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Robotaxis push down gig driver wages in Los Angeles years before the fleet can replace them
Uber and Lyft drivers' hourly pay fell 3.7% in robotaxi-heavy Los Angeles in late 2025 while rising 1.8% nationally, Gridwise data show. For gig platforms, robotaxis are already pressing on driver pay where they run, years before the fleet is big enough to replace anyone.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- DoorDash agreed to a $131 million settlement with New York City over a probe that found it underpaid delivery workers and paid them late.
- A George Washington University study found that moving to robotaxis could cut frontline jobs by 57% to 76%.
- Waymo runs about 4,000 robotaxis in 15 cities doing about 500,000 rides a week, roughly 0.17% of the 300 million weekly trips Uber reported.
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Why it matters
- cost Human drivers in robotaxi cities are already paying for the rollout through lower hourly pay, well before any platform books a saving from replacing them.
- exposure Because people still run nearly every trip on the platforms, Uber and its peers stay open to pay probes like New York's for as long as fleets stay at Waymo's scale.
- constraint Robotaxis priced somewhere between a private car and a human rideshare have to move toward the private-car end before Goldman's market size turns into operator profit.
- contradiction The GWU job-loss range describes an end state that most estimates put at least a couple of decades out, so it cannot guide a platform's labor spending this decade.
Against the national rise, Los Angeles drivers fell 5.5 percentage points behind, and San Francisco drivers, whose pay dropped 1.7%, fell 3.5 points behind [5][1]. Those are the only figures in the source that show robotaxis changing what a human driver earns today. "Full displacement may be decades away, but wage pressure is already here," Veni Dhir said in comments published by The Daily Upside [6].
New York is pushing the price of similar labor the other way. The report does not give DoorDash's total courier pay, so the $131 million [1] cannot be set against the wage bill it corrects. It is also a delivery settlement in one city, while the Gridwise declines are in ride-hailing pay in Los Angeles and San Francisco [5].
Robotaxis can replace drivers, work alongside them, or stay small and still move their pay. The George Washington University range [2] describes the first case. The second is the view The Daily Upside reported: gig work is more likely to evolve than disappear, and most estimates put the great displacement at least a couple of decades away [11]. Gridwise is evidence for the third.
Size favors the third for now. At Waymo's current pace [3], each car completes about 125 rides a week, roughly 18 a day [2]. Carrying Uber's weekly volume [4] at that rate would take about 2.4 million robotaxis, or 600 for every car Waymo runs today [4][3]. That overstates the gap somewhat, because Uber's count includes deliveries.
The per-mile figures explain why the platforms chase the fleet anyway. A typical rideshare at about $2 a mile costs $1.23 more than a private car at Goldman Sachs' 77 cents [8][6], and Info-Tech analyst Brian Jackson puts most of that on one line. "It's the driver in that equation," Jackson told The Daily Upside, adding: "If you cut out the driver from it, the cost goes way down" [9]. Natasha Nair, a Third Bridge analyst, said fleets "must drive down unit operational costs" to beat rideshare margins, through routing, less human support and less downtime for charging and maintenance [10].
I think the investment case for the gig platforms stays a labor case for several years. On this evidence they are still buying human labor at full scale, and the fleet mainly pushes its price down in a few cities [4][1]. The counter-thesis is Goldman's: a $415 billion robotaxi market by 2035 [7] would make owning the fleet worth more than any saving on drivers. About 88% of that market sits outside the US [5].
The labor-case view is wrong if robotaxi costs reach the 77-cent end of the range within a few years while weekly rides climb far above 500,000 [8][3]. It is also wrong in the other direction if Los Angeles and San Francisco wages recover as fleets grow. That would put the Gridwise data on the side of robotaxis supplementing drivers [5].
What to watch
- Gridwise's next quarterly wage data for Los Angeles and San Francisco, and whether the gap to the national figure widens as Waymo adds cities.
- Any disclosure by Waymo or a rival of per-mile operating cost, showing whether robotaxis sit nearer 77 cents or $2.
- Whether other cities open pay probes into delivery platforms after DoorDash's $131 million New York settlement.