The Onramps

The first Cybercabs are coming off the line in Texas. The EPA just certified the thing as the most efficient car ever made, 165 watt-hours per mile. It parks itself. It will run nearly around the clock. Every one of them is a small business that never sleeps and never takes a salary.

So here is the question I keep coming back to. Who owns them?

Today the answer is Tesla. The robotaxis on the road right now are, in Tesla’s own words, “owned and operated by Tesla at this time.” That last phrase is the whole story. At this time. A fleet that size gets bigger than any one company wants to carry on its own balance sheet, and when it does, the cars need owners. The only open question is who.

History already wrote the ending. Airlines don’t own about half the planes they fly; leasing companies do. Trucking runs on financed fleets. Nobody builds a data center anymore when they can rent the compute. In every expensive, cash-producing asset class, ownership separates from operation. Capital owns the asset. Operators run it. Autonomous machines are the most expensive and most financeable assets of the next decade, and they will separate harder than anything that came before.

So the autonomous fleet is going to have a lot of owners who never built a car. The part nobody is talking about yet is that there won’t be one way in. There will be onramps, and they will be matched to who you are.

The most direct onramp is to buy a Cybercab and put it to work. One car, one owner, a single-vehicle fleet earning while you sleep. Clean and simple, but it asks for the full price of the car and the work of running it.

The next onramp is to co-own a fleet with other people. You don’t buy a whole car. You own a slice of many, and someone else handles the unglamorous part, the charging and the 4am restaging that quietly decide whether a fleet earns or bleeds. You get the yield without the garage.

Another onramp is to back the fleet as an investor, putting up the capital that gets cars on the road and owning the return that comes back.

And the onramp I care about most is the one that doesn’t fully exist yet. The everyday one. Where owning a piece of an autonomous fleet costs about what a tank of gas used to, and anyone can do it from a phone, from anywhere. That is the onramp that turns “the robots are taking the jobs” into “the robots are working for me.” It is coming, and it is the thing we are building toward.

This matters because the autonomous economy arrives whether you own a piece of it or not. The machines will do the work. The money those machines earn will go somewhere. Left alone, it goes to whoever already had enough capital to buy the machines in the first place. Onramps are how that story changes. They are the difference between watching the autonomous economy go by from the curb and riding in something you own.

Cybercabs are simply the first vehicle where this gets real. Robotaxis now, humanoids next. The same question, who owns the machine that does the work, is coming for every autonomous thing on the road and off it. The onramps we build for the Cybercab are the onramps for all of it.

The fleet is coming. The only thing left to decide is which side of the window you are on.

---

Autonomy roundup — what you may have missed

• The chip company decided it would rather own the cars. Mobileye announced it’s building its own vertically integrated robotaxi business — ~100 driverless cars in a US city in 2027, scaling toward 17,000. The supplier concluded the money is in owning and running the fleet, not just shipping the tech. The whole essay above, in one press release. → Mobileye · TechCrunch

• Cybercab certified the most efficient car ever made, and driving itself off the line. EPA rated it 165 Wh/mi; Giga Texas footage shows finished Cybercabs driving themselves out the gate. The asset is real, shipping, and cheap to run. → The Verge · production sighting

• ARK ran the unit economics: a Cybercab should cost about half what a Waymo does (~$0.20/mile at scale by 2030). That’s the whole reason owning one is interesting — the cheaper it runs, the more of every fare is yours. → ARK estimate

• The fleet already on the road keeps a clean record — zero at-fault crashes since February per NHTSA. Boring, and that’s the point: the thing you’d own a piece of is operating safely, at scale, today. → NHTSA data

Which onramp fits you? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

And if you want to see what one of these machines actually earns once it’s on the road, the modeler at remount.co/modeler lets you run the numbers yourself.

You’re getting this because you signed up at remount.co. This is a thought experiment, not financial advice and not an offer of securities. Reply anytime or write hello@remount.co.