Uber is leveraging its network of human drivers as a core asset in the competition for autonomous taxis: scheduling both human drivers and self-driving vehicles within the same app, using human labor to fill the gaps in autonomous driving capacity, in order to compete against closed fleets like Waymo and Tesla that only use self-driving cars.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi refers to this strategy as the "hybrid future," which seamlessly integrates human drivers and self-driving vehicles into the same market. Uber claims that in Austin and Atlanta, self-driving vehicles on the Uber platform have 30% more daily orders per vehicle compared to pure self-driving platforms, and passenger wait times are reduced by 25%. Khosrowshahi revealed during the Q2 earnings call that the average daily orders per vehicle on the platform typically range from over 20 to just above 30.

Uber's autonomous driving business is currently operational in seven cities, with a goal to expand to 15 cities by the end of 2026. The proportion of autonomous driving orders to total orders is still less than 0.5%. Uber has committed over $10 billion to invest in autonomous driving software companies, build ground infrastructure, acquire real estate, and secure vehicle procurement, with a total commitment of approximately 120,000 vehicles from related partners.

The partnership network covers multiple technological routes: Nuro and Lucid supply vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area, planning to procure up to 20,000 vehicles; Zoox and Motional operate in Las Vegas; Wayve is responsible for London and Tokyo; Baidu has also entered London; Pony and Verne operate in Zagreb; Rivian has an order for 10,000 vehicles with an additional option for 40,000, deploying in San Francisco and Miami starting in 2028; NVIDIA plans to enter Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2027. Additionally, Uber has placed an order for 25,000 vehicles with Waabi.

On the regulatory front, Uber has been approved to operate 1,000 autonomous taxis in Clark County, Nevada, over the next 12 months, executed by Motional and Zoox, with Zoox holding a separate license for 100 vehicles. Uber's core argument to local governments is to first use human drivers to meet peak demand, gradually integrating autonomous vehicles into urban traffic, rather than deploying a purely autonomous fleet all at once.

Competitors are "de-Uberizing." Waymo has ended its three-year partnership with Uber in Phoenix as of May 2026, with collaborations in Atlanta and Austin expected to terminate by 2028. Waymo currently operates in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin, and has partnered with Lyft to enter Nashville; approximately 70 remote assistants support around 3,000 vehicles. In the high-end market, Uber has acquired the private car booking platform Blacklane, while Lyft has acquired TBR Global Chauffeuring, with both betting on the high-end segmentation of "human driver services."

In terms of market mechanisms, the buyers are demand aggregation platforms like Uber, which exchange order density for vehicle supply from autonomous driving companies; the sellers are autonomous driving software companies and automakers, which need high utilization rates to spread the high costs per vehicle. This round is not driven by a single event but is a structural capital allocation: Uber's free cash flow in Q2 was $2.8 billion, and its rolling 12-month free cash flow has surpassed $10 billion for the first time, with this cash flowing into equity and vehicle orders from autonomous driving companies. Beneficiaries include supply-side companies like Nuro, Lucid, Zoox, and Wayve, which lack demand entry points, as well as flexible part-time drivers (61% of drivers are online for less than 20 hours a week). The pressured parties are Waymo and Tesla, which are pursuing vertical integration: they must build their own demand networks while bearing the costs of idle vehicles during non-peak hours.

Source: Public Information