The second order effect businesses to watch for in Physical AI will be fascinating.
Robotaxis remove the driver, but they won’t completely remove the work.
Moove just raised $250M to build the part of autonomous vehicles most people aren’t talking about: fleet ownership, charging, cleaning, inspection, maintenance, recovery and 24/7 depot operations.
I think about this as the autonomy labor paradox:
Eliminate one distributed worker per vehicle and then a new need pops up around centralizing the remaining labor inside depots that must reset thousands of machines without interrupting revenue.
The vehicle may be driverless, but the overall system is not laborless.
What it does though is it changes the metric that matters.
Miles per required engagement measures driving performance.
For Moove though I think about the key business metric being revenue miles per depot hour:
How much paid utilization does each vehicle generate for every hour consumed by charging, cleaning, repairs and recovery?
This is why Moove’s robotics-first “Nests” could become strategically important.
The depot connects capital, energy, parts, technicians, remote support and fleet data. If they can improve that operating system then every vehicle earns more.
Prediction: massive second order effect businesses in physical AI will be built