Uber is splitting up the driverless market on purpose
Most of the coverage of this story is about the lobbying. Uber has started working alongside drivers' unions to slow the rollout of robotaxis in New Jersey and Washington D.C., and to push for rules requiring platforms to run human drivers alongside autonomous ones. That is a strange alliance for a company that spent its first decade fighting worker protections, and Uber's own president has said it might “feel ironic”.
The more useful line is further down. Uber has committed more than $10bn to buying vehicles and investing in several autonomous vehicle companies at once. Part of the reasoning, according to a former senior executive, is to “fragment the market” — to make sure Uber's app still has a role aggregating rides from different operators.
That is worth reading slowly, because it is a company describing its own strategy in plain terms. Back enough suppliers and none of them becomes large enough to sell rides directly. Keep the market in pieces, and the thing that joins the pieces stays necessary.
It is a rational position. Uber sold its own self-driving unit in 2020 and is behind Waymo, which now sells rides through its own app in several cities. If one autonomous operator gets big enough, it does not need a marketplace. Several smaller ones do.
Two things are worth keeping in view alongside it. Robotaxis are still under half a per cent of Uber's trips, so the strategy is being set a long way ahead of the volume. And in the cities where Uber manages the Waymo fleet, Waymo's share has been rising; where Waymo runs its own app, it is flat. Read carefully, that is evidence for Uber's argument rather than against it.
But the admission stands, and it cuts both ways. A market deliberately kept in pieces still needs something to join it back up. The only question is whether the thing doing the joining has a stake in which piece wins.
Uber does. It holds equity in several of the companies it aggregates, and it is lobbying for rules that suit its own position in the transition. That is not a criticism — it is what a market participant is supposed to do. It just means the layer sitting above a fragmented market is not a neutral one, and everybody in that market can see it.
Where we sit
Fragmentation is happening either way. The open question is who reassembles it, and whether they have a horse in the race.
An aggregator that owns part of its own supply is a participant, not a layer. Omnia takes no position in the market it routes between. Connect once, set your own terms, and reach work from every source you choose to accept — without handing your demand to a competitor.