- Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, said he prefers not to compete with Elon Musk and Tesla.
- Musk said in January that Tesla will launch a paid robotaxi service in Austin this summer.
- Tesla will benefit from having its vehicle offer rides on Uber as well, Khosrowshahi said.
Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, says he’s optimistic his company will be able to work with Tesla and Elon Musk when it rolls out robotaxis.
Khosrowshahi was asked about Tesla during an interview with technology and media analyst, Ben Thompson for his newsletter Stratechery. The interview was published on Thursday.
“Yeah listen, no one wants to compete against Tesla or Elon, if you can help it,” Khosrowshahi told Thompson. “Their capabilities are pretty extraordinary, but I think the same economic laws apply to them.”
Musk announced Tesla’s robotaxi, also known as the Cybercab, during a launch event in October. Musk told investors during an earnings call in January that a paid robotaxi service will be launching in Austin, Texas this June.
Khosrowshahi said in his interview with Thompson that Tesla will benefit from having its vehicles offer rides on Uber.
“Then, that Tesla that is both on Uber, and by the way, they could be both on Uber and the network, that is going to create much, much more revenue,” Khosrowshahi said.
“So it all comes back to revenue generation, you have a box with wheels, you want to maximize the revenue of that box in order to reduce your cost of capital, and economic laws apply to Tesla, just as they do to any other car company,” he added.
Khosrowshahi told Thompson that the same rule applies to the food business, with restaurants using several delivery services to reach out to more customers.
“McDonald’s has its own app, and has an incredible brand, has a lot of capital, has terrific reach. They still work with Uber Eats and DoorDash, because they want to drive utilization of the box called the restaurant, that same economic value is going to be true going forward,” Khosrowshahi said.
“Ultimately, we’re hoping that my charm and the economic argument gets Tesla to work with us as well,” he continued. “If they want a direct channel, no problem.”
Uber and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
This isn’t the first time Khosrowshahi has expressed interest in partnering with Musk and Tesla. Uber has partnerships with self-driving vehicle makers like Waymo and Wayve.
“Obviously, competing with Elon Musk is no easy matter, and we take nothing for granted,” Khosrowshahi told the Financial Times in October.
“I don’t think this is going to be a winner-take-all marketplace. We believe in the spirit of partnership. We’ll see what Tesla does, and either we’ll compete with them, or we’ll work with them, or a combination thereof,” he added.
It remains unclear when exactly Tesla’s ambitions for the robotaxi can be realized given the regulatory challenges faced by self-driving vehicles.
Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told BI in October that it will not be easy for Tesla to get the federal government’s approval to sell a vehicle without a steering wheel.
Tesla would also have get approvals from individual states if it wants to expand the robotaxi network’s coverage, Koopman added.
Musk told investors in January that while he hopes that Tesla will have unsupervised full-self-driving vehicles in most countries by the end of 2026, that could also be “limited simply by regulatory issues.”
“That’s my prediction with the best data that I have right now,” Musk said.
