Mobile IoT | Where do robotaxis go to sleep?

This one comes from an interesting article penned by the team at Intertraffic (one of the world’s largest mobility tech exhibitions).

Do robotaxis stop or circle the wagons?

That is not quite the title of the article, but it hits at something we addressed in an earlier post: The disconnect between congested city centers, “innovation,” and EV charging facilities. This post deals with a different beast, but the constraints are the same – “kerb appeal” versus practical utility.

Let’s start with the conclusion: Robotaxi unit economics in dense historic European cores are load-bearing on “curb” or “staging” space that doesn’t exist and can’t be created without a political fight operators haven’t budgeted for. Electrification specifically worsens the vehicle-count side of that equation.

What do we mean by “vehicle count”?

Compared to a standard fleet of ICE (internal combustion engines) a robotaxi fleet will need more vehicles within the fleet, due to their (current) charging and downtime profile. Depending on charge cycle and depot distance, you’re plausibly looking at a 1.2–1.4x fleet multiplier to hold similar coverage patterns. The AI will skew the numbers by referring to human sleep patterns, but that’s a guided misdirection. The crux here is city center space, not so much operator hours (where the robot wins easily).

Apologists and tech evangelists will say: Dynamic fleet allocation, with a sage focused filter from Instagram. This means using AI, combined with topographical mapping and usage pattern vectors, updated in real-time, creates an advantage over human drivers. The trouble is the argument is dead at the point of delivery. Every one of those vehicles has to exist somewhere in the built environment at any given moment, either moving or staged.

It is the space that is contested. Moving empty bottles round the board to avoid enforcement is not a winning play. If fact it moves you into even more contested terrain – circular economies and “waste.” San Francisco’s zombie car complaints were literally this: AVs weren’t illegally parked, they were driving in slow loops or double-parking briefly and moving. The “AI” didn’t solve the space problem, it found the loophole in how a space problem gets measured. Optimization redistributed scarcity, it didn’t create supply.

Where do the extra vehicles go?

This is the part that’s specifically brutal for Prague/Paris/Berlin. In a gridded, low density American city, marginal land near the core is cheapish, zoning is permissive. Surface lots absorb staging fleets. In a historic European core, there is no marginal land near the center. It’s either monetized retail frontage, protected heritage zoning, or already scarce resident parking that’s politically radioactive to reallocate. This is not the cherry picking of airport shuttles routes.

So the staging fleet doesn’t get absorbed near demand. It gets pushed to depots on the periphery, which lengthens deadhead distance, which worsens utilization, which increases the fleet multiplier further. That’s a reinforcing loop, not a one-time cost.

Worse city geometry → longer deadhead → lower utilization → bigger fleet → more staging demand.

There’s nowhere to put it, because we’ve already established there’s very little marginal land on the ground zero horizontal plane.

Policy begets policing

Cities that start seeing visible robotaxi staging or circling respond by restricting curb access or congestion-pricing AV (autonomous vehicle) cruising. That’s a rational municipal response, but it hits the EV fleet harder than the ICE fleet precisely because the vertically integrated EV fleet has less slack. It already needs more vehicles in rotation. Now some fraction of the “acceptable” staging is regulated away too. The inefficiency isn’t just technical, it becomes politically self-limiting, in exactly the same way as those battle scarred scattered rent-a-scooters.

Maybe there is a watershed moment when batteries deliver the kind of efficiency to give you 24 hours of robotaxi. A few minutes to slip the old one out and a fresh one in. Back at the depot, a quick spruce and shine. Then onward to daily duty. In that scenario, it is possible to see the robotaxi revolutionaries winning the potholed field. And if there is anything to learn from the e-scooters fiasco; we’re not quite there yet.

And for our next post: Can a robotaxi tow? And if it can what are the practicalities and do they have a place for a hitch? The answer is a little more tricky than you might think.