Why everyone is suddenly talking about the end of car ownership
Anyone shopping for an electric vehicle today is increasingly asking a second question: does buying a car even make sense if autonomous fleets are cruising city streets within a few years? That question is no longer science fiction. Across the United States, in China, and increasingly in Europe, services are emerging that aim to replace traditional ride-hailing altogether: driverless taxis, known as robotaxis, that you summon with an app and that get you to your destination with no human behind the wheel. For EV owners and shoppers, this matters because it shifts the basic math of car ownership. How many miles do you actually need to drive yourself before owning a car, with its purchase price, insurance, maintenance, and charging setup, still beats hailing a ride at the push of a button?
From niche experiment to mass-market technology
Just a few years ago, self-driving cars looked like an experiment run by a handful of tech companies. Today it's a serious economic story that analysts, automakers, and mobility companies are all watching closely. The reason comes down to a combination of falling sensor costs, rapidly improving compute for autonomous driving, and billions of dollars in investment from established players. That makes the current market shift one of the more compelling storylines in the future of personal mobility, and by extension in the future of the electric vehicle itself, since the vast majority of robotaxi fleets run on batteries.
Source: Financial Times – How robotaxis will reshape the ride-hailing market | FT
What the Financial Times analysis reveals about the robotaxi market
Just how fast this shift could unfold is laid out in a Financial Times analysis that walks through the key market numbers and players behind robotaxis. The headline takeaway: a niche technology running a few thousand vehicles could turn into a mass market within a decade.
From pilot project to a $400 billion market
According to forecasts, including one from Goldman Sachs, only around 7,000 robotaxis are in genuine commercial operation worldwide right now. By 2035, that number is projected to grow to as many as 6 million vehicles, forming a market worth roughly $400 billion. Three major players are driving this shift, each with a different strategy: Waymo as the clear market leader in the US, Tesla with an approach built around low-cost hardware, and Baidu with its Apollo Go service, which is already running at large scale in China. For a broader look at the field, see our comparison of Zoox, Baidu Apollo Go, and other robotaxi rivals.
Waymo is already operating at scale
Waymo is furthest along by most measures: the service now handles more than 500,000 paid rides per week in the US, spread across ten metro areas. This is no longer a pilot, it's a real business that is taking measurable market share from traditional taxi and ride-hailing services. Just how far the shift from driver-assisted ride-hailing to full autonomy has come is underscored by the fact that Waymo now runs its service without a safety driver in the front seat, meaning genuine, everyday driverless operation.
Why the cost curve is the number that matters
The economically decisive figure in the analysis is the cost per mile driven. According to McKinsey calculations, that figure currently sits around $8. By 2035, it's projected to fall to roughly $1.32, as vehicles operate without a human driver and hardware and software costs continue to drop. That would make robotaxis cheaper than owning a car for the first time, once you factor in purchase price, depreciation, insurance, and maintenance. Our piece on robotaxi cost vs. car ownership vs. taxi walks through the actual math behind that comparison.
One example from the analysis makes this especially concrete: in large cities such as Washington, D.C., owning a car is projected to make financial sense only once you drive around 7,500 miles a year or more, whereas the break-even point for traditional driver-based ride-hailing has historically sat closer to 2,000 miles. If you drive relatively little, owning a car could increasingly stop making economic sense, at least in areas with dense robotaxi coverage.
Uber bets on partnerships instead of building its own fleet
Uber's role in all this is worth a closer look. Rather than treating robotaxis as a threat, the company has positioned itself as a platform for autonomous fleets and is putting more than $10 billion into partnerships with companies including Rivian, Lucid, Nuro, and Waabi. By 2028, robotaxi rides are expected to be bookable through the Uber app in as many as 28 cities, without Uber building any vehicles of its own. That strategy shows the market isn't only being shaped by technology leaders like Waymo, but also by platforms that bring an existing user base and distribution network to the table.
What's holding the market back: regulation and hardware costs
As promising as the outlook sounds, the analysis also points to clear headwinds:
- Safety rules and approval processes vary significantly from state to state, and from country to country.
- Waymo's vehicles currently cost around $150,000 per unit, which makes scaling fleets expensive.
- Tesla is targeting a price below $30,000 for its Cybercab robotaxi, but still needs to reach the required technical and regulatory maturity to get there.
- Approving fully autonomous systems requires new legal frameworks in many markets. In Germany, for instance, regulators are still working through what full approval for driverless operation should look like, a topic covered in our guide to robotaxi laws in Germany and Europe.
- Local infrastructure, including road quality, traffic density, and digital mapping coverage, also determines how quickly a market for autonomous fleets can mature.
These points explain why the market forecasts stretch out to 2035 rather than 2027: the technology already works in several regions, but scaling it broadly takes time, capital, and regulatory clarity.
Outlook: does car ownership still make sense?
Despite the momentum, experts cited in the analysis don't expect private car ownership to disappear entirely. One central argument: once autonomous driving technology becomes available not just in fleet vehicles but in privately owned cars too, owning a car could keep its appeal, simply because it's available around the clock, can be customized to your needs, and involves no wait for a ride to show up. The analysis points to the Waymo-Toyota partnership as an example of exactly this direction, treating autonomous driving as a feature you can buy into rather than a fleet-only product.
Regional differences are growing, not shrinking
The geographic picture is just as uneven. Cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, Dubai, and Wuhan are already frontrunners for robotaxi and shared-mobility fleets, while other regions lag well behind for regulatory or infrastructure reasons. In Germany specifically, that means keeping an eye both on legal developments and on individual pilot projects launching in major cities. For a sense of how close a given vehicle actually is to full autonomy, our guide to SAE levels of autonomous driving is a useful reference point, since it explains what separates driver-assistance features from genuine driverless capability.
What this means for EV owners specifically
For readers who own an EV or are considering buying one, this shift comes with a few practical takeaways:
- How much you actually drive matters more than ever: if you put on relatively few miles, it's worth regularly re-running the math on robotaxi versus ownership.
- Growing robotaxi fleets mean growing demand for charging infrastructure, which indirectly affects everything from home charging setups to how robotaxi fleets manage their own charging.
- Autonomous fleets could push private car ownership to differentiate more through features like automated charging rather than just range or price.
- Cities that lean heavily into autonomous fleets will need to plan charging infrastructure differently than they do today, which could eventually shape private charging access as well.
Overall, whether owning a car still makes sense won't have one universal answer over the next decade, it will depend heavily on where you live, how much you drive, and what's available locally. Anyone planning an EV purchase today would do well to keep an eye on how autonomous fleets develop, because they're going to meaningfully reshape the ground rules for mobility in cities over the coming years.
Additional Video
While the first video looks at how robotaxis could reshape the ride-hailing market overall, this Bloomberg Television report zooms in on the competitive battle between Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla to reveal which company's technology and business strategy is actually positioned to win the robotaxi race.
Source: Bloomberg Television – Waymo, Zoox, Tesla: Who Wins the Robotaxi Race?
Frequently Asked Questions
Will robotaxis completely replace car ownership?
Probably not entirely, based on current forecasts. Robotaxis are becoming cheaper than owning a car mainly in dense urban areas with strong coverage. In rural areas and for people who drive a lot, owning a car often remains the more economical and flexible choice.
At what point do robotaxis become cheaper than owning a car?
McKinsey projects the cost per mile could fall from around $8 today to roughly $1.32 by 2035. In large cities like Washington, D.C., that would push the break-even point for car ownership up to about 7,500 miles driven per year.
Which companies are leading the robotaxi race right now?
Waymo is furthest ahead, with more than 500,000 paid rides per week in the US. Tesla, Baidu with its Apollo Go service, and Uber as a platform partner for several fleet operators are also pushing the market forward.
Are robotaxis operating in Germany yet?
Not at scale yet. Germany has stricter approval requirements than the US or China, though a number of pilot projects are already underway. Our guide to robotaxi laws in Germany and Europe covers where things currently stand.
