Uber Technologies (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) are expected to face pressure as autonomous vehicles disrupt the traditional ridesharing industry, with unit volume potentially shifting to AV providers Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo, Wedbush said in a note Monday.
"While we think the near-term financial impact to established ridesharing platforms is limited, over time, we expect AVs will disrupt the current status quo," analysts said in the note.
About 40% of Uber's mobility gross bookings and a similar proportion of Lyft's core business are exposed to future competition from autonomous ridesharing services, Wedbush said. As deployment scales in high-density U.S. cities, Wedbush estimates that by 2035, just 830,000 AV-enabled vehicles could displace traditional ridesharing platforms.
Waymo is projected to reach breakeven on production costs within a year of deployment by 2030, while Tesla's robotaxi strategy benefits from a lower-cost production model, which may enable faster scaling once safety and regulatory hurdles are met, the note said.
While partnerships with ridesharing platforms may help AV providers during early commercialization, Wedbush said Tesla and Waymo are expected to shift toward first-party networks to achieve scale commercialization.
Wedbush maintained its outperform ratings on Tesla and Alphabet, with price targets of $500 and $200, respectively, and kept neutral ratings on Uber and Lyft, with respective price targets of $85 and $16.
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