulfill the demand that you will have at that point. So if any of these partners try to operate that service themselves, it can definitely work. But you're going to leave either customers dissatisfied or you're going to have underutilization. So our hybrid network really allows them to equalize that because when you don't have enough cars, we are able to send drivers to fulfill that demand. And then given that demand density that Uber brings, we are also able to utilize all the vehicles even if it is 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. So that is the value proposition of our network. We are big believers in autonomy. We think autonomy is going to lead to more safety. It is going to take some time. So as we project out, we don't know if it is going to be five years or 10 years until it sees a certain kind of scale across the world, across many, many cities. We are in about 75 countries today, roughly about 15,000 cities. So there's a huge geographical landscape for us to capture as well. But that's our strategy. And so far, we recently launched in Austin with Waymo and that's been going really well. And we of course have Phoenix with Waymo. We are going to be launching Atlanta soon. We've also launched internationally in Abu Dhabi with our partner WeRide. And then there are many more launches that are going to come down the road. So very excited. And by the way, I talked about mobility. Delivery has something similar. So we have sidewalk robots with many partners who in a downtown area for a short distance delivery are actually doing thousands of deliveries today. Oh wow. I've seen those robots. They're very cute. I always wonder how they get to where they're going, but clearly it's working. The Waymo thing, I've totally noticed that Waymo basically in some form has decided to move away from their own app in many cities and Uber is how you get a Waymo, which I don't think a lot of people understand. So what I'm hearing is essentially the strategy is just be the super app for getting around and getting food and Uber drivers are a part of that and part of that is autonomous vehicles. And is the idea over time it will stay that way? There will always a need for humans to drive cars for a long time?…

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