March 19, 2026 - Uber Wants Everyone's Robotaxis

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for March 19, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

It’s been over a decade since former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick decided his company needed to eliminate human drivers by developing robotaxis. As we know, that didn't turn out so well, and the group was sold off to Aurora in 2020. While Uber is no longer in the business of building an automated driving system or ADS, it still has dreams of being the biggest operator of robotaxis in the world. 

While Uber was still developing its robotaxis in 2017, the company also did a deal with Mercedes-Benz to deploy its future robotaxis on the Uber platform, much as human drivers do today. The goal was to fill the platform with as many driverless vehicles as possible from as many sources and Uber made it clear it was open to other partnerships. Mercedes-Benz eventually cancelled that robotaxi program, although it is now offering an AV-ready version of the new S-Class to ADS developers that need vehicles. 

In recent years, Uber has partnered with and, in many cases, invested in many of the world’s leading ADS developers and has been deploying a wide variety of robotaxis in cities around the world. This includes vehicles from AvRide, Baidu, MayMobility, Momenta, Motional, Pony AI, WeRide, and Waymo with Nuro-powered Lucids, Wayve-powered Nissans, and, most recently, Rivians added to the list. 

Flexibility is the key to why Uber wants these robotaxis. They can now form the base case for the vehicles on the platform, with human-driven vehicles coming in during the highest demand periods. Ride-hailing has very uneven demand throughout the day, with peaks during rush hour and some other times. ADS is still relatively early, and different companies are focused on different regions. Besides their home country, the Chinese are looking mostly at parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Americans are largely focused here, Asia and Europe. Different companies also have different vehicle types. 

With so many partners, Uber aims to fill as many gaps as it can in as many markets as it can and not get left without options if any of its partners fall by the wayside. Focusing on the core of its business of connecting riders with vehicles while owning at least a slice of the technology seems like the best path forward at the moment.  

Thanks for listening.