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Bianniu reported on August 11 that according to foreign media reports, the CEO of the ride-sharing platform Uber expressed hisTeslaAs for whether the robotaxi program can be executed effectively for customers, he pointed to the customer service aspect of the business and car owners' skepticism about letting strangers get in their cars.

Tesla plans to launch a self-driving taxi platform in October, which CEO Elon Musk has hoped for years would allow owners to use their vehicles for ride-sharing when not in use, allowing them to effectively earn money while driving themselves and picking up ride-sharing passengers.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi appeared on the Logan Bartlett Show on YouTube on Friday to discuss self-driving cars, during which he expressed a number of concerns about Tesla's self-driving taxi plans.

First, he said, peak ride-sharing times may coincide with times when car owners want to use their own vehicles.

Khosrowshahi said in an interview: When you want to buy a Tesla, it is likely that passenger volume is at its peak.

He also noted that while self-driving cars are getting closer to being safer than human drivers, he doesn't think society is ready for them.

“Logically, if robots can drive twice or three times as well as humans, then that’s good for society, but honestly, I don’t know if society is ready for that,” Khosrowshahi said.

The Uber CEO also talked about the business changes Tesla would need to invest in to successfully build such a platform, noting that he sees a huge difference between the ride-sharing business and the car-making business.

“You know, it’s a very, very different industry, in terms of hardware, making a $20,000 or $50,000 piece of hardware that processes over 30 million transactions a day, and you only make $2 in revenue,” he added. “It’s a very, very different industry.”

Khosrowshahi also went on to emphasize that the company had to create additional platforms to deal with problems that might arise during ride-sharing, including people getting sick and wanting to pay with cash, people losing items during rides, accidents happening, and more.

Not surprisingly, he noted that it might be worthwhile for Tesla to partner with ride-sharing services like Uber in the future, rather than developing its own, noting that he thinks the automaker could benefit from working with Uber.

“We’ve spent 15 years. We’ve invested tens of billions of dollars, and we can make it available to partners immediately,” Khosrowshahi added. “Hopefully Tesla will be one of our partners.”

To be sure, Tesla has revealed the mobility platform it is building for its robotaxi program, and over the past few years it has been developing its Full Self-Driving (FSD) supervisory system through testing and training of drivers who purchase the software.

Other companies like Waymo and Cruise are also developing their own driverless ride-hailing solutions, with the former already offering paid ride-hailing services in specific areas. Still, Musk has previously stressed that he believes these companies will have more difficulty scaling these services because they require high-density mapping of specific service areas.

Musk said these are different from FSD, which can theoretically be used anywhere because it has a camera-based system and a continuously trained neural network. It is worth noting that Tesla's FSD still requires supervision, so FSD is named supervised, and it is unclear when the company will launch an unsupervised version of the software.

Although Tesla was originally supposed to hold its robotaxi unveiling this month, Musk noted that the delay would allow the company to make some important changes and show off more features.

"I think the extra time I requested for the significant design changes to the front side will allow us to show something else," Musk wrote in a post on X last month.