Terminal Miles 🚖

Independent Robotaxi Analyst + Reply Guy

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

Long $UBER

Planting a ⛳️ in the ground at ~$66/sh

“Robotaxis make Uber a zero” is one of the laziest consensus takes in the market.

Waymo and Tesla can afford to own the car, the driver, the fleet, the app and the consumer brand.

Most AV companies cannot. They will need demand, dispatch, payments, support and fleet utilization. Uber already has all of that.

Uber does not need Waymo or Tesla. It needs one credible AV supplier in each major market.

As AV supply fragments, Uber can aggregate it while cross-selling Delivery and leveraging Uber One and an enormous existing audience.

The real risks are not mysterious:

1) Uber’s partners fail to put meaningful driverless fleets on the road over the next 12-24 months.

2) Waymo and Tesla start another ruinous promotion war to train customers to bypass Uber and use their apps directly.

If Uber cannot get non-Waymo/Tesla vehicles to commercial driverless scale, or if its Mobility growth and margins deteriorate as Waymo expands, I’m wrong.

But Waymo and Tesla are the exceptions, not the template for every AV supplier (and this tech is becoming commoditized faster than ppl realize).

The market is pricing Uber as though every robotaxi company will become Waymo or Tesla. That is fantasy.

The market is pricing Uber as though Waymo and Tesla will have the only L4 AV tech. That is also fantasy.

Uber is not the AV winner. It is the bet that there will be many winners.

$TSLA fanboys, Waymo bulls, Uber bears and robotaxi enthusiasts: attack this thesis.

What am I missing?

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

Gonna post about this bc I can’t take the false narrative anymore!

@travisk getting removed from $UBER was the right and best thing for the company back at the time. TK had personally green lit many playbooks that pushed the boundary of what is considered ethical (to put it kindly). That was fine (prob not but history is written by the winners 🤷‍♂️) when Uber was a hyper-growth startup but by the time TK got the boot, it was time for Uber to grow up.

Divesting ATG was also absolutely the correct move at the time. At best Uber’s ATG efforts were hampered by Anthony Levandowski *alleged* illegal activites. At worst, ATG was simply not competitive with Waymo.

TK is held up as the GOD by VCs, but don’t kid yourself, this is mostly @a16z posturing so they can attempt to win future deal flow. The narrative from the recent podcast with Ben Horowitz couldn’t be further from the truth.

TK *is* a legendary founder but he need to leave Uber - it was best for him and the company.

Don’t let VCs with ulterior motives let you believe otherwise!

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

I worked at Uber during the Gurley years. You are so wrong. Gurley’s crusade against IPO pricing is misguided but the rest of his body of work is A+

You won’t hear a VC admit it, but he saved Uber from TK driving it off a cliff. The employees who matter at the time agreed it was time for TK to go.

Gurley isn’t at benchmark anymore FYI so not sure what he has to do with Fomo

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

I worked at Uber during the Gurley years. You are so wrong. Gurley’s crusade against IPO pricing is misguided but the rest of his body of work is A+

You won’t hear a VC admit it, but he saved Uber from TK driving it off a cliff. The employees who matter at the time agreed it was time for TK to go.

Gurley isn’t at benchmark anymore FYI so not sure what he has to do with Fomo

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@Circa1981 @mattbarrows @hawkblogger This is not a bold claim, in fact it’s a regular occurrence with Teslas

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

Waymo leaving doesn’t prove Uber’s partner strategy is broken. It proves Waymo was never going to remain a captive supplier. Any serious $UBER thesis already assumes Waymo (as the clear 1st mover) goes DTC.

The actual bet is whether Wayve, WeRide, Nuro, Zoox and others become credible substitutes. If they don’t, Uber is in trouble. But spending billions to manufacture another Waymo would be the dumbest possible response.

A platform buying back cheap stock while funding a diversified supply base is not ignoring the threat. It’s *the* strategy.

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@realroseceline Lesson not learned (I figured).

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

This wrong - you're implying that $AMZN prioritizes its own inventory at the expense of others when that's completed backwards.

Might want to check out this podcast from @eric_seufert and @aepstein_ to educate yourself on $TTD's competition bc for someone who has owned this biz since '16, surprised you're getting basic facts wrong that are so critical to the bull thesis from here

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@psichico_ @ariaradnia @realroseceline Ppl who unit shame are not worth your time

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

Tbf to you, Yipit’s SF calculation only includes Uber, Lyft and Waymo transactions where both pickup and drop-off are inside Waymo’s ODD. It historically excl. SFO, outside-zone trips and many freeway-dependent use cases.

Every ODD expansion changes the comparison set. Notice that around the November expansion:

• Uber jumps from 51% to 58-60%.
• Waymo falls from 27% to 18-19%.

That prob isn’t an overnight competitive reversal. The denominator suddenly incorporated new Peninsula/freeway territory where Uber was already much stronger and Waymo had only just become available.

Btw, I say this while being long $UBER 😂

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@TheRideshareGuy @_balaji_km I read every one! Appreciate your work

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@TheRideshareGuy @_balaji_km sorry just meant that the lack of disclosure is unfort par for the course in the public markets, no shade

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@TheRideshareGuy @_balaji_km Welcome to the public markets Harry!

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@realroseceline @ariaradnia Youre crashing out man lmao

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@realroseceline @TonandDK The same logic you use to underwrite the $UBER bear case is the same exact logic that would explain why your $TTD is such a dogshit investment lol

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@reinvestcap @WaltLightShed Autonomy in 2030

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@davidu You know the quote don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut?

You’re the barber here

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@grantbelden Waymo’s own CEO says its moat is evals, metrics and safety validation. That’s an execution lead, not a durable tech moat.

$NVDA open-sourcing Alpamayo 2 today is the tell.

Waymo won the first battle (first mover). Declaring the AV market finished is absurd.

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@gbrulte lol no way

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@zoox @Uber Congrats!

[Terminal Miles 🚖 @TerminalMiles]

@DrewCohenMoney @CapexAndChill This is a good pt!

But it’s not the one being argued by OP and my reverse DCF at ~$70 implies $UBER loses ~50% of its Mobility economics (YMMV)