Two weeks ago [February 5, 2025] the Uber Platform published a document presenting its development plans, mainly in the field of passenger transport. This document presents many different data regarding Uber’s future financial condition, but also reveals the point of view of the management of this giant corporation, which currently employs almost 17 million people (see its financial statements for 2024 here).
We will focus only on two things presented there by the Platform.
First: currently, the total cost of the passenger transport service is about PLN 5 per kilometer. And they emphasize that the biggest pain in it is the cost of the employee who drives the vehicle.
Second: the Platform declares its desire to completely eliminate employee costs and replace them with autonomous vehicles (AVs). At the same time, it believes that this will allow for a situation in which the waiting time for a vehicle will be less than 4 minutes.
Ok, but what does this mean for us? After all, it’s very convenient! Of course, yes. But for AVs to get everywhere in the city in 4 minutes, they have to wait for an order on almost every corner! And that means thousands, hundreds of thousands of AVs in our cities. And the obvious question arises: will the capacity of the cities handle it?