Is that something Motional would consider in the long run? Versus seamlessly integrating into your day-to-day mode of transportation and you get an option now to use an autonomous vehicle.Ĭruise and Waymo seem to be more vertically integrated at this stage, as both the tech provider and operator. If you open an app and there’s not always a ride available, it doesn’t meet your needs and you’re going to stop checking that application. Taking the pathway of trying to create our own app would be more challenging from a customer perspective. As we mature, you will have larger scale, and you’ll be able to sell more routes. Initially, we expect smaller deployments. It also gives us a little bit more runway as the technology matures. People who are used to using an app are now going to be delighted and surprised to see ‘ Oh, there’s an option to take an autonomous car from Motional!’ It allows us to make our technology accessible to millions of riders. So we want to be part of that concentration set. As a customer, you want to go to one app to get from point A to point B and you want all the options you need to get there. We think it makes sense to partner with them especially as the technology matures because we’re taking a very customer-centric view. There’s other companies like Uber and Lyft that have developed a network for folks to hail rides. Our core competency is building the autonomy stack, right? We want to stay focused on doing that piece. Can you walk me through your thinking?Īkshay Jaising: The way we view it is we have limited resources. It looks like Motional thinks partnerships are really the way to go. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. The upshot? Motional sees partnerships as a way to meet the customer where they already are.
Jaising ran us through the different aspects of Motional’s go-to-market strategy. Sensing a pattern emerging, we reached out to Akshay Jaising, Motional’s new VP of commercialization, who joined the company in July after doing a stint as the director of business development at Kitty Hawk, the electric aviation startup backed by Larry Page that shut down last month. The Uber deal comes off the back of similar partnerships with Via and Lyft to launch robotaxi services in Las Vegas. Motional, the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture that aims to commercialize autonomous driving technology, announced last week its partnership with Uber to bring robotaxi services to North American cities over the next 10 years.
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