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Moonshots · 3 min · Oct 31, 2026

Mostaque estimates 40,000 Cybercabs could replace city taxi trips

Emad Mostaque · Founder, Intelligent Internet

Emad Mostaque estimates about 40,000 Cybercabs could cover 800,000 daily taxi and ride-hail trips in London or New York.

In this episode

Full analysis
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  3. 1:30:19Mostaque estimates 40,000 Cybercabs could replace city taxi trips3 min
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“The amount of cyber cabs you need to completely replace all those Uber and black taxi and yellow taxi trips is 40,000.”
Emad Mostaqueat 1:31:15 · Moonshots
1:31:15

Takeaways

  1. Mostaque estimates roughly 800,000 trips a day in London or New York.
  2. His calculation puts the needed Cybercab fleet at about 40,000.
  3. He says early deployment could make it harder for rivals to enter.

About this segment

Emad Mostaque estimates about 40,000 Cybercabs could cover 800,000 daily taxi and ride-hail trips in London or New York. He argues a first mover could fill a few major cities quickly.

Emad Mostaque

Emad Mostaque is founder of Intelligent Internet.

Co-founded Stability AI, behind Stable Diffusion, and now leads Intelligent Internet's open, sovereign AI stack.

  • Peter Diamandis, Host · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Salim Ismail, Host · Founder, Open ExO

    Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Dave Blundin, Host · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

    Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

  • Alexander Wissner-Gross, Host · Computer Scientist & Founder, Reified

    Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

From “AI’s Stock Market Fallout, Google’s Profit Problem, and Altman’s “Hold My Beer” Moment | #307”, Oct 31, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:30:32

    And does it become a repeater for Starlink? It's going to have bandwidth, it's going to have power, and it's going to be distributed throughout a busy city population. If he really believed that, though, wouldn't he be allocating more production to cybercab and less to optimus robots? I would expect Optimus robots. Yeah, sure. Starlink femtocells or whatever, and real-time mapping of urban environments.

  2. 1:30:55

    But do you think CyberCab is the play for that and not Optimus? I think CyberCab is going to have 20 kilowatt hours of power. It's going to be where the people are. And it's going to all have Starlink connections being built in from day one. I think people are missing something on CyberCabs and this. It's actually a first to market thing and how you can produce these on mass within a couple of years.

  3. 1:31:20

    I did some calculations and I saw that in the London or New York, there's about 800,000 trips a day. The amount of cyber cabs you need to completely replace all those Uber and black taxi and yellow taxi trips is 40,000. Yeah. So if Elon puts 40,000 cyber cabs in Austin and New York, and London, he has the market. Because you're not going to introduce a marginal Waymo into that market, are you? And even then, like right now in San Francisco, LA, it feels like there's quite a lot of Waymos already and things like that. So can you imagine 40,000 of them?

  4. 1:32:00

    Again, there's actually an upper limit to the amount that the city itself will accept of these autonomous vehicles. So I think that you're going to see a ramp up. And when you look at the numbers actually you see that he could saturate a few first tier cities and then move to second tier cities it's just i think he's thinking optimus first that then builds more cybercabs but then every single city just do the math go and talk to your jack topt how many trips and how many cybercabs would you need to replace this and what's the cost of that and how difficult is it for a second player in that city then interesting production and of course waymo's producing them in china and he's producing him in his plans here in the United States. Which brings us to our next story for my colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teamsters Local 25 rallied outside of City Hall on Thursday,