What's next in robotaxis: an infrastructure roadblock
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Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
Robotaxis are hitting a very analog bottleneck: real estate. The next phase of autonomy isn't about better AI — it's about land, electricity and logistics to keep fleets on the road.
Why it matters: The race for autonomy is becoming an infrastructure battle, one that will demand billions for urban land, grid upgrades and high-throughput service hubs.
Between the lines: Like any fleet business, the key to operating a successful AV network is maximizing vehicle "uptime."
- Robotaxis plugged into an EV charger, or waiting to be serviced, aren't earning fares.
- Making money requires operating at scale — fanning out in large numbers across many cities with highly efficient pit stops for cleaning and charging.
Think of it like a WiFi mesh network, but for an entire city, says Ming Maa, co-founder and CEO of Moove AV, which manages and dispatches Waymo's robotaxis in Phoenix and soon Miami.
- In any "mid-tier market," a robotaxi company needs four to six facilities where vehicles can be charged and serviced, he told the audience at the recent Ride AI conference in San Francisco.
- And that infrastructure has to be planned efficiently to minimize "dead miles" between rides and to shorten customer wait times, he said.
"The challenge is trying to find sites in and around urban areas with the right zoning and pathways to power," Brett Hauser, CEO of fleet charging company Voltera, told Axios in an interview.
- A robotaxi depot doesn't demand as much electricity as an AI data center, but it still needs anywhere from 4 to 12 megawatts of power, Hauser says, "and that's hard to find in an urban core."
One option is to repurpose an industrial site as Revel did in Brooklyn for EV rideshare drivers.
- Revel converted a former Pfizer manufacturing complex with 7 megawatts of power into a 25-stall charging hub. Robotaxi hubs could use the same model.
Follow the money: The tech and auto industries have spent billions to develop AV technology, but it's new players that will build the AV ecosystem to support robotaxis.
- Lyft's Flexdrive unit, for example, just started construction on an 80,000-square-foot depot in Nashville to support Waymo's robotaxis.
- Uber plans to spend $100 million on AV depots in three cities to support a flurry of new robotaxi partners.
- Terawatt Infrastructure plans to raise up to $1.5 billion later this year to develop dozens of AV charging hubs, Axios Pro's Alan Neuhauser scooped earlier this month.
What we're watching: Securing that necessary capital is another challenge.
- There's more of it than there are companies to invest in right now, said John Casesa, a longtime automotive analyst and former Ford executive who now leads the Autos and Mobility Investment Banking team at Guggenheim Securities — but investors want to see profitable business models first.
- The first AV charging depots are just being built, Casesa tells Axios. "No investor will invest $1 billion unless they know that it will work," he added.
Our thought bubble: Robotaxi charging occupies an uncomfortable space between real estate investment and venture investment, Alan notes.
- The former got burned in the climate-tech boom-bust cycle of roughly 2019-2023; the latter tends to avoid real estate altogether.
The bottom line: AV infrastructure is like the early days of railroads.
- The first investors were speculators, and many got burned. The real fortunes came later when industrialists consolidated rail lines and introduced operating discipline.
