Uber Executives Predict No One Will Own A Car Within 15 To 20 Years As Robotaxis Take Over, Musk Agrees

SAN FRANCISCO — Top Uber executives are predicting that private car ownership and driver’s licenses will become largely obsolete within the next 15 to 20 years, as autonomous vehicles, bikes, scooters and public transit reshape how Americans get around, a vision that echoes similar long-term predictions from Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the future of driving.

Uber President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald outlined the prediction during a recent appearance on entrepreneur Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast, describing a future in which car ownership becomes an increasingly rare choice rather than a default necessity.

“In some future world, maybe not five years, but 15 or 20 years, everyone’s going to be like Harry — nobody’s going to own a car,” Macdonald said, referring to podcast host Stebbings. “Nobody’s going to have their driver’s license because you’ll be able to get around. And I think bikes and scooters will be part of that. I think autonomous vehicles will be part of that. I think public transportation will be a big part of that, but I don’t think you need to own a car.”

Macdonald was particularly critical of the economics behind personal vehicle ownership, describing the private automobile in stark terms.

“The most inefficient asset that anyone owns,” Macdonald said of the personal car, noting that a typical vehicle sits idle roughly 98% of the day while continuing to depreciate and generate ongoing insurance costs even when parked in a driveway. He pointed to rising vehicle costs as compounding the inefficiency, noting that new vehicle prices have climbed roughly 30% over the past six years, with the average transaction price now hovering near $50,000.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has offered a similarly ambitious timeline for the shift toward autonomous, shared transportation. Speaking on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast earlier this year, Khosrowshahi described a future increasingly dominated by robot-driven rides.

“You can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind,” Khosrowshahi said. “Probably not 10 years from now, but you go 15 to 20 years from now, you’re going to start getting there.”

Khosrowshahi has separately detailed how he expects vehicle ownership structures to shift during that transition, describing a future in which large institutional investors, rather than individual drivers, own the underlying autonomous vehicle fleets. He suggested major financial firms could eventually own large fleets of self-driving cars generating steady investment yields, comparing the model to how firms such as Blackstone currently manage other large asset portfolios. Khosrowshahi has acknowledged, however, that the transition raises difficult unresolved questions, including how displaced human drivers will be affected.

“I think 10-15 years from now this is going to be a real issue and I don’t have a neat answer for it,” Khosrowshahi has said regarding the broader disruption autonomous vehicles could bring to the ride-hailing workforce.

Speaking separately at the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C., Khosrowshahi framed the eventual dominance of autonomous vehicles as effectively inevitable given the safety case for removing human error from driving.

“If you fast-forward 15, 20 years, I think eventually the cars are going to be autonomous,” Khosrowshahi said. “There’s very strong evidence to believe that robot drivers are going to be safer than human drivers.” He identified California and Texas as currently the most open regulatory markets for expanding autonomous ride-hailing services.

Elon Musk has voiced comparable predictions about the long-term trajectory of autonomous driving technology, dating back several years. Speaking during a Tesla earnings call, Musk said he expects “all cars will go fully autonomous in the long-term,” predicting it would eventually become “quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy” within a similar 15-to-20-year window, with Tesla vehicles specifically reaching that point even sooner than the broader industry.

Musk has also offered a broader, more sweeping vision of how automation and artificial intelligence could reshape the economics of daily life more generally, extending well beyond transportation. Speaking earlier this year at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, Musk suggested that traditional employment could eventually become optional for most people as AI-driven productivity gains generate what he described as unprecedented material abundance.

“My prediction is that work will be optional,” Musk said. “It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that. If you want to work, it’s the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”

The convergence of predictions from Uber’s leadership and Musk reflects a broader alignment among major technology executives around the eventual dominance of autonomous vehicle technology, even as the specific business models and ownership structures each company envisions differ somewhat in their details. Uber has continued expanding its own autonomous vehicle partnerships in the meantime, reportedly working with roughly 20 different autonomous vehicle partners and aiming to operate driverless vehicles across 15 cities by the end of the year. Khosrowshahi has said Uber aims to facilitate more autonomous and robotaxi rides than any other company in the world by 2029.

In the near term, Uber has taken incremental steps toward that longer-term vision, including compensating some human drivers to help train the artificial intelligence systems expected to eventually power its autonomous fleets. Rival ride-hailing company Lyft has adopted a similar approach, paying some former drivers to maintain and clean self-driving vehicles as those vehicles gradually take on a larger share of rides previously handled by human drivers.

Despite the confident long-term predictions from Uber’s leadership and Musk alike, both companies have acknowledged that significant technical, regulatory and workforce-related challenges remain before autonomous vehicles can realistically displace private car ownership and human-driven ride-hailing at the scale envisioned. Whether the 15-to-20-year timeline offered by Macdonald, Khosrowshahi and Musk ultimately proves accurate remains to be seen, though the shared conviction among leaders at two of the industry’s most influential companies suggests the broader shift toward autonomous, shared mobility is likely to remain a defining storyline across the transportation and technology sectors in the years ahead.