Uber Spent Years Building Robotaxi Partnerships. Now It's Lobbying To Regulate Them Out Of Existence.

For years, Uber and Waymo looked like an unlikely success story: former courtroom rivals turned business partners, putting Waymo's self-driving cars on Uber's app in Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta.

That partnership is now falling apart in public. And the battleground is a piece of legislation in Washington, D.C. that most Americans have never heard of.

At stake: whether robotaxis get to operate as an independent, standalone service or whether they're forced onto ride-hailing platforms like Uber's, competing for the same customers as human drivers on the same app.

Uber wants the second option. Waymo wants the first. And on Monday, both companies will make their case in a hearing that could set the template for how autonomous vehicles get regulated across the entire country.

What The Bill Actually Does

The proposed legislation, introduced by D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen in May, would update the district's decade-old Autonomous Vehicle Act to finally allow driverless commercial operations. Right now, companies like Waymo and Zoox can only test autonomous vehicles in D.C. with a human safety driver behind the wheel; the training wheels haven't come off yet.

The new bill would let the District Department of Transportation issue actual driverless permits, provided companies meet certain requirements: a minimum of $5 million in liability insurance, mandatory crash reporting within 8 to 72 hours depending on the vehicle type, and a per-mile tax on robotaxi trips.

That tax of $0.15 per mile has become its own flashpoint. Half the revenue would go toward public transit, the rest toward retraining rideshare and taxi drivers at risk of losing their jobs to autonomous vehicles. Robotaxi advocates say it's too expensive. Add in a $1 million application fee and a non-refundable $5 million permit fee, and critics argue the whole structure is designed to lock out everyone except the biggest, best-funded players.

That's a genuine regulatory hurdle. But it's not actually the fight Uber is picking.

The Real Fight: Who Gets To Own The Customer Relationship

Uber's objection isn't really about insurance requirements or per-mile taxes. It's about something more fundamental: whether robotaxis can operate as their own standalone service, or whether they have to plug into an existing ride-hailing network like Uber's.

Javi Correoso, who leads U.S. policy and federal affairs for Uber, laid out the company's position during a D.C. Council roundtable in May: "If a consumer is on the app, they should be able to choose. I would go a step further: I think it should be part of the regulatory framework for the industry. There should be a requirement for consumers to be able to take an Uber that's driven by a human."

Read that carefully. Uber isn't just asking for the option to include robotaxis on its platform; it's asking regulators to require that human-driven options remain available within the same regulatory framework. That's not a business strategy. That's an attempt to write competitive protection directly into law.

Uber's argument for why this matters is more sympathetic on its face: robotaxis create congestion by idling or cruising empty, they can't provide physical assistance to elderly or disabled riders the way a human driver can, and citing data, Uber presented that one autonomous vehicle displaces roughly four human drivers.

Those are real concerns. Labor displacement, accessibility, and street congestion are legitimate policy questions any city should be asking before greenlighting driverless commercial operations at scale.

But the solution Uber is proposing happens to also be the one that guarantees Uber remains the gatekeeper.

Waymo's Very Different Vision

Waymo, unsurprisingly, sees it differently. The company backs the D.C. bill as written, arguing it allows for safe autonomous vehicle deployment while still supporting public transit, equitable access, and displaced workers without requiring companies like Waymo to route every ride through a competitor's app.

Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher pushed back directly on Uber's framing: "We would welcome changes clarifying that different types of networks can operate in the District."

In other words: Waymo isn't trying to ban Uber's hybrid model. It just doesn't want that model to be the only legally permitted structure, which is functionally what Uber's proposal would create.

This matters enormously for Waymo's business. The company already operates its own standalone app in Phoenix, its first robotaxi market, alongside the limited partnership it had with Uber there. If Uber's hybrid-only framework becomes the regulatory standard, Waymo would effectively be forced to choose: put its robotaxis on Uber's platform in every market, or hire human drivers to run a parallel ride-hailing service alongside the autonomous fleet it spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing.

Neither option looks appealing for a company that's already the largest robotaxi operator in the country, delivering more than 500,000 rides weekly across 11 cities.

Why This Fight Sounds Familiar

If Uber's current positioning, pro-worker, pro-compromise, "let's partner with cities instead of confronting them," sounds like a departure from the company's reputation, that's because it is.

Uber's early history was built on an aggressive anti-regulation playbook: find the loopholes, ignore the rules that didn't fit the business model, expand first and negotiate consequences later. The company fought hard against California's AB 5, which would have reclassified gig workers as employees, and ultimately backed Proposition 22, the 2020 ballot measure that preserved contractor status for drivers while offering some benefits as a compromise.

Those fights left scars. Uber COO Andrew Macdonald acknowledged as much in a LinkedIn post this past May, writing that the company's old grow-at-all-costs approach led to "regulatory battles and a corporate crisis that damaged trust for years." His conclusion: "That experience changed us. Today, we partner with cities instead of confronting them."

Uber's hybrid network proposal is being framed internally as exactly that kind of partnership, a way to bring autonomous vehicles into cities without triggering the same labor backlash that plagued the company's earlier gig-economy fights.

Critics see something else entirely.

"Regulatory Capture" In Robotaxi Form

Greg Rogers, founder of the mobility think tank The Innovation Majority, is scheduled to testify at Monday's hearing, and he doesn't mince words about what Uber is actually doing.

"Mobility is already a marketplace," Rogers told TechCrunch. People can already make choices on whether to take a bus, ride a bike, walk, or take a rideshare every day. And any argument that you can improve consumer welfare by forcing certain business models and canceling out others does not improve people's mobility choices. It does not improve road safety, and what it risks is only further entrenching interests and charging rent on anyone who seeks to operate AVs in the district."

That's the core critique: Uber is dressing up a competitive moat as consumer protection. If regulators require robotaxis to operate through a ride-hailing network, Uber, as the dominant ride-hailing platform in the country, becomes the default toll booth for the entire robotaxi industry, regardless of who builds the best autonomous vehicle technology.

Uber disputes this characterization directly. Spokesperson Noah Edwardsen argued the company is responding to a bill that would effectively ban hybrid networks altogether, and contrasted Uber's position with what he called cynical attempts elsewhere in the AV industry "to lock out competitors and create monopolies."

Both sides, in other words, are accusing the other of trying to rig the market in their own favor. Which tells you something important: this isn't really a debate about safety or labor protections anymore. It's a fight over market structure, dressed in the language of both.

A Partnership Quietly Falling Apart

The tension in D.C. didn't come out of nowhere. It's the latest chapter in a relationship that's been souring for months.

Uber and Waymo's history goes back to 2017, when Waymo sued Uber over trade secret theft allegations involving a former Google engineer, a trial infamous enough to produce the phrase "laser is the sauce" as courtroom evidence. Uber settled after five days.

Six years later, with Uber having sold off its own self-driving development to Aurora, the former rivals became partners. Waymo vehicles started appearing on Uber's app in Phoenix in 2023, then expanded to Austin and Atlanta cities, where, notably, customers can't hail a Waymo directly and have to go through Uber's app instead, hoping for a match.

By March 2025, the partnership looked solid enough that company executives were celebrating together at SXSW with margaritas and barbecue.

That goodwill has evaporated. Uber's Phoenix partnership with Waymo quietly ended in May. Uber's chief technology officer publicly criticized a Waymo robotaxi's behavior as "scary" on X earlier this year. And during a May earnings call, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pointedly referenced safety incidents involving Waymo vehicles without naming the company directly, expressing support for regulators asking harder questions about how autonomous vehicles handle power outages, school zones, and interactions with emergency responders.

The relationship hasn't just cooled, it's heading toward open conflict, with both companies now bracing for a similar showdown in London.

The Bigger Strategy Behind Uber's Lobbying

D.C. isn't an isolated fight. It's one piece of a broader Uber strategy to protect its dominant position as autonomous vehicles become commercially viable.

Uber is simultaneously playing both sides of this transition. The company has invested in and partnered with more than 30 autonomous vehicle technology companies globally, and it's building out AV Labs, a new internal unit hiring dozens of engineers to collect and share real-world driving data with AV developers.

At the same time, Uber is actively lobbying for regulatory frameworks that would require those same autonomous vehicles to operate through ride-hailing platforms like its own. It's a strategy that lets Uber benefit no matter which future materializes: if AVs succeed independently, Uber has equity and partnerships across the space; if regulators mandate hybrid networks, Uber becomes the essential intermediary that every robotaxi operator has to go through.

Uber's head of AV policy, Harry Hartfield, summarized the company's underlying philosophy in testimony submitted ahead of Monday's hearing: "We think the future of our transportation system will be hybrid. Public policy should be designed around that reality, not around an AV-only future that does not exist."

Who Else Is In The Room

Monday's hearing won't just be a two-company showdown. Representatives from Tesla, Lyft, the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, disability rights organizations, local business groups, highway safety advocates, and government officials are all scheduled to speak.

There's also a murkier element: an anti-robotaxi campaign launched by a New York-based organization called the Coalition for Accountability and Road Safety, which has been canvassing D.C. voters and posting on social media. The group's registered address traces back to an employee of a New York lobbying firm affiliated with labor and employment law, which has been retained over the past year by several labor unions and a black car drivers' compensation fund. Who's actually funding the campaign remains unclear.

That opacity is its own small window into how high-stakes this fight has become, enough to attract dark-money-style advocacy campaigns alongside the official corporate lobbying happening in plain sight.

The bill's passage isn't imminent. Multiple sources told TechCrunch they hope for approval before the end of the year and specifically before D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser leaves office in January, adding a political deadline to an already complicated fight.

But regardless of D.C.'s specific outcome, the underlying conflict isn't going away. Uber has explicitly committed to pushing its hybrid network proposal in other cities and states as more jurisdictions write or update their own autonomous vehicle laws. Wired has already documented similar lobbying efforts underway in New Jersey.

Whatever happens Monday, it's a preview of a fight that's about to play out in city council chambers and state legislatures across the country: not whether autonomous vehicles are safe enough to deploy, but who gets to control the platform they run on once they are.

Uber and Waymo built a partnership on the premise that robotaxis and ride-hailing apps could grow together. That premise is breaking down in real time, and Washington D.C. just became the first major battleground where it's playing out as actual policy.

Uber's pitch for a "hybrid" network requiring human drivers to remain available alongside autonomous vehicles sounds like a reasonable compromise. It also happens to preserve Uber's position as the essential gatekeeper of ride-hailing demand, regardless of whether Uber, Waymo, or anyone else builds the best self-driving technology.

Waymo's pitch lets different networks operate independently, which sounds like open competition. It also happens to be the framework that lets Waymo bypass Uber entirely and go straight to customers.

Neither company is wrong that labor displacement, accessibility, and road safety are real issues worth regulating carefully. But underneath the policy language, this is a fight about market control at the exact moment autonomous vehicles are becoming commercially real.

Monday's hearing won't resolve it. But it will tell us a lot about which vision of the robotaxi future regulators are actually inclined to build.