Uber built a global business on the backs of independent drivers. No employment contracts, no benefits, no guaranteed income just a platform, a cut of every fare, and the flexibility that made Uber its pitch. For over a decade it worked. Now Uber is looking at those drivers and seeing a cost problem it would very much like to solve.
The Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing analyst estimates and people familiar with Uber's deals, that the company has committed more than $10 billion to autonomous vehicles. The money breaks down into more than $2.5 billion in equity stakes in robotaxi companies and over $7.5 billion earmarked for purchasing robotaxi fleets directly. As Reuters summarised it, Uber is breaking from its traditional lean platform model to avoid being disrupted by the very thing it is now funding.
The partners
Uber is not building autonomous vehicles itself. Its strategy, as Automotive World reports, is to position itself as the marketplace and distribution layer for whoever can build them, locking in partnerships with virtually every serious player in the space simultaneously.
Current live deployments include Waymo services in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. WeRide is operating in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Dubai, with fully driverless commercial operations having started in early 2026 following a safety driver period. Avride has launched in Dallas. Baidu's Apollo Go service, which has provided millions of rides globally, is partnered with Uber for markets outside the US and mainland China. Momenta is beginning tests in Munich this year.
The vehicle deals are also significant. In July 2025, Uber invested $300 million in Lucid Motors and agreed to purchase more than 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs for a robotaxi programme with autonomous driving firm Nuro. On Tuesday the day before the FT story Uber expanded that deal, committing an additional $200 million and increasing the vehicle order, bringing the total Lucid investment to $500 million. Tech Times reports that modified Lucid Gravity vehicles with Nuro's autonomy stack are already in internal test rides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Then there is Rivian. As Fortune reported in March, Uber announced an agreement to purchase 10,000 fully autonomous vehicles based on Rivian's forthcoming R2 platform, with an option to scale to 50,000 units if Rivian meets development and validation milestones. The R2 does not yet exist in production form.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has stated he expects the company to offer robotaxi services in more than ten countries by late 2026, with at least 28 cities targeted by 2028.
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What this actually means
The math that drives all of this is straightforward. Drivers currently take a very large share of every fare processed through the Uber app. Remove the driver and that share becomes margin. At the scale Uber operates billions of trips per year even a partial shift to driverless vehicles transforms the economics of the business entirely.
Jalopnik put it plainly: "Between Uber and Waymo, we may soon reach a point where we can hire a rideshare without a cent of our fare ever having to go to a real human person."
The shift also explains why Uber is now willing to own vehicles at all. For most of its existence, Uber's great competitive advantage was owning nothing: no cars, no employees, no infrastructure. The platform took a cut; everything else was someone else's problem. The $10 billion commitment represents a departure from that model, and reflects how seriously Uber is taking the risk that a competitor Waymo, Tesla, or one of the Chinese players could build a driverless network that undercuts Uber's pricing without needing Uber's app at all.
One note on the numbers: Domain-b published a fact check pointing out that the $10 billion figure is the FT's calculation derived from analyst estimates and deal disclosures, not a single official Uber announcement or regulatory filing. The individual deals Lucid, Rivian, equity stakes in various companies are real and documented. The consolidated $10 billion framing is journalism's aggregation of them, not Uber's own stated figure. That is a meaningful distinction, though it does not change what Uber is actually doing.
What it means for drivers
Uber has not announced any policy changes affecting its driver base. The robotaxi deployments are currently limited in scale and geography. The company still needs millions of human drivers to run its core business today, and will continue to need them for years in markets where driverless technology is not ready or not permitted.
But the direction is clear enough. Uber spent years telling regulators, politicians and the public that its drivers were independent entrepreneurs, not employees, in order to avoid the costs of employment. The $10 billion commitment is an acknowledgement that the company's vision for the future does not include those drivers at all.
It built the platform using human labour. Now it is funding the technology to replace it.
Sources:
- Reuters — Uber commits $10 billion to robotaxis in strategy shift
- Jalopnik — Uber Goes All In On Robotaxis
- Fortune — Uber will operate its own robotaxis again with Rivian's not yet built EVs
- Automotive World — Uber targets robotaxi services in ten countries in 2026
- Tech Times — Uber Robotaxi Push: Self Driving Lucid SUVs Begin Real World Tests
