- Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that making driverless cars common in rideshare will take a while.
- He pointed to several issues, from safety to parking, as Uber released fourth-quarter earnings.
- Uber has been working with Waymo in some cities to offer driverless cars.
Self-driving cars have a long way to go before they become common on Uber, the rideshare service's CEO said Wednesday.
Developers of self-driving cars, such as Tesla and Waymo, are making the technology more common for riders in a few US cities, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call.
But scaling that technology to assemble large fleets of driverless cars to ferry Uber passengers around is more challenging, he said.
"We think that the commercialization of the technology is going to take way, way longer," Khosrowshahi said.
The company already uses some self-driving cars in Phoenix through a partnership with Waymo. This year, Uber and Waymo will expand their venture to Atlanta and Austin.
In a letter to investors on Wednesday, Khosrowshahi explained that "several pieces of the go-to-market puzzle still need to come together" before Uber can use autonomous vehicles widely.
One aspect he pointed to was safety.
Waymo has said that its driverless cars are safer than vehicles driven by humans, but as new providers enter the market, autonomous vehicles as a category "will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers in order to earn the trust of the public," he said.
Large fleets of driverless cars would also require parking spaces when not in use, cleaning, and maintenance, Khosrowshahi said.
"It is important to note that an average-utilized AV can run as much as 100K miles a year, compared to a typical consumer vehicle at 10-15K miles a year," Khosrowshahi said, using an abbreviation for autonomous vehicle. "This means that AVs need to be charged multiple times a day and serviced monthly."
Uber's drivers, who are independent contractors, are currently responsible for most of those tasks.
Khosrowshahi also pointed to regulations, which can vary by state, as another hurdle for rolling out AVs. The Trump administration has indicated that it might develop a federal approach for autonomous vehicles.
The CEO also said that the high cost of self-driving vehicles, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, needs to come down before companies can buy lots of them.
Anyone with a large network of AVs will also have to match the fleet to demand — something that Uber already does with its human drivers, Khosrowshahi said.
In January, Khosrowshahi said that he doesn't expect autonomous vehicles to replace Uber's millions of human drivers within the next five years.
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