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Lift and Weimo are partnering to bring self driving taxis to Nashville. Customers will be able to request driver US rides on both companies platforms, and Lift will provide fleet management for Waimo's national operations. Let's get to more with Lift CEO David Rischer. This is something you've been working on for some time, that's right, and the state of plays is very clear. Weimo also has a partnership with Uber in different markets. You now have a partnership in Nashville.
Just explain the rationale for you on why this is a great go to market for robotaxi.
Well, as you know, we've been saying for a while we think self driving cars are going to be hugely market expanding for ride share. It's a really good product. And then when we looked at potential partners of course Weimo has to be at the top of the list. The great thing about this partnership is it does two things. It supplies demand. So if you're in the self driving car business, you've got to have demand. We got lots of demand every single day, and we do it in
a very integrated way. But the other thing is, as you just mentioned, it supplies fleet management, and that sounds kind of geeky, but it's really important that every one of those cars be ready to drive twenty four to seven if needed, and that's something we're really good at. We've been doing that for a long time.
So you're emphasizing the sort of capital light business model for you, right. The counter argument is the Tesla or the zooks one, which is control the full stack hardware software operationally the app the consumer interfaces with. Would you argue that you can scale this faster, going this route, go to more cities quicker?
I would? Yeah. I mean this allows every company to specialize, right, so waymo can really focus on providing great self driving technology.
The way Moore Driver is obviously a great product. They partner with OEMs, the car manufacturers that can choose the best car form, and then we can provide the fleet management as they say, that keeps the cars clean and charged and ready to go, as well as the demand so that anytime a person wants a car, they can get one, or they can get a driver car, right, I mean they can get so it's I think it's a great division of labor.
Let's talk about that fleet management flex drive because you're going to be building, you're going to be putting some cabal expenditure to work. David, Why does that make sense and when will that be finished?
So we've been in the flex drive world. Let me explain for a second. So about a decade ago, Lift decided that for a certain type of driver, it really makes sense to have cars that they can rent right on the platform and they can do we can take care of the maintenance and making sure that those cars are always ready to drive. So that's what we've been
doing for about a decade now. So when we look at the autonomous vehicle world, you know, look when you see a car driving around the city, it looks like magic. It looks like no one had to touch it. But no someone had to charge it, someone had to clean it, someone has to maintain it. Someone probably has to reboot it from time to time. And we're really good at that. So as you say we're building a new depot there, we've got a small one. We're building a bigger one
for this partnership. And what it does is it allows the cars to be ready to drive, ready to drive. Think about so when you travel on an airline and you know you know that of course they want the airplane in the air, but they also needed to be ready to fly at all times. They want that turnaround to be super fast. And that's what flex drive does. It means that people like WYMO can get the most out of our asset, which is super good for them.
Look today, investors love this announcement and the shares a rising. Shares have been doing well all year because you've had three straight quarters of profitability. David, how are you going to finance what is a little less asset like is building these facilities to help keep all our auto cars clean.
Yeah. So, as I say, because we've been in the flex drive business, the subsidiary business for a long time, we've actually had capital deployed to that for a long time. We have about twenty four locations in about fifteen different states across the United States, which I think gives you a sense of how this kind of partnership could scale over time. And we own some of those cars ourselves. Others of those cars are financed by other groups. So the good news is this won't be a significant change
to the current strategy. It's just sort of a revectoring. Let's say, of the money we spend more towards.
Autonomous okay, scale over time this morning, Bloomberg type you some Marguerite Galleryini put this table together, you know the table right It explains the roadmap from here. So let's look at it together. This is twenty twenty six and it focuses on Weimo principally. But there's you there, right, Nashville.
You are going to come up against suba in negotiating with Weimo for cities that are not yet claimed for What are the advantages that you're going to present to win that business with Weimo against Duba and how much you're gonna have to give up, you know, to get a deal done.
Yeah, So I think the way I would look at that is one of the reasons we were so called patient in working through this deal because it took a while. It was we wanted to come up with something that is good for Weimo, good for Lyft, and good for riders, and that's hard to do. It's hard to have, you know, kind of a three away win. We feel really good about it and feel like this is a great model for us to expand to other cities in the future.
But look, city by city, you know, some places we're actually going to compete with WEIMO itself, right because for example here in San Francisco, they've got.
Their own appreciate that admission, Yeah.
Of course, So this is something we you have to kind of recognize and say, how do we come up with a construct that is really durable and frankly can benefit all the companies and then the other guys will do what they do and you know, we'll see who does a better job.
Look, people are going to accuse me of wanting to create a headline here, but it's a really important question. Tesla and Zookes are committed to their own go to market model. Right, we talked about they control the full stack. But have you held discussions with both Tesla and Zoke's to say, like, look, this is the model we're doing with Weimo, we can do something similar. Do you see that as being realistic?
So, of course I don't want to come in on, you know, conversations we might be having. What I can tell you is we're talking to everyone who finds the partnership model interesting. You know, there are, of course always companies. Whenever you see a new industry, you have some companies that say I want to do it all, and frankly, if you look back a couple of years ago, just about every company in the self driving space was in that zone. They wanted to do everything top to bottom.
I think over time most companies find, particularly when it's capital intensive and quite complex, like rideshare and self driving, is that a division of labor where everyone does what they're good at is the best model. But we'll see, you know, it's still such early.
Days, but you struck deals with interesting players in Europe, I do, what's it like working with a Chinese giant? What were those negotiations like?
You know? I actually, I'll tell you what was very interesting. It came together fairly quickly, and in part I think is you know, frankly, Chinese companies are kind of built for speed, you know. They for those of you who don't know, you know, by do you can sort of think of them as kind of the Google or Alphabet
of China. They have many businesses, but self driving cars are a very important one for them, and we committed that we would roll out some of their technology in one to two markets we would expect in Europe over the next twelve months or so. It's still very early days there, but I can tell you they've got really high standards for their technology. We're super excited about working with those guys, and we'll have more to say about that next year once we start to roll out in Europe.
One minute, how hard is it to get to New York?
I mean I can take a flight there pretty easily.
Also, the ROBOTAXI how hot? When am I going to have it here?
I love that? You know it's going to take a little while. New York is a complex place to do business. The streets are complicated. You know, there's a lot of interest there. Look, you know this Caroline, I mean, Lift has been there for many years. It's super strong in New York. We also run the city bike program, as you know, super excited to bring self driving there someday, but that was probably gonna take a little while. Sorry about that, you can have to wait for ale.
My addiction with the bikes will just have to continue.
Lift.
See David so as a joy to have you on the show. Take care,