Uber plans 2,000 driverless cars by end-2027 and pitches AV partners 30% more trips per car

Uber expects about 700 fully driverless vehicles on its app by the end of this year and more than 2,000 by the end of 2027, roughly half in the US and half abroad, it said with its third-quarter results on Nov. 4. Zoox is due to launch on Uber in Las Vegas later this month, with Motional going fully driverless there soon after. Nuro and Lucid start driverless testing this quarter ahead of a Bay Area launch in the first quarter of 2027, with Houston to follow.

Two thousand cars is a small fleet for a company whose 10.8 million drivers and couriers served 4.1 billion trips in the quarter: about one robotaxi for every 5,400 of them. What Uber is selling AV companies is utilization. It says its US AV partners now average about 30% more trips per vehicle per day than first-party deployments nationwide, and its own illustration says a 30% gain in paid trips, with fixed costs held constant, cuts fixed cost per trip by about 23%. That gap is the case for paying Uber's marketplace fee instead of running a fleet alone, and it is the number partners will audit.

Fewer partners will get Uber's money

Uber will keep the platform open but concentrate "capital, integration resources, and hands-on deployment support behind a smaller group of partners with the clearest paths to commercial scale," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote. He did not say which. The list is long: driverless Avride deployments in 2027, supervised NVIDIA and Rivian deployments starting in 2027 and 2028, and abroad, driverless service from WeRide, Baidu and Pony.ai plus supervised Wayve rides in London. The UAE alone should have nearly 200 driverless cars on Uber by year-end, more than a quarter of the 700. CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said Uber is also working on financing structures that bring outside capital into autonomous fleets.

The quarter showed why Uber wants more supply. Fuel prices and tighter driver availability held Mobility growth 1 to 2 percentage points below its expectations, and Canada is "meaningfully undersupplied" after tighter immigration flows, Khosrowshahi said. Uber's forecast of 95 to 99 cents of adjusted fourth-quarter profit per share fell short of the $1.06 analysts expected, Reuters reported. Where AVs already run, Uber says the ridesharing category in mature US AV markets has grown 7 percentage points faster than the rest of the country for several quarters.

Las Vegas will be the first place to watch the utilization claim against a rival in the same app: it becomes the first US city where Uber riders can pick between two fully driverless fleets, starting with limited numbers of cars.