00:00 Speaker A
So talk to me a little bit about how you’re seeing these themes going into 2026. Robo taxi, AI.
00:10 Speaker B
Autonomous is going to be it’s going to be the year of autonomous. You know, frankly, particularly in the US with the expansion of Waymo into uh as many as 20 markets in 2026. Our estimate for uh Tesla is that it it enters 30 US markets by the end of 2026 and you’re beginning to really see the early stages of a transition from uh human human-driven activity to one that’s run by robots. and it’s very exciting. It’s good for society, it’s good for um the health of consumers given that it lowers traffic uh deaths and uh and incidence rates. And so I think autonomous is something that could be a headwind for companies I cover, Lyft and Uber in some ways. Um could be beneficial in other ways and certainly will will be good for Waymo and Tesla. On the AI side, you know, a lot of the the benefits the past two to three years in terms of security prices have come with infrastructure plays. I think you’re going to start to see a transition more towards use cases, the enterprise and consumer use cases. And um, you know, these things kind of being found in the wild now and starting to see the ability to quantify uh the returns. Meta’s been an early beneficiary of incorporation of AI into the business. I think you’ll see more companies as well in 26.
02:08 Speaker A
And looking at Lyft and Uber, I mean, Uber has done well this year. Uh and I’m curious, is that because of robo taxi uh and and how you see the competition between some of these players uh shaking out? I mean, you’ve got Waymo that has done so well, and then you’ve got Tesla that is also making advancements and Tesla which touched all-time highs this year. So I I guess I’m just curious as to how you see it all shaking out within those players.
02:44 Speaker B
So Uber and the performance year to date, it’s a little tricky because it did underperform exiting 2024 on fears of autonomous and then recovered this year as it, you know, as autonomous has has been, you know, uh held at bay and hasn’t really impacted anyone’s business quite yet. And so I I think that that that performance looked over an extended period of time called the next 18 months, Uber’s been relatively flat. You know, I think Uber as a company is a bit more insulated than Lyft because it has a delivery business for restaurants as well, which is about half of the gross bookings, and also has a significant business outside the US. In the US, you know, autonomous is ramping quickly and I think it’s going only going to accelerate on an S-curve type uh pattern in 2026 and that really exposes Lyft which has over 90% of its gross bookings in the US and and so I think that you’re going to start to see the effects of that in the share price which has also done well um this year in 25 could come to an end in 26.
