Carro autônomo no Brasil? No Uber vai demorar

The company's Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Macdonald, told the 20VC podcast that Brazil and India – two markets that account for the majority of Uber's global travel – will delay the advancement of autonomous vehicles within the company. "The average fare (for drivers) in Brazil is around $3.50 to $4. In India, it is $2.50 to $3.

It will take decades for the cost of the technology to become cheap enough to compete with human labor in these markets," Macdonald explained, who joined Uber in 2012 and is now its oldest employee. "If you want to know when the majority of Uber's trips will be autonomous, I don't know, because that will likely only happen when autonomy reaches Brazil and India.

And I can say that will take a very long time," the executive said. For now, the company is growing with human drivers in markets with more autonomous vehicles, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. According to MacDonald, Uber runs "about 300 million trips per week and a few million trips with autonomous vehicles per month", meaning autonomous trips are still a small fraction of the business.

The figures are an attempt to defend Uber from its major failure of the decade: not developing an autonomous vehicle project. "For many years, the narrative around autonomy was far ahead of reality," the executive said. "But we sold the ATG (the company's autonomous vehicle arm) during the pandemic peak, when our mobility business lost 84% of its gross revenue in three weeks."

Macdonald said the company didn't see itself as a leader in the autonomous vehicle market, and decided to focus on its core mobility business. In terms of financial results, it seems the strategy has worked so far. When asked which company (Waymo or Tesla) poses the biggest threat to Uber, Macdonald said the sector would have space for several winners, and expects both Waymo and Tesla to put their vehicles on the platform. Uber is worth $160 billion on the stock market.