Last week in London I went out with a friend for dinner. He “called an Uber” – as it is usually said – that promptly arrived. During the journey, which was slow due to the peak-hour traffic and the limit of 20 mph (miles per hour), we were chatting with the driver who mentioned that Uber will launch automated vehicles/AVs (i.e. robotaxis) in London as of next year. I remembered to have read this piece of info somewhere a few weeks before, and this seems to be confirmed.
While talking I was thinking of the fights had in the past in London and other European cities when Uber wanted to enter the market: existing taxi drivers protested hard (and sometimes harshly) saying this new market comer would have destroyed their work, reduced their income, etc. The counterpart argued that, instead, this generated new job opportunities with less stringent regulations which would allow some people to have a second job – maybe for only a few hours a day – without incurring in high expenditures such as buying taxi driver licence, etc..
The set of reasons from both parts was more complicated than I have described now, but for the scope of this editorial let’s simplify as follows: Uber would have created more jobs, offered the possibility of cheaper rides cost, a wider and more granular taxi service.
Let’s go back to Uber planning to introduce AVs. This would certainly cancel the first aspect mentioned above: no more job opportunities for sure, whereas I am not that sure about the second and their aspects.
As a matter of fact, there is an interesting article today on the Financial Times: “What will it take for robotaxis to go global?” that well analyses the implications of expanding robotaxi services (not limited to Uber, though) beyond the current limited areas of some US cities with a special focus on how this geographical expansion and wider fleet management would cost.
For example, the article reports that Waymo vehicles (Jaguar I-Pace SUVs), fully equipped to become robotaxis, would cost up to $150,000 each (Waymo didn’t disclose nor confirm this figure). This means that setting up a fleet whose size should be able to serve an average city could cost tens of millions (USD, GBP, EUR or else).
Taking into account that ride costs couldn’t be much more expensive than existing taxi services, how many thousands of rides every vehicle should make to – at least – break even the purchase & equipment costs? Besides, although there are not human drivers, so no driving time limits regulations, the vehicle couldn’t circulate 24/7 as it needs time to recharge its batteries.
My other concern is the comparison of cities topography between US and European cities where the latter have much narrower streets organised in complicated patterns (many of them are still based on a medieval structure) and very different one from the other, also in the same country.
Some of my readers could argue that I often discuss this robotaxis issue, maybe they are right, but the proliferation of many articles published on several newspapers and magazines (not limited to those addressing Transport professionals) makes me think the topic is still quite hot and deserve attention.
After talking so much about the technology installed in these vehicles, the competition of the “big guys” that would like to arrive first – or among the first ones – to conquer the market, now we are becoming realistic and talk about the economic viability of this solution (GM, Ford and Apple already abandoned this kind of project, by the way) which will make this topic hotter for some more time.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2025
Previous EPN Consulting Newsletters are available here.