This is one of the most important things the market misses about $UBER. Robotaxis serve a fixed demand base, however, the actual demand is highly variable within the day and throughout the week. Vertically integrated robotaxi companies wither need to hold large amount of underutilised cars in the market, or leave demand on the table. First case will lead to massive sunk costs that’ll be very hard to recover and the latter will invite competition. The economics of the market calls for an aggregator that owns the distribution so it can supply to the fixed demand by directly owning an AV fleet and supply to excess demand via elastic, unowned inventory of human drivers that doesn’t come with sunk costs. If you don’t own the distribution, you can’t pull this off. $UBER owns the distributi
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