Uber in funding talks with banks, private equity for robotaxi rollout
The company has been offering Waymo robotaxis on its ride-hailing app in Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia. In April, Uber entered a deal with Volkswagen for thousands of autonomous electric vans in the US over the next decade.
It also struck a $300m (R5.31bn) partnership in July that will allow it to deploy more than 20,000 autonomous taxis, made by EV start-up Lucid and powered by self-driving tech from Nuro, over six years.
Despite strong regulatory scrutiny, doubts about wider adoption, and high costs forcing many firms to shut down, Tesla and Waymo have been pushing to expand robotaxi services, a business Elon Musk has said could be worth trillions of dollars.
Waymo is present in five US cities, including San Francisco, while Tesla launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin in June and started ride-hailing operations in the Bay Area last month.
Uber said it has not yet seen any changes in demand trends in Austin or San Francisco since Tesla's services were launched in the cities.
'To a lot of these companies, it does seem this will be a worthwhile endeavour ... as there are lofty predictions about the robotaxi industry's total addressable market,' said Ken Mahoney, CEO of Mahoney Asset Management.
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