Industry leaders break down how AV deployment will reshape fleet operations, disrupt driver earnings, and create entirely new categories of work. On the panel were:

Ashwini Anburajan – CEO Obi
Ryan Green – CEO Gridwise
Daniel Muñoz – Co-Founder & COO, Tower Mobility
Yariel Diaz – Director of Government Affairs
Moderated by Natalie Lung, Tech Reporter at Bloomberg

The conversation explores how AVs are already affecting drivers’ earnings, how drivers and fleets are adapting, and where delivery bots fit into the mix. The panelists also touch on the kinds of new jobs AV deployment could create for humans — from fleet management to remote operations etc. They dive into AV ride pricing dynamics, the importance of pricing transparency for riders and drivers alike, and what the near future could look like for the gig economy.

As well as the video above, a full transcript is below.

Urban Autonomy Summit Transcript – NYC

Natalie Lung: So we’re kicking off our very first panel exactly on the issue, the pressing issue of. Eight v’s. Impact on drivers’ earnings, existing fleets, and also pricing for consumers.

So I have with me to be today an esteemed panel of experts starting from my right here. Ryan Green from GridWise Trian from lv, and we have Daniel Munoz from Tower Mobility and Yayo Diaz from Server Robotics. So I wanted to kick off with Rideshare. Waymo is already in five cities doing 250 K trips every week, and so the impact would be probably most pronounced for drivers in those cities.

And GridWise recently released a report that showed there has been some impact and decline in earnings for some drivers in some cities. So I want to dive into that and ex explore a little bit about the nuances behind that. So, Ryan, would you mind taking us off, like what’s the big picture there? Like what’s happening to [00:01:00] driver earnings in, in those?

Ryan Green: Yeah, of course. And maybe I can help you understand like what you know, where we’re coming from in the market as well as, as you think about GridWise, as we’re a data and analytics company that’s providing, that’s really focused on empowering the gig mobility workers. We empower over a million of these gig mobility workers in helping them maximize their income, but as they work and use our application, connect their accounts to Uber and Lyft, DoorDash, any company they work for.

We’re capturing billions of billions of trips and deliveries in our system and have a very rich understanding of driver behavior, wages, but also consumer side pricing and, you know, pick up and drop off information, et cetera. So we make, we, we produce a lot of reports like Natalie just mentioned, as well as, uh, provide access to a lot of the insights and analytics to many types of companies across different industries.

So, as we think about. Like the impact that we’re seeing. I think it’s, it’s everyone assumes thats, Hey, as soon as AVS roll out into the market, we’re gonna see an instant decline in driver earnings. We’re gonna see all the [00:02:00] trips going over to AV vehicles, et cetera. Which at first wasn’t really the case.

But now as we’re looking across a lot of the, a lot of the metropolitan areas that have had AVS operating for, you know, in the course of at least six months or more, they’re at a bit more scale as it relates to the fleet size. We are seeing a direct impact to earnings. We’re looking at earnings across the pay per trip, hourly earnings, grosser, gross, take home earnings that the drivers take home every, every month as well.

And across the board, across all those markets that we’re looking at. San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, la There’s, there’s a decline across the mall. So the, the, where we’re seeing the most impact is actually in la. So if you look at take home pay of a driver in la we’ve seen that year over year decline 18%, which is, uh, obviously a, a very major impact.

And really why would is you look at la you look at across San Francisco. What’s interesting is that we’ve seen San Francisco be a bit more of an, an anomaly as it relates to [00:03:00] gross income or gross take home pay is that San Francisco is the only market we see where gross. Income has actually increased a few percentage points while hourly pay has gone down, while pay per trip has also gone down.

So what do you look at next from there? The other stats that we look at are utilization and liquidity in the marketplace based off of trips per hour and the way we measure them. And those have actually also gone down. Because of that, what what we infer is that drivers are actually having to work a lot more.

We see the work hours increasing for those drivers in the San Francisco market and they’re driving a lot more than they used to, to make more and to compensate for the decrease in pay. But we don’t see that same behavior elicited by drivers in, in the other markets.

Natalie Lung: I’m curious, are drivers adapting to this sort of new normal for them?

Are they, you know, picking sort of longer trips, like are longer trips? More available to them now that, you know, these are sort of introduced as new supply into the market? [00:04:00]

Ryan Green: Yeah, so as, as we look at, as an av, any AV platform, like as they enter into a market, they are optimizing for operating in the most high density demand areas and optimizing for the shortest trips possible because it’s gonna keep them as utilized as possible.

So what you are seeing. In the near term is more displacement of short term or, or short distance trips that are in those like higher urban high density areas in the urban areas and drivers, human drivers taking a bit more of the longer distance trips, whether that’s airport trips, whether that’s trips in the suburban areas, but also you know, some o other urban areas or in peak demand time.

Maybe they’re taking more of those trips, but that’s where we see. Kind of the impact to utilization, I think declining as well, because you’re seeing the types of trips that drive the human drivers are continuing to take, or there’s, there’s creating longer wait time between those trips. There’s that, but plus the market’s already been for the last two to three years oversupply, so now you’re [00:05:00] adding more supply to the market.

I think what a lot of the, you know, a lot of people across the industry and I also believe that. Autonomous vehicles are gonna increase the tam of the market, the total addressable market and total demand pool available for riders or for, for any operators to go after. But in the near term, I think there’s just gonna be some displacement that takes place of rides until you have more broader rollout of these vehicles, larger fleet sizes, but also the price per mile has to start to drop down more drastically from relative to where it’s at today.

Natalie Lung: I wanna bring in Daniel for a moment. From Tower Mobility. You run a fleet of EVs in LA as well as like wave accessible vehicles in six other cities. And you mainly work with Uber, but also now with Waymo to provide accessible vehicles for their service. And so since these these have come onto the market, has the fleet dispatches to your drivers changed at all?

And like I’m curious what you’re observing there.

Daniel Muñoz: No, we, we have not seen any changes actually. We have [00:06:00] seen an up uptick on, on, on EPH. I think that there, there is a transition, uh, from, from, from the tactical what’s happening today to pricing and utilization to where. The AV companies like Waymo are looking at it strategically, which is very similar to the pharma model, which is you look at this as, as a 10 year net present value with, with, with tactics or strategies to gain the market initially by, by going down in price.

But at the end of the day, I will see, I will think that they will continue at a, at a price equal to today or higher, because that’s where the margins are. From and, and from a net present value point of view, from a financial point of view, long term they need to keep those price.

Natalie Lung: Are, are your drivers getting more or less jobs or is it more, it’s not as over protected,

Daniel Muñoz: so, so we have to develop our own algorithms [00:07:00] to actually go and make sure that they are a hundred percent utilized.

So, so we haven’t seen any decrease in utilization of, of, of trips per hour. It. Throughout the, the, the hours that our cars are out there.

Natalie Lung: And I suppose with the expansion of AV services, you know, the demand for like wave vehicles are also, you know, growing as well and

Daniel Muñoz: that is correct. So, so the wave business, uh, how we catalog it right now, uh, and how we segment it, what we do today is specifically to serve the requirements of the team in the market for, for, in order for them to operate.

The other piece of business there that is huge, that, that we have put in the back burner right now is the nan using medical transportation and also the, the micro transit business that is also wave type of business, which is also very large in in [00:08:00] opportunity.

Natalie Lung: I’ll get to the consumer pricing side in a bit, but I do wanna touch on delivery before we move on.

Serve Robotics is currently in five cities with Uber working alongside human career. So I’m curious what you see the role of rope robots there. Like is it taking a particular type of trips more than humans?

Yariel Diaz: Yeah. Happy to talk about that. So if you don’t know us, serve Robotics. We do sidewalk delivery.

Robots. We’re in la, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and now Chicago as of last week. So we are expanding pretty quickly. We just launched our 1001000th robot, and we are going to have 2000 by the end of the year. So we’re growing pretty quickly. And that’s, as you mentioned, Natalie, a partnership with Uber Eats. So we are only really picking up that last mile, that one to one and a half mile delivery, and we only deliver right at the sidewalk.

So what does that mean As a delivery driver, you’re still getting orders that are leaving it right at the door of the customer. You’re still [00:09:00] getting orders that are meet in the lobby. You’re still getting orders that are beyond that one mile, 1.5 mile radius. So we’re not necessarily displacing of delivery drivers that would say we are complimenting those rides, that in reality they don’t necessarily want.

’cause that last mile is usually the one that you got the worst tips on. These are the rides that you almost never get folks accepting because it’s based on, the algorithm usually pays out based on distance, and that distance is very narrow. And on the customer side, sometimes I’ll tell you, I tap into me where I order something from down the block.

I’m like, do I really need to tip this person 20% to go three blocks to deliver my cookies? You know, you think about it, and with the robot, you don’t have to think about it because you don’t tip.

Natalie Lung: So, yeah, like after covering the supply side of both ride share and delivery, I wanna talk to Ashwini about, you know, the consumer side of things.

You know, with supply coming in, you know, with laws of economics, you know, pricing. Definitely there would be impact on the pricing dynamics. I’m curious, could you give us [00:10:00] a little bit of overview of, you know, how autonomous rides are being priced at the moment? Is it always a premium in all markets in LA or sf?

Ashwini Anburajan: Autonomous rides are at a premium now because there’s only one player in the market. And that’s Waymo. Right. So what we’re seeing is essentially that, and I wanna get to the point that Daniel was making, ’cause I think there’s a lot of truth in it that the prices could only go higher. But that’s because you’re dealing it.

It depends on the number of entrants. Right. And what we’re seeing overall is that from the research we’ve done, it’s a 30 to 40% on average, higher price across all three markets. LA SF and Phoenix Atlanta’s rolling out, and that seems to be Atlanta and Austin appear to be priced at overall the same level because it’s on the Uber platform when you call the ride.

So they need to price it comparably to a driver. What we feel in terms of the way that things are [00:11:00] positioned at the moment, and I think consumer preference is important to play into the idea that it’s like what happens to the drivers overall? Consumers are preferring rides without drivers. And that’s just like, that’s what the research has shown out, right?

Once the co, once the consumer gets in the car, 70% prefer it to be without a driver. There’s a higher preference among women to put their children or elderly relatives in cars, even though women are slower to adopt, go getting in these, getting in these vehicles. And right now, I mean, you’re talking about San Francisco, it’s one of the most expensive markets in the world.

Incomes are higher. Usage of technology is higher. And so the willingness to pay more exists in that market compared to others. So what, what’s gonna happen as we see this roll out, I think what we know now with Tesla rides, which we’re, we’re working on pricing in that at the moment, Tesla rides are looking at, you know, they’re being, they’re being priced at like, kind of like half to a quarter of the price of, of an Uber [00:12:00] ride.

But they also have drivers in the car. So it doesn’t count. And then I realized I didn’t introduce OB properly, but for those of us who don’t know you one, there’s a hat on almost every seat. So please take a hat. And we are a consumer rideshare app that basically allows you to be kayaked for rideshare, right?

So you can aggregate prices in one screen. You can link your accounts and then you can understand what pricing and ETA and wait times are. We’ve incorporated Waymo in, we’re gonna soon have Tesla in the app as well, and you’ll be able to, you know, kind of deep link in and choose, choose your rides. We are highly used in these markets where Waymo exists and we have seen a level of preference among our own user base, despite the fact that everyone that uses our app is a highly price conscious consumer.

So overall, like, you know, you’re seeing, there’s. Consumer preference is about enthusiasm for technology, but also enthusiasm for the experience the car is providing in and of itself.

Natalie Lung: Is there, do you think there would be sort of a return to sort of like subsidized rise, you know, in [00:13:00] the early days of ride share and I, I guess maybe that might come when there are more entrance in the market.

Right now is still a premium as you said, but like in terms of different rides of different distances at the moment, is there price competition there at the moment?

Ashwini Anburajan: The price per kilometer is still is, is quite, is quite high. Like I said, like the only way we’re gonna see the return of quote unquote subsidized rides is if we see Tesla really expanding into the market and really.

Embracing, like, you know, kind of like lowering the price and if whether Waymo wants to compete with that or not. I don’t think Tesla’s, like, I think they have a ways to go until they get the approval to be in a car, you know, to have passengers in the car without, without the driver. So it’s not, it’s not a, it’s not a comparable solution when you think about the fact that Waymo’s actively out in market and you can call, call a ride at, at any given, at any given time.

Natalie Lung: And from the ride share or ride hailing company’s perspective, how important is like pricing transparency for them? I understand you also sort of work with [00:14:00] the companies and provide that your data as a service for them as well.

Ashwini Anburajan: We do have a B2B data product and I don’t think companies wanna be transferred pricing.

Right. Like why would you? But the reality is that consumers compare, they’re well aware of it. It’s actually like far more pricing elasticity. Is much more dynamic outside the United States than it is in the United States because there are a lot more rideshare providers and prices are regulated on some platforms and they’re not on on others.

So I think it just, it depends on, on where you are. But pricing is the most important thing and what we’ve seen overall in the market, consumers are paying more for rideshare, whether Waymo was there or not. They’re taking more rides. So this market is expanding. As Ryan said, the TAM is growing and I think that’s gonna happen.

That would’ve happened whether we had AVS or not.

Natalie Lung: I wanted to dive a little bit into sort of, you know, for drivers and carriers who might be displaced or having to adapt their work. What are some of the jobs that [00:15:00] you see being created at the moment or further out in the future?

Ryan Green: Sure I’ll go. So I think that, uh, I mean in the near term is, you know, there’s many categories of work that these drivers can work between.

I mean, even in just a platform like Uber, they have so many different types of delivery deliveries that you can perform. So what we, what we’re starting to monitor and what we advise anybody to look at who’s leveraging our data and insights is starting to keep a close eye on the multi aping trends.

’cause we can see how. Drivers are multi apping across rideshare by category or by service our company as well. And so I think there’s gonna be as as, as the AV fleets become more prominent until the TAM starts to really expand out a bit more. As you may start to see a higher level of multi apping across categories from rideshare to delivery, while still they want to continue operating on rideshare because there’s higher pay there generally.

But I think longer term. Is it, it, it, I, I think people [00:16:00] start to look at other types of, as you think about really why someone has decided to gravitate towards this type of work is there’s, there’s flexibility in it, there’s autonomy. You can kind of choose when you work, how you work, et cetera. And so there’s many other types of flexible work that is coming to market that is in market, but that market is only just growing right now.

And we see that, you know, one third of the US workforce participates in some sort of flexible work. Today with AI and automation being on the rise is we expect that to only increase over time, so we see more opportunities. One thing that I’ll, I’ll add that I do think is like an interesting, interesting other type of job that you could see coming to market actually came out of the last korber board event we were at in la.

I do forget the name of the company, but there’s a company where they were able to plug into a vehicle and remote control it. From a console that was actually in a different country and they were giving demo rides at Vore. And so someone could [00:17:00] actually, I I, I remember sitting in the car and someone plugged in from overseas in Europe, I think in Poland or somewhere, and then they take over the car and they’re driving it for, for me and the, the, the person who was sitting in the driver’s seat and he was like, we’re talking to this person.

They’re just allowed to drive from another country. In, in la and so I, I think that’s an interesting one because at that point you can be a rideshare dri if, if technology like that come to fruition in, in production, you could be a rideshare driver from, and there’s, there’s some things to investigate here who should be allowed to do this, but from another country.

You could be in New York and be a rideshare driver in la but say like, alright, LA is like peak time demand. Peak demand is kind of dwindling. So now we need you in Atlanta. So you basically can. Drive for 24 hours a day. You could drive, if you wanna drive for 24 hours, you could do it. But it’s, it’s, it’s almost like, yeah, you could just drive across the, the entire country at different points of time, different [00:18:00] days of week, et cetera.

The way, the way that you want it to and be from and, and be a remote rideshare driver or virtual ride driver, working home, working from.

Yariel Diaz: So a, as the sole government affairs person on here, I’ll tell you there are regulations around that. I thought

Ryan Green: you could just

Yariel Diaz: roll that out, just No, no. And several states do have regulations around teleoperation.

Yeah. And where people have to be physically located. So very important.

Ryan Green: That’s that’s good. I, I think that’s important. Yeah.

Yariel Diaz: So from our perspective and from the delivery side, we talk about the quality of jobs, right? Like you’re talking about the ability to be a delivery driver maybe in another market, and the opportunity to pick up those rides remotely.

But one thing that’s often overlooked when we talk about autonomous vehicles and personal delivery devices, which is the category we fall in, is the fact that these vehicles and these devices are operating themselves when they’re on the sidewalk or when they’re on the street. But at the end of the day, they go somewhere, they’re going to depots, they get cleaned, they get serviced, they get maintained, their software gets updated, and those are jobs [00:19:00] too.

And these are jobs that are paying way above a minimum wage. These are jobs that are paying way above a living wage. And every one of the companies, ’cause I used to work at an autonomous vehicle company before, have depots locally in the markets that they’re operating in. These depots are literally physical space where these items are stored, whether it’s the PDDs or the avs.

And as the fleet sizes grow, so do the depots. So do the employees and so do, does the hierarchy of those employees. Coming in from a field response operator to a tele operator, to a field supervisor, there’s plenty of opportunity to move up through there. And oftentimes the folks are coming in as field response agents don’t have a college education, so it’s not necessarily a requirement.

Natalie Lung: Is that sort of like the jobs we created, is that one of the benchmarks that governments all often look at when you don’t talk to them when you wanna launch in new markets?

Yariel Diaz: It is. It is there. We always get the question about just job displacement and the jobs that we’re creating, so we love to talk about all of these additional W2 jobs that come [00:20:00] with benefits as opposed to the gig workers.

Daniel Muñoz: Think from a fleet management point of view, it doesn’t matter if you are or ev, you still need the same processes and the same people. When in a, in the site and depending on the site with each original site and off site or a, or a big site to, to do more than just regular maintenance. But you need that from a fleet management point of view, AV or ev from, from an uh, from a man, uh, fleet point of view.

One thing that we found is that there are two types of, of drivers that standard gig driver, gig economic driver, which drives maybe two or three hours or part-time flexible here and there and, and the full-time driver, uh, for fleets, we have found that the gig segmentation doesn’t work because as, as they are used to working part-time whenever they want.

That doesn’t [00:21:00] work for, for a, for a fleet. So in a fleet you have to have full-time employees that work all the time consistently, that show up every day for a the job.

Natalie Lung: I wanted to broaden up, you know, our discussion a little bit, you know, what can sort of platforms do to sort of retain and maintain the trust among its drivers and sort of keep that balance between the existing fleets and also the all other types of autonomous partners, anyone?

Would like to, this is like an open question.

Yariel Diaz: Well, I think it comes down to transparency in what the fees look like, what they’re earning, what they can expect, what they can expect the availability of the work to be. Most of the gig workers are in that economy because it’s flexible, as Ryan was saying. So transparency around that and being able to depend on it.

From our perspective, we don’t have those workers. We have W2 employees. Their schedules are planned out. They know what their hours are gonna be. They know what they can anticipate, and [00:22:00] they have jobs that they can rely on. Yeah, I will say from From the fleet, from our fleet point of view, is all about the benefits and the consistency of pay.

Knowing that they’re going to a job like this is their number one job, that they are getting the benefits and that the culture is something that they like to go to. So. Some of the surveys that we have done in, in, in our, in our, with our work is, why do you like this job? Um, uh, and so we, we have improved based on those surveys, how do we, what type of benefits we provide to our employees to the point that today what we hear from them is we love coming to work at our mobility, uh, because of the package that we have put together for them and how they’re treated.

As as people, not as numbers.

Ashwini Anburajan: I mean, I would look at it from the consumer point of view. How many of you have been in a car and the driver asks you how much you paid for the ride? [00:23:00] Like, come on. Like most of you right? Just happened to me last week going to the airport because they don’t trust the price that they’re getting paid.

They don’t know. They don’t know what they’re getting paid, they what you’re getting paid. They don’t understand the spread between it. And I think that that level of transparency. You know, empower. I don’t know if anyone from that company is here, but it’s super interesting, right? Because it’s just like, I was first told about Empower two years ago by a driver who had picked me up in a curb from, from the airport, and he was like, you need to try this app instead.

What do you do for work? He was chatting. I mean, you know, the idea of a subscription based model is something that is happening outside the United States at a very rapid rate. In India, for example, Uber has had to change its business model for Tri Wheelers. Because you cannot, like, you know, like another company ca came in owned by Paytm and they, they introduced a subscription model and it, it sort of shifted, it shifted the industry around it.

So I think that new models of new business [00:24:00] models are coming out around this. I think it gives preference to. Full-time drivers, but we know the majority of rides happen with full-time drivers anyway. And as a passenger, I know I prefer being with someone who’s a more professional driver than, than not.

And, and that’s a question of safety and many, many other things that, that are there. So I think that pricing transparency, that’s where it really, it really matters as, as you think about breaking down the components of, of a ride. I think

Ryan Green: just, uh, to add to that, I mean there’s, I, I think a consistent theme across everyone here around transparency.

And, you know, when we think about the lack, you, you, a you, you mentioned around people, the driver asking, Hey, what, what is the price right now? Is like, that is an interesting component. ’cause a lot of times you do see, and we see in the data that, you know, we see rides where there’s a 15% take rate. We see Rise where there’s an 80% take rate, uh, from the platform.

And so there’s a wide spectrum of that, and you’re not seeing a, a even [00:25:00] distribution of going back to the driver on pay that exists there. But I do think that as you look at the innovative models, there’s, you know, companies like I, I think one that’s been most interesting to me on a global scale is in drive that really has implemented at scale successfully and profitably a free marketplace model.

That is similar to the rest of the gig economy. As you look at an Airbnb, an Airbnb is a host who, you have a host who has a, a property and they say, here’s the price, and you decide whether they’re paid or not. So they actually have that same type of model where you can actually, the, the ride will come in the ride request, but the driver, they’re saying, Hey, the riders like.

I’m willing to pay within this band. And then you have a lot of drivers who just bid on it in real time, which sounds inefficient relative to what we’re used to today, but through seeing it live is actually works pretty instantaneously. So you have a free market model where the market decides what the price is rather than the platform itself.

Natalie Lung: But if we look in the US, like we don’t have a lot of different models like the [00:26:00] bidding model, like what kind of signals can drivers look at to sort of still get the best job, still get the. You know, higher paying jobs or like close by jobs that, you know, can, they can optimize for.

Ryan Green: Yeah, I mean, I think through the platforms themselves that they’re working for today is they one have to be very cognizant and conscious to not over recruit in the market as supply dynamics are changing over time.

So hopefully as more and more supplies being introduced to the market, they’re not maintaining the same level of. Acquisition initiatives that they have at play to bring more and more drivers in the market and can kind of normalize things over time as the market supply dynamics evolve or supply is increasing from autonomous vehicles.

And as they’re doing so as those things would change, as like offering in their marketplaces or being more open to offer opportunities that are out there for work or make, create awareness, I would say, around those things, I, it’s hard to see them probably doing that completely. So I, I think the best [00:27:00] thing there is for looking for even the, uh, any, anybody across the ecosystem, even, even the autonomous operators is, is creating awareness around these new jobs that are being created directly through them and, and trying to generate as much awareness as possible.

Ashwini Anburajan: Yeah. I can I jump in on the in drive point? Yeah. That iDrive had to pull out of the US and in doing so, it was because the bidding model wasn’t quite working because of like base costs that had to be met. Those include insurance competitive with other, other markets. Like it was working well in Miami, didn’t work so well in some, some other places.

So, and we know that like right, right from talking to consumers and looking at pricing. So I think like these things can work in some places, but like there are a level of base costs that has to be met to be deployed market by market. And in the US regulation state by state is so different that it really impacts.

Ride share company’s ability to perform and also new entrants into the market that are not used to like kind of [00:28:00] working on, on US prices. So in drive, often undercuts internationally, and it does have the bidding model to a degree and goes head to head with companies like Bolt in particular, in, in like Southern Africa.

But like, it’s not, I don’t, it hasn’t been able to take off. In markets that are more highly regulated. And I think that’s because there are base costs that, that have to be met

Daniel Muñoz: no matter what. Yeah, because the, the, the minimum labor costs are there, so you cannot go under certain labor costs. Uh, plus what you say, insurance and everything else that goes with a, with a costing model.

So there’s only a base, and, and that base is hard to, to break.

Natalie Lung: Daniel, I’m, I’m curious, you know, as avs have come into la, which is your sort of main market, like what sort of communication or data sharing do you have with Uber or, or Waymo to sort of understand like how your drivers need to be dispatched?

Daniel Muñoz: We, at this time we don’t have any data sharing. [00:29:00] However, I think that there will, there will always be a hybrid model and, and the right now it’s too early. For that hybrid model to be affected by one or the other, because the, the, the supply of EVs and EVs is not significant enough in the market to make a difference.

I think as, as the, as the market evolves, they, they will be segmentation as to what EV serves and EV serves. EV will probably require more, more of a premium type of product. It’s probably gonna be more, uh, touch a lot more touches like Wave and, and the premium or airports where you need luggage and other stuff versus the av which may serve a different type of population.

Natalie Lung: I think one last point I, I wanna, I’m curious to ask you about, I know Serve is, you know, planning to double its [00:30:00] fleet to 2000 by the end of the year. So with that, you know, new supply of robots coming in, like how do you see. Sort of you, the company, improving its utilization, whether it’s, you know, deploying in more cities or like, what, what would that sort of look like for you?

Yariel Diaz: So deploying in more cities is part of the strategy. We haven’t announced any additional cities, but some are on their way, just like increasing the number of hours that we’re operating in a market. ’cause right now it’s mostly 12 hours from 10 to 10, so increasing it into some of the later night hours.

Uh, increasing the service of the markets, uh, that we’re operating in. Meaning we are, when we say Miami, it’s not just the city of Miami. We’re operating in Coral Gables. We’re operating in Miami Beach. We might be operating in a couple of the other surrounding cities soon. So expanding that footprint to allow for the expanded fleet size.

And then also making sure to work with our partner, working with Uber Eats to ensure that the filters that they’ve set up to send orders our way are [00:31:00] working to, to the best of their abilities, so that the bots are at their highest utilization, utilization point. Because really that’s where we make the most money.

How do you mitigate, um, like weather conditions, like snow and things like that? Common question. So the tires are altering tires, but we do factor in a certain number of days for weather that they’ll be out of service. An example, we just launched to Chicago last week. Chicago is notoriously snowy in the winter, so we have, you know, well over 20, 30, 40 days as part of the calendar that we can anticipate.

We won’t be operating in light snow. We will be operating. Light rain, even heavy rain will be operating. But if it’s unsafe for a human to be out there on the roads or on the sidewalk, we’re not gonna be out there on the road or the sidewalk either.

Ashwini Anburajan: But snow is when people order the most.

Yariel Diaz: No, no. And the question also, not only for for your product, but also for autonomous.

I with this, I mean, living in Chicago and I know how, how [00:32:00] difficult it is just to drive and so I, I, I see a lot of obstacles for the AV vehicles in, in, in the northern cities or in snow cities.

Natalie Lung: I was recently in, I visited the depot of Waymo in SF and saw the new seeker models, and I think they have like their own individuals win like wipers on each of the sensors.

So maybe that would help a little bit. But please start. Yeah, it’s a start. I, so that’s all the time we have, so I put your hand together for, for our panelists. Thank you so much.