Driver earnings are falling in the cities where Waymo operates, years before autonomous fleets reach the scale to take the work outright.
Rideshare drivers in Los Angeles and San Francisco earned less per hour at the end of 2025 than a year earlier, even as pay rose nationally, according to driver-analytics company Gridwise. The two cities are among the most heavily served by Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis, and the gap is the first measurable sign that automation is pricing into gig wages long before it replaces the drivers.
Gridwise’s 2026 Autonomous Vehicles Impact Report found that hourly gross earnings for Uber and Lyft drivers rose 1.8% year on year across the US in the fourth quarter of 2025. In Los Angeles they fell 3.7%, in San Francisco 1.7% and in Phoenix 0.4%. Trips per hour fell 5.3% in autonomous-vehicle cities, roughly double the 2.6% national decline.
Small fleet, large shadow
On volume alone, robotaxis remain a rounding error. Waymo said in March that it was providing 500,000 paid rides a week, double its level of less than a year earlier, and it has committed to reaching one million weekly paid rides by the end of 2026.
Uber, by comparison, completed 3.9bn trips in the second quarter of 2026, up 18% from a year earlier, including deliveries, the company reported on August 5. That is about 300mn a week.
The imbalance has not stopped the wage effect. Veni Dhir, director of corporate venture capital at ADP, told The Daily Upside that platforms gain bargaining power from the mere prospect of automation. “They can squeeze driver pay today knowing the automation alternative caps what labor can demand,” Dhir said.
The economics driving the build-out
The case for robotaxis rests on removing the largest single cost in a ride. Goldman Sachs Research projected on April 30 that the global robotaxi market would reach about $415bn in 2035, with the US accounting for about $48bn.
Reaching that scale depends on cost per mile. Operators have disclosed little about fleet economics, so the break-even point against a human-driven ride, where the driver takes a large share of each fare, remains opaque to outside investors.
For Uber, the tension is direct. Its growth is built on a network of human drivers, while its long-term margin story increasingly rests on partnerships with autonomous operators that would make those drivers unnecessary.
Labour costs are rising elsewhere in the gig economy
The pressure on pay is arriving at the same moment that regulators are enforcing existing wage rules more aggressively. On September 22, New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a $131.5mn settlement with DoorDash over violations of the city’s delivery worker pay laws. The city said more than $115mn would go directly to more than 260,000 workers who were underpaid or paid late between April 2022 and June 2026, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history.
The two trends pull in opposite directions. Enforcement raises the cost of human gig labour, which strengthens the investment case for replacing it. Automation, even at small scale, weakens drivers’ bargaining position before a single job is lost.
What it means for the side-hustle safety net
Gig driving has served as a buffer for workers between jobs, with low barriers to entry and pay that starts within days. If autonomous fleets keep growing at Waymo’s current pace, the first casualty is likely to be the price of that work rather than its existence.
Nicolò Masorgo, an assistant professor of business at Miami University in Ohio, told The Daily Upside that automation may serve the excess demand human drivers cannot meet rather than displace them. The Gridwise numbers suggest drivers in the most exposed cities are paying for that transition already, in lower hourly earnings rather than lost jobs.