Uber betting big on robotaxis as a means to solve its driver shortage

Defiance ETFs CIO Sylvia Jablonski joins The 8:30 team to discuss Uber's (UBER) investments in driverless vehicles and the hurdles it faces in utilizing robotaxis to solve the company's extended driver shortage. Video Transcript 00:00 Speaker A let's talk about big in my world is Uber, uh, right? So, uh a little profit below Wall Street forecasts here, uh, you know, talking about driver shortages, higher fuel costs, the Middle East conflict weighing on results. So, Uber's forecasting a fourth quarter just a profit of 95 to 99 cents. It's below estimates of about 105 a share. Uh, said that Middle East was a 75 basis point drag on mobility bookings and 100 basis point potentially for Q4. 00:32 Speaker A CEO Dara Khosrowshahi talking about elevated fuel prices and tighter driver availability weighed on supply growth in several international markets. Gross booking outlook a little bit, it's in midpoint of what analysts are expecting, uh, same with, uh, adjusted core profit, looking at $3.30 or sorry, 3.13 billion to 3.23 billion, uh, with in the midpoint is what analysts are expecting. So, you know, they're sort of there, you know, from like a forecast point of view, but it's just a concern of driver shortages, rising higher fuel costs. Uh, we haven't even talked about, uh, robotaxi spending, which is about to. 01:13 Speaker B I was going to say, that's what caught my eye are all the driverless car numbers. 01:16 Speaker A Yeah. I mean, they're going to spend what, $15 billion, something like that. Uh, so that's that would address potentially the driver shortage issue, but the question is, that's not happening for a while. It's it's happening, but it's going to take a while. 01:27 Speaker B You've got to, you've got to legislate that. Yeah. 01:28 Speaker A Yeah. 01:29 Speaker C Yeah, I mean, I think super interesting and they they have a a very kind of like cause and effect situation, right? They can get more drivers or invest in the driverless cars and and then I think the the price of fuel, we were talking about that a little bit. So if you kind of start to see that come down, and you start to see the the supply of drivers go up, this company is in a great spot, in an absolutely great spot. And so I think for, you know, investors that are in it for the long run, this is this is actually a pretty good earnings call. I think they're kind of like where they need to be and there's a path to to improvement here. And and then the driverless car thing is going to be an absolute boom if they figure that out and get that right. 02:08 Speaker A Yeah. I mean it's it's interesting that, uh, they've they've kind of spread their bets, right? So they had a deal with Waymo that is expiring now in certain markets. They're not going to work with Waymo anymore. But they strike deals with, uh, with Rivian and and Lucid to make, uh, vehicles to make to make level like level three, level four robotaxis, probably level four robotaxis, uh, in certain markets and they're going to launch those in the US and in other main mar in other major markets. So that's that's a big one using other companies as a software backbone for the deployment and things like that. And they know logistics and they know, uh, they have the ability to sort of service these cars. They they're they're going to figure that out. It's a question of regulatory, it's a question of, uh, you know, using a non-Waymo or non-Tesla based FSD system, are these good enough to use for commercial deployment for regular people to be seen across different areas and different markets? View Comments