Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi just said out loud what most in the industry already whisper: the job of “driver” as we know it is on borrowed time.
Speaking in late September 2025, he laid out the timeline bluntly:
“In the next five to seven years we’ll actually have more human drivers and couriers because we’re growing so fast.
But 10 to 15 years from now, the sheer number of people losing their driving jobs will become a real problem for us.”
He openly admitted he doesn’t have a clean solution.
The numbers back him up. Uber currently has around 6 million active drivers and couriers worldwide.
By the mid-2030s, analysts expect 50–70 % of urban rides to be fully autonomous, slashing the need for human drivers by millions.
The robotaxi revolution is already here:
- In the US, Waymo alone is doing over 250,000 paid rides per week in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta.
- In China, Baidu’s Apollo Go has completed more than 11 million passenger trips and operates fully driverless fleets in multiple megacities. Pony.ai and WeRide are right behind.
- Driverless taxis are running commercially in the UAE, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, parts of Europe, and even Russia.
Costs are plummeting. A robotaxi ride in China is already down to about 25 cents per mile in some cities — less than a third of what a human-driven Uber costs in most Western markets. And the cars never sleep, never take breaks, and never surge-price on Friday night.
For now, human drivers are still cheaper in many places than the current generation of lidar-heavy robotaxis. That gap is closing fast. Tesla, Zoox, Cruise, Aurora, and a dozen Chinese players are all racing to flood the market with sub-$40,000 autonomous vehicles by 2030.
Uber itself no longer builds its own self-driving cars — it sold that division years ago — but it has deep partnerships with Waymo, Nvidia, and others. The company is positioning itself as the “operating system” for whatever robotaxi wins, the same way Android powers phones built by dozens of manufacturers.
That’s great for Uber’s balance sheet. It’s potentially catastrophic for the millions of people who currently make a living (or at least supplement their income) behind the wheel.
Khosrowshahi has floated ideas like retraining drivers for remote fleet monitoring, data labeling, or vehicle maintenance, but those jobs won’t come close to replacing the volume of lost driving work. Some cities are already experimenting with small-scale universal basic income pilots for gig workers; others are talking about taxing robotaxi miles to fund transition programs.
One thing is clear: the countdown has started.
In ten to fifteen years, hailing a ride might mean summoning a silent, empty car that arrives in minutes and costs pennies per mile.
For the millions of drivers who built Uber into a $150 billion company, the future just got a lot less certain.
Also read:
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