Mobility hubs and infrastructure

How Robot Mercantile intends to build the ground layer of an independent Robotaxi network in the Carolinas: places where vehicles charge, park, get cleaned, and get serviced.

The network is built on the ground, not in the cloud

A Robotaxi looks like a software product. It is not. Every vehicle in service is a machine that needs electricity several times a day, a place to wait when demand is low, someone to wipe down the seats, and a bay where a technician can fix a sensor or replace a tire. The autonomy lives in the car. The uptime lives in the hub.

That is why we are working on hubs before we own a single vehicle. When Cybercab vehicles are made available for fleet use, the operators who already hold sites, power, and service capacity will be the ones who can put vehicles to work on day one. Everyone else will be waiting on a utility interconnect or a lease negotiation. We intend to be in the first group, and this page describes how.

What a hub is

We use the word hub for any place that does at least one of five jobs for the fleet:

Charge. High-speed direct-current charging for quick turnarounds during the day, slower overnight charging for the bulk of the fleet's energy, and inductive charging pads for vehicles designed to charge without a plug. Tesla said at Cybercab's 2024 reveal that the vehicle is designed for inductive charging, so we plan hub bays with pad-ready parking positions and the power service to run them, alongside plug-in chargers for vehicles that need them.
Park. Somewhere for vehicles to wait between rides without circling, and somewhere for them to sit overnight.
Clean. Interior wipe-downs many times a day, full details on a schedule, and exterior washes that keep cameras clear.
Service. Tire, brake, glass, sensor calibration, and the routine inspections a commercial fleet requires.
Stage. A place to line vehicles up before a surge: an event letting out, an airport bank of arrivals, a stadium, a convention hall.

No single site has to do all five. A network is a set of sites that together cover all five for every part of a metro the fleet serves. In one sentence: mobility hubs are the physical sites designated for vehicle staging, localized cleaning, maintenance, and high-speed or inductive charging.

Why this matters now

The companies that build autonomous vehicles are not building every hub themselves. Public filings for a Tesla Robotaxi charging hub in San Antonio, a 56-stall facility for its own fleet rather than the public, list the site as owned by a third-party real estate developer, not by Tesla. Waymo has said it wants an ecosystem of industry partners, including charging infrastructure partners and fleet maintenance partners, and has already handed fleet operations in some cities to an outside operator. The direction is the same across the industry: the vehicle maker runs the software and the fleet, and local partners hold the ground.

That is the opening. A metro where an independent operator already holds sites with power, cleaning, and service capacity is a metro that can take vehicles the moment they are offered. We intend to be that operator in the Carolinas, and where the vehicle maker wants hub partners rather than landlords, we intend to be the partner it calls.

The industry is confirming the thesis

In August 2026, Moove raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, in a round led by Mubadala and co-led by Woven Capital and Ion Pacific, to scale what its press release calls "the global infrastructure layer for autonomous mobility". Moove is a third-party fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, with London announced; it plans to buy robotaxis with debt financing; and it is building robotics-first depots it calls "Nests", where third-party autonomous fleets are charged, serviced, maintained, and orchestrated.

Its co-CEO's framing, as reported by TechCrunch: AV developers, vehicle makers, and marketplaces do not want to "own the metal", and the open questions are who owns, operates, orchestrates, services, cleans, and handles lost property.

Those are the exact questions we are answering for the Carolinas, at metro scale. Moove proves the category and the capital structure, equity for the operator and debt for the vehicles, and it also shows the bar: they earned Waymo by running 42,000 human-driven vehicles first.

Sources for this section:

The shapes we expect hubs to take

Depot hubs. Industrial or light-industrial property, fenced, with a large power service and room for both charging and service bays. This is where the fleet sleeps and where the heavy work happens. One or two per metro to start.

Micro-hubs. A corner of an existing parking deck, a hotel lot, a shopping center, or a hospital campus, with a handful of chargers and a cleaning station. These keep vehicles close to demand so a ride begins in minutes, not from a depot across town. Many per metro.

Event hubs. Temporary staging on venue property for a game, a concert, a festival, or a conference. Chargers may be mobile. The point is to move a crowd without a parking lot full of idling cars.

Transfer points. Curb space and short-stay bays at airports, rail stations, and intercity bus stops, subject to each operator's rules and permits. We treat these as partnerships with the authorities that run them, not as places we can simply show up.

Why the Carolinas

Charlotte is a banking and logistics city with a major airport, a dense uptown, and sprawling suburbs where a car is still the only practical way to move. Raleigh and the Triangle combine a state capital, three research universities, and a technology workforce spread across several towns with limited transit between them. Wilmington is a port city and a coastal destination whose population swells in season, with a historic downtown that was not built for parking.

Three different demand patterns, three different hub maps. A depot in Charlotte's industrial belt looks nothing like a seasonal micro-hub near Wrightsville Beach. We think that variety is an advantage: an operator that learns all three has a playbook that transfers to most American metros.

We are starting here because this is where we live and work, because these metros are growing, and because nobody has organized this layer for them yet.

What we are looking for

If you own or operate any of the following in Charlotte, Raleigh, or Wilmington, we would like to hear from you.

Property with power: industrial parcels, distribution yards, closed dealerships, underused parking decks, large surface lots near activity centers.
Charging capacity: existing fast-charging sites, charging operators looking for a committed fleet customer, or landowners who have already begun a utility interconnect.
Service capacity: fleet maintenance shops, tire and glass providers, mobile technicians, and detailing operations that can run on a schedule rather than walk-ins.
Venue and event property: stadiums, arenas, fairgrounds, convention centers, and large private venues with staging space.
Municipal and institutional partners: airports, transit authorities, universities, hospital systems, and city departments that manage curb space.

You do not need a finished plan. A site address and a sentence about what is there today is enough to start.

How a partnership could work

We expect to explore several structures, and the right one depends on the site:

A lease for dedicated depot or micro-hub space.
A revenue share where a property owner hosts a micro-hub and participates in the rides that start there.
An operating agreement where an existing charging or service operator runs part of the hub on our behalf.
An event agreement for staging at venues, on a per-event or seasonal basis.

Nothing on this page is an offer. It is a description of the conversations we want to have.

The order of work

We think about this in phases. We are not attaching dates, because the pace is set by vehicle availability and by utilities, permits, and partners, none of which we control.

Now: mapping and relationships. Identify candidate sites in each metro. Understand power availability and interconnect timelines. Meet property owners, charging operators, and service providers. Build the board of advisors that knows this terrain.

Next: a pilot hub in each metro. One depot-class site per metro with charging and a service bay, plus a small set of micro-hubs near the densest demand. The pilot exists to learn the real operating numbers before we scale anything.

Then: fill in the map. More micro-hubs, event agreements with the venues that matter locally, transfer points where authorities allow them, and a second depot where the first is at capacity.

The standards we intend to hold

Safety first. Sites designed for vehicles that move themselves: clear lanes, no pedestrian conflict zones, lighting, and cameras.
Good neighbors. Hubs that are quiet, clean, and screened, with traffic patterns that do not push fleet movements onto residential streets.
Accessibility. Pickup points and vehicles that work for riders with mobility devices, and staff who can help.
Power discipline. Charging schedules that respect the grid and the utility, with storage where it makes sense, so a hub is an asset to the local system rather than a strain on it.
Transparency with partners. Property owners and operators see the utilization of what they host.

What we do not know yet

We do not know when Cybercab vehicles will be sold to fleet operators, or on what terms. We do not know the final regulatory framework for driverless service in North Carolina. We do not know exactly how many hubs a metro needs until a pilot tells us. We are stating these plainly because partners deserve to know where the uncertainty is, and because the work above is worth doing regardless: a metro with hubs ready is a metro that gets service first.

Sources

Talk to us

If you have property, power, or service capacity in Charlotte, Raleigh, or Wilmington, tell us about it. We read every submission and reply personally.

This page is an expression of interest only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security. Any offering would be made only to accredited investors through definitive offering documents. Robot Mercantile LLC is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Tesla, Inc. Tesla, Robotaxi, Cybercab, and Full Self-Driving are trademarks of Tesla, Inc.