Most Uber Trips Will Need a Human Driver for Decades

The future of Uber still has a driver behind the wheel, at least for most trips. Andrew MacDonald, Uber's president and chief operating officer, says the majority of the company's rides will not be autonomous until the cost of self-driving technology falls below the cost of human labor in India and Brazil, and that will take decades because those two countries account for most rides.

Start with how many trips Uber does in total. The company completes about 300 million trips a week across its core ride and delivery platforms. Only a few million a month are in autonomous vehicles. MacDonald says autonomous trips could keep growing by triple-digit percentages, month after month, and still account for only a very small share of all rides.

The human-driven business is also still growing. MacDonald says even in the largest markets for autonomous vehicles where Uber does not offer them today, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, rides with human drivers are increasing there more quickly than elsewhere in the United States. The target keeps moving because both systems are expanding at once.

The deeper reason is geography and labor cost. Uber operates in 75 countries, and two of its three largest countries by ride volume are India and Brazil. Fares there are low, so a robot must become very cheap to compete with what a person is paid to drive. MacDonald says self-driving costs will need decades to drop enough to compete with that human labor, so a majority-autonomous Uber must wait until autonomy reaches Brazil and India, and that will be a long time.

That leaves Uber with two different scoreboards. Counted by trips, drivers win for a long time. Counted by dollars, robots can matter much sooner. MacDonald says if driverless cars come to handle most trips in San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC, Miami, New York, and Boston, that would be a big chunk of bookings and dollars, even while most Uber trips around the world still need a person up front.