Uber is live with robotaxis in seven cities — and they are still under 0.5% of its trips

Uber reported second-quarter 2026 results on 5 August: gross bookings up 22% year over year to more than 58 billion dollars, a fourth straight quarter above 20%, non-GAAP earnings per share up 35%, and trailing-twelve-month free cash flow above 10 billion dollars for the first time in the company's history. The autonomous part of the business is where the numbers get interesting. Uber is now live with autonomous vehicles in seven cities and targets fifteen by year end, with partners across almost every serious robotaxi programme outside Waymo and Tesla: Nuro with Lucid in the Bay Area, Zoox in Las Vegas, Wayve in London and Tokyo, Baidu in London, and Pony.ai with Verne in Zagreb. The company describes a multi-year 10 billion dollar autonomous programme, 120,000 vehicle off-take commitments, and a new AV Labs unit building sensor cars to collect rideshare-specific data. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber is looking to accelerate development of the entire autonomous ecosystem and called for smart regulation. Against all of that sits one figure: autonomous vehicles still account for less than 0.5% of Uber's trips. Seven cities, ten billion dollars of commitment and a six-partner roster add up to a rounding error on the platform's actual volume — which is the honest measure of where robotaxi deployment stands in mid-2026, as opposed to where the announcements stand. What the call did not provide is the economics. Asked about profit and loss impact, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said it would be disclosed closer to deployment, and characterised the 10 billion dollars as multi-year, covering soft investments and balance-sheet support. That silence is worth noting, because it is the industry norm rather than an exception: of the operators in this catalogue, only Pony.ai has published per-vehicle economics — 338 RMB of average daily net revenue on 23 paid rides in Shenzhen in February 2026, with depreciation, charging, maintenance, remote operations, insurance, labour and parking counted in.