Dara Khosrowshahi

ZOOX is on the way to create one of the best brands in the business in transportation... To have that experience on UBER will only magnify what it is bringing to the marketplace. Uber is successfully transitioning into a capital-light, neutral marketplace for autonomous vehicles, eliminating the need to fund its own expensive R&D. Conversely, Amazon's Zoox gets immediate, massive global distribution and high utilization rates for its capital-intensive robotaxi fleet without having to acquire customers from scratch. LONG. This partnership validates Uber's platform-as-a-service model for AVs and accelerates Amazon's monetization of its Zoox investment. Regulatory pushback on autonomous vehicles in major cities or high-profile safety incidents could stall the rollout.

Uber is an absolute believer in eVTOL and is an investor in Joby; it will work with Joby and put its aircraft on the network as the vehicles become available. Cities have expanded into the third dimension for businesses and residences, but transportation infrastructure has only grown in two dimensions, which is why traffic keeps getting worse, so the 'Z axis' makes a ton of sense and Uber's demand can feed it.

Uber's marketplace economics survive the shift to robotaxis. A standalone fleet has fewer vehicles and no demand of its own, while Uber's hybrid human-plus-autonomous network already has the demand and sends much closer pickups (3 minutes instead of 15 for a 10-minute ride), so revenue-generating miles as a share of total miles and revenue per car per day are much higher for a fleet on Uber than for one going direct. Just as McDonald's runs a direct channel and still sells through marketplaces, even Waymo or Tesla will want to work with Uber to maximize the economics of very expensive cars. The end state is financial, REIT-like owners holding big fleets on Uber's network; Uber will use its balance sheet only to prove the revenue per car and then move fleets off balance sheet, staying largely capital-light as the demand layer for asset-heavy operators.