Uber is campaigning alongside driver unions to slow robotaxi expansion

The reversal makes sense once you look at who owns the autonomous vehicles. Uber's asset is demand aggregation — the app, the rider base, the dispatch. Its supply is contractors who bring their own cars, which is why it can scale without capital.

Autonomous fleets invert that. Whoever owns the vehicles owns the supply, and an autonomous fleet operator with enough vehicles in a city does not need an aggregator. Waymo raised $16 billion in the first quarter, among the largest venture rounds ever recorded.

So regulation that keeps human drivers in the market keeps Uber's supply structure intact, and it keeps a rival's capital-intensive fleet from becoming self-sufficient. Union alignment is not a change of philosophy; it is the same interest arriving from a different direction.

The hedge on the other side

Uber is not betting only on delay. It has invested $100 million in Atoms, the startup founded by Travis Kalanick — Uber's own ousted founder — which is reportedly moving into robotaxis.

That is a coherent position: slow the transition through regulation while buying exposure to it. It is also an unusually direct illustration of what these campaigns are for.

Whether a quota can work

An 85 percent human-driver requirement is a novel instrument, and it will be argued over on grounds that have little to do with labour.

The safety argument cuts against it if autonomous vehicles demonstrate lower crash rates, and a state mandating human drivers would be mandating the more dangerous option. That case is not yet made — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Tesla's Cybercab this month after its Austin debut, with vehicles lacking steering wheels or brake pedals, and Tesla asserting self-certification compliance.

The economic argument is more interesting. Four drivers displaced per vehicle, applied across a metropolitan fleet, is a labour market event concentrated among workers with limited alternatives, and the Dutch data protection authority's €825 million fine against Uber last month — over automated deactivations that removed drivers' ability to earn without meaningful human review — established that regulators will act on exactly this population.

What is not being discussed

The quota debate treats the question as a binary between human and autonomous. The more likely outcome is a long period of both, in which human drivers take the work autonomous fleets decline — bad weather, complex pickups, unusual destinations — at rates set by a market where the easy work has been removed.

That is a worse outcome for drivers than either pure alternative, and it is the one that requires no regulation at all. Neither Uber nor the unions has proposed anything that addresses it.