Robotaxis and the Taxi Driver's Job: How Much Is Automated

Which part of the job moved

O*NET's profile of the taxi driver lists 16 tasks, from driving and picking up passengers to collecting fares, cleaning the car and helping riders with their bags.¹ Read against that list, robotaxis (vehicles that drive paying passengers with no one at the wheel) have taken over one block of work: driving between an app-booked pickup and drop-off, inside mapped service areas. Waymo says its cars have driven 271.3 million rider-only miles, its term for miles with no human driver, through June 2026.³ Baidu says its Apollo Go fleets have logged over 240 million fully driverless kilometers.⁴ The systems doing this are Level 4 automated driving systems in SAE's taxonomy, which our explainer of the driving levels covers level by level.

Most of the remaining tasks didn't vanish. Some moved into software, such as fare quotes and payment in the booking app.² Others moved to remote staff and depot crews, and a few, such as helping a wheelchair user aboard, are still done by a human driver in a conventional vehicle.

For scale, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 204,200 taxi drivers in 2025, with a median wage of $20.24 an hour ($42,100 a year). Its 2025–2035 projections put the occupation's growth at "much faster than average (7% or higher)", with 20,400 openings over the period.¹ Those are BLS projections made with BLS's own method, not a measure of robotaxi effects. The scorecard above counts tasks, not jobs.

How big driverless service is, by the operators' own numbers

In this market the operator and the developer of the driving system are usually the same company, so every scale figure here is company-stated, and no independent body audits them. They also count different things. Waymo said in February 2026 that its 3,000 vehicles provide "over 400,000 rides" a week.⁶ It added its fifteenth US city in September.¹⁷ In California, where the Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) collects quarterly data, Waymo reported 1,348,926 completed trips for June 2026 in its deployment program.¹⁸

Baidu reported 3.2 million fully driverless operational rides for Apollo Go in the first quarter of 2026, with weekly rides peaking above 350,000 in March, and a footprint of 28 cities by August.¹⁹⁴ WeRide reports utilization instead: its robotaxis in China averaged over 21 rides per vehicle per day in the second quarter, with a peak of 28.²¹ Pony.ai reports its fleet, 1,975 robotaxis at June 30, 2026, and revenue, but no ride count.²⁰

Tesla sits in its own rows. Its Q2 2026 update lists six metros as "Ramping Unsupervised" and the San Francisco Bay Area as "Safety Driver", where it runs FSD (Supervised), a driver-assistance system that, in Tesla's words, "does not make the vehicle autonomous".²⁴ Tesla launched in Austin in June 2025 "with a safety rider".²⁷ It "began removing the safety monitor from customer rides in January on a limited basis" in 2026.²⁵ Its filings don't say what share of rides now carry no employee. Newer figures are due with its Q3 2026 results on October 21.²⁶

The people behind a driverless ride

The dispatcher's radio has a successor: remote assistance. Waymo says its service "does not rely on remote drivers". Its Remote Assistance agents don't watch cars continuously. Instead, they "respond to specific requests for information initiated by the Waymo Driver", and the system can use or reject their advice. As of February 17, 2026, about 70 agents were on duty worldwide at any time, including a US-only Event Response Team that coordinates with emergency responders. All agents must hold driver's licenses and pass background checks.⁶ Pony.ai describes the same split in its October 2025 filing: its remote assistance operators "only monitor and provide driving guidance to vehicles without any direct control over the vehicle", step in for cases such as road closures, and each oversees several vehicles from a multi-screen workstation.¹⁶

When a car stops and can't continue, a person still takes the wheel. Waymo's Support team calls the rider. A Roadside Assistance specialist in a yellow vest then arrives, unlocks the car, gets into the driver's seat and drives to the drop-off. Waymo says it "doesn't operate any of its cars remotely".²⁸ How often remote staff help is hard to see from outside. The CPUC's template asks for fleet-level data on stoppages, including manual interventions, and Waymo's public Q2 2026 file shows those fields as "Redacted". Its notes say the stoppage data include stops where Remote Assistance gave help.¹⁸

Depots: where the driver's other chores went

A taxi driver also cleans, refuels and checks the car. In a robotaxi fleet those jobs move to a depot. Pony.ai says that "for every 100 Pony.ai Robotaxis … just three fleet operations staff are needed for routine ground operations": cleaning inside and out, charging and inspections.¹³

In Nashville, Lyft's fleet subsidiary Flexdrive is opening an 80,000-square-foot depot for Waymo's fleet on October 12, 2026. WSMV reported that the cars drive themselves there at least once a day, and crews inspect, clean and charge them before they go back on the road. The station also reported that the site brings more than 70 full-time jobs this year, many filled by former Lyft drivers.¹⁴ According to WSMV, a Waymo representative said charging and servicing are largely automated: the car displays an "I'm ready to go" message when it has finished charging, so that someone can unplug it and it can drive itself on.¹⁴

Waymo says it may use in-car cameras to "make sure cars are clean" and "spot left-behind items".⁵ It charges riders a $50 fee for a mess they report during the ride and $100 for a first unreported one.²⁹ Robots that clean are, so far, a stated goal: a July 2026 Waymo job listing seeks a lead to "generalize complex depot operations—such as exterior cleaning, sensor calibration, and maintenance checks—using advanced robotics".¹² We grade that as a vendor claim.

What no robotaxi does yet

Helping passengers in and out is the clearest gap. Waymo says its wheelchair-accessible vehicle service is for riders "who cannot ride in our fully-autonomous cars". Those vehicles are "driven manually", by drivers who help riders board and secure the chair.¹⁰ In its Q2 2026 filing to the CPUC, Waymo said those trips run with Tower WAV, in conventional vehicles with side ramps and securement systems, and that 2,557 were provided to its riders in the quarter.¹⁸ May Mobility's accessible automated vehicles carry an operator who deploys the ramp and helps with securement. The company wrote in 2023 that it was "hard at work developing a solution" for rider-only service.⁹ Luggage is half-automated: a Waymo trunk takes about 200 pounds and opens by itself at the destination, but the rider does the lifting.¹¹

The robotaxis reviewed here are booked in apps. We found no operator taking street hails or queuing at taxi stands, so the pickup row counts only prearranged pickups. The tourist questions a driver might field are newer ground. Waymo's in-car Gemini assistant can suggest sights along the route or coffee shops near the destination. Waymo says the assistant can't make driving decisions, though a rider can ask it to have the car pull over.⁸

Costs and savings, as stated

Fares are set by software. Waymo prices trips by a minimum fare, distance, time and demand, and shows an estimate before booking. In Las Vegas it publishes the rate: a $9.49 base plus $1.23 a mile and $0.45 a minute.² Zoox said it would start charging in Las Vegas on August 10, 2026, aiming to be competitive with ride-hail "comfort" pricing.¹⁵

On the operators' side, Pony.ai's October 2025 filing says the bill-of-materials cost of its 7th-generation system fell 70% from the previous generation. It describes a business model premised on "labor costs associated with human drivers" being "largely removed", and lists as a risk that those unit economics may not materialize.¹⁶ On safety, Waymo says its rider-only fleet had 95% fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 82% fewer injury-causing crashes than an average human driver over the same distance in its cities. That is Waymo's analysis of its own fleet, not an independent measurement.³