Uber Bets on a Partner Going in Reverse

Uber has filed a California ballot measure that would insulate robotaxi companies from the full cost of crashes. For Uber, the timing is not accidental: Nuro, its partner for a 2026 robotaxi launch, averaged 646 miles per disengagement in 2025, down sharply from 2,044 the year before, per Consumer Watchdog's analysis of California DMV figures. For context, that is roughly the distance from Los Angeles to Denver, with a human having to take the wheel on average once along the way. Nuro drove 157,561 miles in 2025, down from 210,544 in 2024, according to the California DMV's 2025 AV report. The company's driverless ambitions are going in reverse.

The data, which covers December 2024 through November 2025, paints a stark picture of an industry consolidating around a single dominant player while the rest fight for scraps — or fight to stay in the game at all. Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous vehicle division, accounted for more than 68% of all drivered vehicle miles traveled in California last year, according to EE Times's analysis of the DMV figures. Its driverless miles grew 7.5x year-over-year, reaching nearly 3.9 million in 2025. The company completed 14 million trips last year — three times the roughly 4.5 million rides it provided in 2024 — and ended 2025 providing more than 450,000 paid rides per week, up from approximately 175,000 at the start of the year, per The Driverless Digest. In February, Waymo closed a $16 billion funding round at a $126 billion valuation, the company said in a blog post.

Waymo and Mercedes-Benz are the only two companies to have held California AV testing permits for all eleven years the DMV has been publishing this data, per EE Times. That longevity is starting to look less like patience and more like a moat.

The disengagement numbers tell the story that matters. A disengagement is when a human safety operator has to take control of a vehicle — either because the autonomous system flagged uncertainty or because the person in the driver's seat decided things were going sideways. Waymo averaged 19,234 miles per disengagement in 2025, per Consumer Watchdog. Zoox, Amazon's autonomous vehicle unit, averaged 60,682 miles per disengagement — better than Waymo, though Zoox is testing at a fraction of the scale. Zoox drove 1,213,646 drivered miles last year compared to Waymo's 3.35 million. The company started driverless testing in 2023 with just over 11,000 miles and expanded to more than 312,000 miles by 2025, per EE Times. Zoox is expected to surpass Cruise in cumulative AV miles in 2026.

The ballot measure Uber filed would cap liability for the Uber-Nuro service. Nuro's vehicles are small, low-speed delivery robots designed to operate without passengers. The disengagement rate suggests the technology isn't ready for high-volume passenger service — or at least that the company's own data doesn't support the safety claims the ballot measure requires.

The ballot measure itself is notable for what it presupposes. Uber is effectively arguing to California voters: trust us, the data shows we're safe enough. The DMV numbers don't fully support that claim for Nuro, but they do show something important — the disengagement metric that the measure's safety argument rests on is itself going away. In 2026, the department expects to finalize updates to its AV regulations, replacing disengagement reporting with braking events, immobilizations, dynamic driving task failures, and vehicle miles traveled metrics, per the California DMV press release. The thing Uber's bet is placed on is being retired before the 2026 launch.

Tesla has reported zero test miles in California for six consecutive years, according to the DMV data. It has never applied for a driverless permit in the state. The company's "robotaxi" service — which Elon Musk has described as arriving "any month now" for several years running — operates under a charter party carrier permit in California, which requires a human driver. The company's own CPUC filings in February 2026 showed human drivers and remote operators in both Austin and the Bay Area. What Tesla calls a robotaxi and what California calls an autonomous vehicle are, for now, different things.

The other notable absence in this year's data is Chinese companies. In 2021, Baidu Apollo, Pony.ai, and WeRide together accounted for 74% of roughly 25,000 driverless miles logged in California. By 2025, only WeRide was still testing driverless vehicles in the state, with less than 1,800 miles — 0.5% of total driverless vehicle miles traveled. Republican House Representative Bob Latta described Chinese driverless cars as an immediate threat to national security in 2024. Didi withdrew from the California AV testing program in February 2024. The data is catching up to the politics.

What the 2025 California AV numbers ultimately show is an industry that is not, in fact, losing to China — Waymo's dominance is now substantial enough to be its own category. But the gap between Waymo and everyone else is so wide that it raises a different question: what does it mean for the long-term competitive landscape when one company has a $126 billion valuation, eleven years of California data, and a 7.5x annual growth rate in the metric that matters most?

For the Uber-Nuro partnership, the 2026 launch may be less about preparing for success and more about surviving long enough to find out.