In late March, we attended a panel at New York Law School where Sam Schwartz, a former NYC Traffic Commissioner who coined the term "gridlock," walked through where driverless technology stands today and why the five boroughs are its hardest test. Dinara Zhanpeissova, an Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) organizer, gave a driver's perspective.

On April 7th, just outside Buffalo, we saw a Tesla Cybercab, the vehicle Elon Musk is using to launch a robotaxi service. Two days later, walking down Spring Street in Manhattan, we watched a Waymo-branded Jaguar roll past, rooftop LIDAR spinning, safety driver behind the wheel. On April 12th, we spotted another one in Chelsea.

If you follow the current news and commentary, these sightings and discussions might seem improbable. Reports of AVs being banned, or unfairly prevented from operating in New York, are overstated.

Today we wanted to look at the AV debate a different way. On a recent trip to Southern California, we took a number of fully driverless Waymo rides and looked carefully at what the trips actually cost, what Uber and Lyft were quoting at the same time, and where the fare goes. Waymo, especially on longer trips, was often more than 25% cheaper than Uber and Lyft on the trips we took, and the reason is structural: the driver’s paycheck is the line item that disappears.

What we experienced in LA was not only a working self-driving car. It was the foundation of a working price structure and business model that will ultimately lower passenger fares, on its way to eliminating a driver’s paycheck. The technology and the economics, taken together, make the coming AV disruption structural rather than speculative.

Mass adoption, in our view, is still several years away in New York. The capital intensity, regulatory frameworks, insurance structures, and fleet build-outs required to replace a meaningful share of today’s for-hire trips cannot be assembled overnight. But that window is precisely what makes this the moment to act. The longer stakeholders wait, the less leverage they have over the terms under which AVs arrive.

NYC TLC drivers, advocates, fleets, brokers, and lenders need to focus on what AVs mean for them now. Regulators and policymakers need to decide the terms before the market decides for them. The question is not only whether the technology arrives. It is how, when, and on what terms.

The rest of this article (Part 1) walks through the financial disruption, trip data and unit economics in hand. Part 2 turns to the framework for how drivers, fleets, and the city get paid in the AV era through their ownership stake in taxi medallions and TLC plates.

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Taking Waymos

Last week we spent four days in Los Angeles attending Curbivore, a conference focused on transportation, autonomy, and food delivery. While there, we took several fully driverless Waymo trips, including a few that were longer than an hour. We also took regular human-driven Uber trips to and from LAX, where Waymo is not yet permitted.

We adjusted quickly to the absence of a driver, and the absence itself changed the trip. We took conference calls and worked as if we were in an office.

Most of the human drivers on the road around us did not appear particularly fazed by the self-driving Jaguars. We watched the Waymo vehicles navigate a range of complicated traffic and pedestrian situations. Not New York, but not simple either.

It felt like the future. It is likely the future. But understanding when and how that future arrives is not only a question of technology. The pace of AV adoption is driven as much by the business model as by technological breakthroughs.

Way-mo Cheaper?

Across our trips in LA, the longer-distance Waymos were considerably cheaper than comparable Uber and Lyft rides. Our first Waymo trip lasted 62 minutes and covered 17.2 miles, costing $31.57, equivalent to about $0.51 per minute, or alternatively $1.84 per mile. That trip is the case study we use throughout this piece to explain the current AV business model, where it is likely headed, and why it is so disruptive.

Our average speed was 16.6 miles per hour (mph), or roughly 3.6 minutes per mile. That speed-to-distance ratio matters for the pricing breakdown below, because Waymo does not publish its rates and we have to back them out from the trip data. At the same moment we hailed our Waymo, screenshots we captured show Uber and Lyft quoting $44.65 and $41.97 for the identical route, meaning Waymo was 25 to 30% cheaper.

Decomposing the Uber fare. According to The Rideshare Guy, current Los Angeles driver pay rates are $0.28 per minute and $0.80 per mile. Layer on Uber’s $3.00 booking fee and 25% commission, we run the pay formula on our trip:

• 62 mins × $0.28 + 17.2 miles × $0.80 = $31.12 in time and mileage charges

• Plus a $3.00 booking fee = $34.12 estimated passenger fare

• Of the $31.12, the driver keeps 75% = $23.34 to the driver

• Uber keeps the $3.00 booking fee plus $7.78 commission = $10.78 per trip

Using the driver-pay formula puts the trip at $34.12. But our Uber app showed $44.65. The roughly $10.53 gap is likely upfront pricing, which, per The Rideshare Guy, “decouples the price drivers are paid from what the passenger pays.” The rider pays more, the driver’s cut stays the same, and the platform keeps the difference.

Applied consistently, Uber’s actual per-unit rates to the passenger work out to roughly $0.37 per minute and $1.07 per mile, a 33% markup on both dimensions above the driver-pay rate card, captured entirely by the platform through upfront pricing.

What Waymo captures. Compared to Waymo’s effective $0.25 per minute and $0.92 per mile, Uber’s actual passenger rates are meaningfully higher on both time and distance. The driver sees one rate. The passenger sees another. Waymo charges the passenger below both, not because its cost structure is lower, but because with no driver in the economic equation, it captures the full fare as platform revenue.

If we had taken Uber instead of Waymo on our trip, we would have paid $44.65. Uber would have kept $21.31, and the driver $23.34. Waymo kept the full $31.57 we paid. Waymo captures roughly 1.5x more per trip than Uber, and offered a cheaper ride. The driver's paycheck, $23.34 on this trip, is the line item that disappears. Even if Uber dropped upfront pricing entirely, Waymo would still offer a slightly cheaper fare and earn nearly 3x Uber's commission on the trip.

Uber has no clean competitive response in LA as of now, except perhaps decreasing how much drivers are paid and/or increasing their commission. Cutting the platform take to match Waymo’s price would compress Uber’s per-trip revenue by roughly half in our example.

Cutting only the upfront-pricing margin ($10.53 on this trip) would bring Uber close to Waymo's fare but still leaves the driver-pay base intact, which is already in line with what Waymo charges. That leaves one remaining lever: compressing driver pay, raising commission, or both. Either path erodes the economics, for the platform or for the driver. There is no version of the current ride-hail model in LA that beats the fare Waymo is offering on the trip we took. As Waymo adds to its fleet, the competitive pressure on Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles — and on the drivers working for them — should become more obvious.

Why this matters for NYC. Current NYC TLC minimum driver pay rates, $0.68 per minute and $1.28 per mile, are among the highest in North America. The TLC's utilization rate (UR) requirement, which obligates platforms to keep drivers busy more than half the time, lifts effective per-trip pay further. Driverless economics look most attractive where the human driver is most expensive, and by that measure NYC sits at the top of the list where AVs make the most financial sense.

Two factors push in the other direction. The first is the capital intensity of owning and maintaining a fleet. The second is insurance: NYC is the only major North American market where drivers and fleets, not the platforms, carry commercial auto coverage. An AV operator entering New York inherits that obligation, which changes the math materially, though the working assumption in the industry is that AV insurance will ultimately price far below current commercial for-hire rates.

Whether Waymo’s fare actually covers the vehicle cost is a different question. We turn to it in the next section.

The broader takeaway is this. If Waymo and other AV operators can underprice Uber and Lyft, and we explain below why we believe they can, price-sensitive riders will migrate. Most people would rather pay $31.57 than $44.65 for the same trip. That migration is how the financial disruption becomes the adoption curve.

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Does Waymo Make Money?

On Waymo, the full $31.57 is platform revenue, roughly 1.5x what Uber keeps on the same trip (or ~3x if you remove the upfront fee). But revenue is not profit.

What Waymo does not spend on drivers it spends on vehicles and running a fleet. Each Jaguar I-PACE in the fleet likely carries a sticker price north of $125,000 including the LIDAR stack, cameras, compute, integration costs, and distributed overhead. Vehicles, driverless or not, depreciate. Sensors get replaced, and the fleet requires depots, remote operators, mapping infrastructure, and compute.

At the vehicle-cost level alone, before charging, insurance, remote operators, and mapping infrastructure, we estimate $27.61 in costs against the $31.57 fare, a $3.96 contribution margin per trip. Once operating expenses are layered in, Waymo is likely running at a substantial net loss on this trip today. But the contribution margin is the number that matters directionally, because it sets the base that scales as vehicle costs fall.

We walk through our assumptions below. Of note, we also did not see any taxes or surcharges on our Waymo fare, which will almost certainly not be the case in New York.

On our downtown LA to Santa Monica trip, we averaged 16.6 mph across a mix of surface streets and larger arterial roads. For a fleet-wide average, a more conservative 12 mph is probably closer to reality, reflecting the mix of dense urban driving, deadhead miles, and slower off-peak conditions in the Los Angeles area.

Assume Waymo operates each Jaguar I-PACE at 30 trips per day over 2 years, 340 operating days per year after accounting for charging, cleaning, maintenance, and days off the road entirely for flat tires, sensor malfunctions, or repairs. At an average trip of 5 miles and 25 minutes, an implied speed of 12 mph, the vehicle covers roughly 102,000 miles across 20,400 trips over its useful life.

Thirty trips per day is not idle, especially at an average trip of 25 minutes. Waymo can run at that pace because there is no driver to rest. The useful life and utilization profile probably looks a lot like how Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise run their rental fleets.

Those companies typically rotate vehicles out before three model years and 100,000 miles, mostly for customer experience and maintenance reasons: no one wants to rent a worn-out car, and cost-per-mile climbs sharply past that threshold. A driverless Waymo, at 2 years and ~100,000 miles, is operating in a similar manner, with obsolescence risk from rapidly evolving AV hardware, rather than mileage, as the binding constraint on useful life.

We cap useful life at 2 years deliberately. AV tech stacks and EV charging hardware are improving quickly, and older vehicles will experience functional obsolescence faster than conventional fleets. A second-generation Waymo with cheaper sensors, better systems, and faster charging will out-earn a current-generation Jaguar retrofit well before the Jaguar itself wears out.

The same dynamic applies at the passenger level. As Zoox and others launch purpose-built AVs without steering wheels or pedals, a 2026-era Jaguar retrofit starts to look dated. Offering a visibly aging AV to a customer is unlikely to be a durable strategy. Each generation of vehicle improves on the last, but the old ones come off the road faster than the depreciation schedule alone would suggest.

Autonomous vehicle cost is more time-driven than mile-driven in our opinion. Sensors and compute depreciate over months and the car draws power continuously. Weighting the $200,000 all-in cost 65% to time and 35% to mileage, and applying it to our actual trip, produces the unit economics shown in the table: $27.61 in vehicle cost against a $31.57 fare, a $3.96 per-trip contribution margin.

The real insight is not the current per-trip number. It is the curve. At $150,000 all-in vehicle cost, contribution margin per trip rises to $10.86. At $100,000, it rises to $17.77. At $50,000, $24.67. The all-in AV capital cost is the variable that determines whether Waymo makes money, and it is falling. Hardware prices compound, utilization expands, mapping infrastructure amortizes across more trips. Each of those drivers pushes the per-trip cost down, and each dollar of cost reduction flows directly to contribution margin.

Scaled contribution margin is what allows an AV operator to stay price-competitive while funding expansion. Underprice, gain share, build utilization, reduce unit cost, underprice further. This is the strategy Uber executed during its rise, and it is the strategy available to any AV operator that can hold down vehicle cost while building trip volume.

These are back-of-envelope assumptions, and reasonable people can draw the lines differently. More conservative inputs would push per-trip vehicle costs up and reduce contribution margin. The directional conclusion is what matters: Waymo’s current pricing is a base to build on, not a ceiling to defend.

The LA economics we walk through here are, in structural terms, a sort of best-case version of the driverless math for an AV operator like Waymo. NYC is going to be a lot harder.

You might read the math above and conclude we are making Silicon Valley’s bull case for AVs. We are not. We are illustrating, through reasonable financial projections and analysis, what incumbents, journalists, and drivers will almost certainly misunderstand.

Many wrote obituaries for Uber in its early years, never fully grasping how much cash flow the company would eventually generate once it scaled. The same mistake is on offer with Waymo and the other AV operators. Understanding the current math is how you understand the path to profitability, and that path, once it arrives, is what accelerates adoption.

AVs Path to Profitability

Let’s be clear. AVs in LA are cheaper than Uber and Lyft today, at least on longer trips, because Waymo is subsidizing growth. How else does a company run at a net loss per trip and stay in business? But the subsidy thesis is not the whole story.

Two forces push margin into the model over time. Hardware costs are falling. Waymo’s next-generation sensor stack will likely be meaningfully cheaper than the Jaguar retrofits we rode in, which is precisely why older AVs will be rotated out faster.

The replacement vehicles carry better unit economics. At the same time, utilization is rising as AV fleets get larger, operating hours expand, deadhead time shrinks, and markets mature. Prices likely stay low or go lower, not because Waymo is losing money forever, but because the unit economics get better as the fleet scales and each generation of vehicle improves on the last.

Uber and Lyft are multi-billion-dollar companies in their own right, but this time they are up against some of the largest and most profitable companies in modern history, companies that can uniquely afford and invest in capital-intensive fleet buildouts to win share. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns Waymo. Amazon owns Zoox. Tesla is led by the richest person in the world.

Tesla’s approach, and those of other AV operators, may ultimately differ in kind, not just scale. Musk has described the Tesla Network as an Airbnb-like model for cars, in which privately owned Teslas are dispatched as robotaxis during idle hours, with the owner collecting a share of revenue and Tesla operating the platform.

If that vision materializes, the capital cost of the fleet shifts from the balance sheet onto individual owners and fleets, much as Uber and Lyft offloaded vehicle cost onto drivers and fleets more than a decade ago. Waymo, along with fleet partners such as Avis, currently bear the capital intensity of the fleet. If Tesla’s vision is successful as articulated, AV companies would shed the capital intensity of their businesses. That is a structurally different bet on how autonomous mobility scales, and on who carries the capital risk when it does.

The shape and structure of the market are not yet decided. Uber and Lyft may still have an important role to play as demand aggregators distributing trips across competing AV fleets. The pace of AV adoption, whether the technology is truly ready for dense and unpredictable urban environments, insurance frameworks, state and city policymaking, labor — each of these deserves its own treatment, and each is genuinely uncertain. We will continue to work through them in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

What many discussions have not yet come to terms with is the financial breakthrough underneath the technological one. The AV is not only a working self-driving car. It is a platform that captures the full passenger fare without splitting it with a driver, and that is what draws capital, scales deployment, and has the potential to push consumer prices down further, making it difficult for human-driven taxis and Ubers to compete.

One important caveat. AVs still need to prove definitively that they are safer than the average human driver, and we do not want to overstate what we are implying.

We are making a simple point: in the long run you cannot beat safer and cheaper. That was as true 100 years ago as it is today.

Taxi Medallions & TLC Plates

We took several driverless Waymo trips in Los Angeles. The technology is real. The financials, which are rarely discussed in the public conversation, are also real. Together, they make autonomous mobility something NYC TLC drivers, fleets, brokers, and lenders need to pay close attention to now, not after the first AV picks up a passenger in the five boroughs.

The measured pace New York has taken on AVs is worth defending. Safety, infrastructure readiness, and labor protections all deserve it. But the center of gravity will shift. At some point the question stops being “should we let AVs operate here” and becomes “on what terms, and with what share of the market going to whom.” That shift is when drivers, taxi medallion owners, small fleets, and the city itself either get compensated for the disruption or watch it happen around them.

The word “inevitable” gets used often in these conversations. In the hands of tech companies and their investors, it can read as combative, a way to produce a sense of hopelessness among drivers, fleets, and other stakeholders who stand to be “disrupted.”

We want to borrow the word back. What we believe is more inevitable than the technology itself is this: New York City will not allow a repeat of the medallion crisis or the mass labor disruption that followed the last wave of change in the for-hire industry. The city will establish licensing and regulations that make AV companies pay to access this market. And we believe it will do so through the regulatory regime already in place: taxi medallions and TLC plates.

The framework we have in mind is not a one-time buyout. It is continuous compensation to license holders, and continuous revenue to the city. Every AV trip would generate a franchise fee that flows to the medallion or plate under which the vehicle operates, turning the license into a long-term capital asset that can be held, borrowed against, or passed on.

Every AV trip would also generate public revenue, through transfer fees, annual renewals, and franchise assessments, that flows to the MTA and the city’s general fund at exactly the moment mass autonomous mobility threatens to pull riders out of mass transit. Drivers and the city benefit together, through the same mechanism, from the same market.

The calibration matters. The framework should be calibrated to generate meaningful revenue for license holders and the city without making AV operation uneconomic or materially raising passenger fares. It should work for riders, operators, license holders, and the city together. Part 2 will show how.

Part 2 walks through the mechanics. How NYC taxi medallions and TLC plates can be converted into a tradable capital asset that provides an ongoing income stream. What the fee structure looks like. How conversion is sequenced across license classes. What statutory guardrails protect individual license holders through the transition. How ownership caps prevent a few operators from rolling up the market. The framework does not fight the technology. It sets the rules under which the technology is permitted to operate.

The people who hold TLC vehicle licenses today are not obstacles to the autonomous future. They are its founding shareholders, alongside the city itself. The question is not whether to fight the technology. It is how much everyone gets paid when it arrives.

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AutoMarketplace reports on and invests in New York City’s for-hire transportation (TLC) industry and the wider automotive mobility landscape.

AutoMarketplace.com is a market intelligence and fleet management platform for New York City’s for-hire vehicle ecosystem—delivering proprietary indexes (AYX, APX, AIX), real-time analytics, and fleet services across taxi medallions, TLC plates, and commercial insurance.

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Yesterday, we wrote about the inevitability of autonomous vehicles (AVs) coming to New York and the importance of drivers, advocates, fleets, and other stakeholders not focusing on fighting the technology, but rather ensuring an AV licensing regime is established before chaos ensues.

In simple terms, if taxi medallions and TLC plates remain mandatory for AV operators, they cease to be merely the right to drive and become the right to access the market.

If labor income declines, licensing income can replace it without equivalent labor. Because market access would be scarce and regulated, those permits could command higher lease rates, stronger resale values, and durable cash flow.

Technological displacement does not eliminate income if ownership of market access is preserved.

We also made clear that AutoMarketplace’s house view is that AVs are unlikely to become ubiquitous for another five to ten years. Significant questions remain unresolved, including public safety, labor, taxation, economic impact, and insurance.

Transitioning from more than a century of human drivers to a future in which vehicles operate autonomously is a structural disruption of historic scale.

Uber was founded in 2009. Taxi medallions peaked at more than $1 million roughly four years later.

Markets often underestimate structural change until it is already embedded. Winning short-term battles can create the illusion that the larger war has ended.

Governor Will Not Advance AV Bill

Today, New York taxi and for-hire drivers won an important battle against driverless cars being allowed to enter New York State, and therefore New York City, without more defined rules and regulations.

Although Governor Kathy Hochul, who faces re-election this year, initially indicated her support for advancing AV regulations — specifically rules that would not require a safety driver across the state, excluding NYC — it appears the political support for such an initiative does not currently exist.

Both of New York’s most influential driver advocacy groups, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) and the Independent Drivers Guild (IDG), celebrated the news.

"Taxi drivers are again on the frontline of a seismic economic shift this time spearheaded by trillionaires. Putting the brakes on robotaxis picking up passengers for hire is the sensible decision by the Governor given the impact on working people, questions over jobs and lack of independent data and reporting. We need a moratorium with a comprehensive study." - Bhairavi Desai, Executive Director of NYTWA (press release)

“We thank the Governor for pulling autonomous vehicle legislation from the budget and for listening to workers and communities across New York. This is an important step for jobs and public safety. We urge the Legislature and the Governor to now pass legislation requiring a human driver in every vehicle and a comprehensive study of the impact driverless cars would have on New York State — from job losses and safety threats, to strain on social safety net programs and the local economy. New York must put people first.” - Brendan Sexton, President of IDG (public statement)

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Battle Won, War Only Beginning

To be clear, we support Governor Hochul’s decision to pause AV regulations this year. We applaud the advocacy of NYTWA, IDG, and others in ensuring that New York for-hire drivers and the public are not subjected to a chaotic rollout that fails to account for impacts on livelihoods, families, and public safety.

AV deployment in New York should not occur on an experimental basis. Studies must be conducted. A clear regulatory and licensing framework must be established before widespread entry, not after harm has occurred. The medallion debt crisis and the driver suicides that followed remain stark reminders of the cost of unmanaged disruption.

That said, the greater long-term danger is not the technology itself, but misdirected opposition to it. A delay can feel like victory. It may instead reduce the time available to shape the rules of what comes next.

History offers a useful parallel. In 1902, when automobiles were still a novelty, public resistance was fierce. As The New York Times later recounted:

‘“In 1902, when 8,000 cars were made in the United States, the storm of disapproval was terrific. By the public the automobile was looked upon as “a rich man’s toy” and as “the horse’s natural enemy.” Motorists were “dangerous citizens” and “unmitigated cranks”; anti-automobile legislation poured out of the State capitols, and politicians marched to victory and office under the brave banner, “Down With Road Hogs!”

…

Thus encouraged by the farsighted few, the automobile at last came into its kingdom, despite the seemingly overwhelming “consensus of opinion” that declared against it. “A consensus,” said Mark Twain, “examines a new thing with its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. While a consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship did it.”’

— The New York Times, by L.H. Robbins, Old Cry “Get A Horse” Echoed In the Sky, published December 23, 1928.

Roughly 40,000 people die each year in traffic accidents in the United States. That figure does not include the countless serious physical and psychological injuries that follow. The baseline level of harm on American roads, including in New York City, is already extraordinarily high.

Recent incidents involving a Waymo AV killing a neighborhood cat and striking a child in Southern California are rightly cited by skeptics as cause for concern. These events deserve scrutiny. But the relevant question is not whether autonomous vehicles will make mistakes. It is whether they will ultimately make fewer of them than human drivers.

For example, in the case of the child who was struck and injured, even observers noted that a human driver in the same situation might not have stopped as quickly. Drivers, advocates, and fleets must recognize that there may come a time when autonomous systems are demonstrably safer than the average person behind the wheel.

When that threshold is crossed, public opinion will shift. Parents, pedestrians, and bicyclists will increasingly view the issue through a public safety lens. Vision Zero goals and broader safety concerns will become a central driver of AV adoption in New York.

For that reason, the policy debate should not center on indefinite delay. It should focus on ensuring that current NYC TLC drivers share in the economic value of whatever licensed system ultimately replaces them.

The technology will come. The only real question is whether New York licenses it — or lets it license itself.

“If it was a regular car, [with a] regular person, they might not have been able to stop as quickly as the Waymo.”

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AutoMarketplace reports on and invests in New York City’s for-hire transportation (TLC) industry and the wider automotive mobility landscape.

AutoMarketplace.com is a data intelligence and market infrastructure platform for New York City’s for-hire vehicle ecosystem—delivering proprietary indexes (AYX, APX, AIX), real-time analytics, and marketing services across taxi medallions, TLC plates, and commercial insurance.

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Disclosure: AutoMarketplace and its affiliates, including entities that may share common ownership or shareholders, may have financial interests in companies, assets, or markets discussed in our coverage. Such interests may include direct or indirect investments, advisory relationships, or other economic exposure.

All analysis and commentary are provided for informational purposes only and reflect independent editorial judgment.

After presenting in Vienna on the future of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in New York, we spent ten days in South Florida before returning to Manhattan. The shift was striking. We went from discussing AVs in a conference room to watching them operate in real life.

At Miami International Airport, as we waited for our human-driven Uber, a Waymo-branded Jaguar that appeared to have no driver in the front seat rolled past the airport terminal’s curb.

Last year there were none. This year there was one. Next year there may be ten.

We make a South Florida trip annually, which made the contrast unmistakable.

That is how these transitions typically unfold.

Across Miami, including suburban corridors north of the city, we observed Waymo AVs operating without safety drivers, delivery robots navigating sidewalks, and test vehicles looping through retail centers. The message was unmistakable.

This is not a question of if.

It is a question of when.

And in New York City, more than anywhere else, it is a question of who controls the licenses when they arrive — from issuance to ownership.

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AVs Are Coming to NYC

New York is not Miami, San Francisco, Phoenix or Austin.

It is dense, political, has unique labor dynamics, and is tightly regulated. The City will not allow unchecked AV deployment. Congestion cannot be infinite. Labor politics are real with hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs on the line. Mass transit funding is fragile. Vision Zero is non-negotiable.

But the direction of travel is clear.

Governor Kathy Hochul has already signaled intent to allow driverless AVs at the state DMV level, a key step before AVs can consider entering NYC without safety drivers. Google-owned Waymo, which just raised $16 billion, and others are clearly positioning to launch a paid AV service in New York City, one of the world’s most prestigious and lucrative for-hire transportation markets.

The technology will continue to advance whether New York embraces it or not.

Fighting the technology itself is wasted energy.

Fighting for the licensing regime is not.

Intro 94: A Good Start, But Not Complete

City Council’s Intro 94, a successor to Intro 1457, and sponsored by City Council Members Gale Brewer and Farah Louis, attempts to:

• Prevent AVs from entering New York through side regulatory paths.

• Create an official AV licensing regime, including insurance, vehicle, safety, and reporting standards, overseen by the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC).

• Ensure owners of the City’s 13,587 taxi medallions are grandfathered into any new AV licensing regime.

Conceptually, we support the direction of Intro 94. As we stated, autonomous vehicles in New York are fundamentally a licensing issue, not a technology problem. If an AV service is offering paid passenger trips, current rules indicate that service (i.e., Waymo) must have an NYC DOT permit and NYC TLC license.

By ensuring this, the City can create, amongst other things:

• Entry caps that prevent tens of thousands of vehicles from flooding City streets, causing congestion, oversaturating the market, and ultimately reducing driver earnings.

• Insurance and accessibility standards.

• Data reporting requirements.

That is smart policymaking.

However, the bill’s language uses the term “taxi”, not “for-hire vehicle.” That distinction is not semantic. It is structural.

Under NYC’s Administrative Code and TLC rules, a taxi is a “medallion taxicab”. A for-hire vehicle (FHV or TLC-plated vehicle) is explicitly defined as not a taxi

If AV eligibility attaches only to “taxis,” then taxi medallion owners receive the economic upside, while more than 104,000 TLC plates and the majority of today’s Uber and Lyft–focused NYC drivers are excluded, or left in a regulatory gray area.

Roughly 70% of TLC plates are individually claimed. That means tens of thousands of working drivers could be cut out of any future AV licensing value. Clearly, this is not a small oversight.

We Warned About This Fight

We previously warned that defining AV licensing through the term “taxi” could effectively rewrite the meaning of market access in New York.

We also warned that a fight between medallion owners and TLC plate holders creates the perfect opening for Waymo, Tesla, or another operator to lobby for a completely new AV licensing framework that bypasses both sectors.

If taxi and FHV stakeholders fracture, Big Tech does not need to win the political argument. It simply needs to exploit the division.

That would be an unnecessary and avoidable outcome. In this regard, we believe Intro 94 language can still advantage taxi medallion owners, given the cost of entry, but not completely exclude the license class (FHV or TLC plates) that represents the greatest number of individual NYC for-hire drivers.

Tesla FSD

If AVs ultimately prove materially safer, public safety will drive calls for driverless technology to be adopted. That is politically difficult to resist.

At the same time, liability and insurance questions remain unresolved. Our coverage of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system in the TLC fleet highlights how regulatory blind spots can create real financial and legal risk. For example, a driver operating a TLC-plated vehicle equipped with Tesla’s FSD software should be prohibited from using that system for paid trips until clear rules exist governing situations in which a licensed driver is overseeing a self-driving system.

Managed deployment through existing licensing channels reduces that risk.

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The Strategic Choice

More than 170,000 TLC-licensed drivers and thousands of small businesses depend on the current TLC ecosystem. AVs will not arrive in an abstract tech market. They will arrive in a real labor market.

Stakeholders have two strategic options:

1. Fight the technology and lose influence.

2. Fight for licensing rights and shape the transition.

Licensing determines who captures value.

If taxi medallions and TLC plates become embedded in New York City’s AV infrastructure, the upside could partially, perhaps even fully, offset income and job displacement. If AV operators establish a parallel licensing system, almost everyone in today’s industry loses leverage.

Intro 94 is directionally correct because it forces the debate into the TLC framework.

But unless the definition of eligibility expands beyond “taxi,” it risks triggering a destructive intra-industry conflict that weakens the entire sector.

Final Thoughts

Robotaxis are coming.

New York will not be first. It will not be last.

The real question is not whether AVs arrive. It is whether today’s drivers, fleets, advocates, and other stakeholders are positioned to share in the value when they do.

If the industry fights each other, it hands the leverage to Silicon Valley.

If it fights for inclusive licensing, it shapes the outcome.

That choice is still available.

For now.

AutoMarketplace Presentation, Taxi 40100 MEET-THE-CAB Conference, Vienna, Austria (February 2026)

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AutoMarketplace reports on and invests in New York City’s for-hire transportation (TLC) industry and the wider automotive mobility landscape.

AutoMarketplace.com is a data intelligence and market infrastructure platform for New York City’s for-hire vehicle ecosystem—delivering proprietary indexes (AYX, APX, AIX), real-time analytics, and marketing services across taxi medallions, TLC plates, and commercial insurance.

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NYC for-hire driver advocates at the Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) have gathered nearly 20,000 signatures for a petition entitled ‘Stop Driverless Cars from Taking Over NYC Streets.’

IDG’s petition, addressed to New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the New York State DMV, and the NYC Department of Transportation (NYC DOT), has two core demands:

• A full ban on autonomous vehicle testing on New York City streets.

• A ban on autonomous vehicles being allowed to operate commercially anywhere in New York State.

With Governor Hochul’s recent announcement that she will propose legislation allowing autonomous vehicles (AVs) to operate in New York State, outside of NYC, the trajectory is clearly moving away from IDG’s demands and those of similar advocates. This shift is already evident at the state level and, in our view, will eventually extend to the City as well.

“Autonomous vehicle technology is advancing quickly, and New York has an opportunity to act to ensure its safe and responsible use on our roads. To that end, Governor Hochul will introduce legislation to advance the next phase of New York State’s autonomous vehicle (AV) pilot program by allowing for the limited deployment of commercial for-hire autonomous passenger vehicles outside New York City. AV companies interested in piloting services that expand and improve mobility options for communities will be required to submit applications that demonstrate local support for AV deployment and adherence to the highest possible safety standards.

This initiative builds on years of successful testing demonstrations across the state and reflects growing evidence that autonomous vehicles can improve road safety and transportation options when introduced thoughtfully. By pairing innovation with strong oversight and planning by State agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Department of Transportation (DOT), and New York State Police (NYSP), New York will help shape the future of transportation while keeping public safety front and center.”

— Governor Kathy Hochul, 2026 State of the State (January 13, 2026)

It is important to be candid with driver advocates, drivers, and other TLC stakeholders about where advocacy is most likely to produce results. Efforts focused on outcomes drivers can realistically win will matter far more than attempts to stop a technological shift that is already underway.

At some point, whether in two years or fifteen, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be demonstrably safer than human drivers. When that happens, consumer demand will follow, and the role of human drivers in for-hire transportation, and in life generally, will change permanently. That does not mean today’s TLC drivers will suddenly be unemployed, nor that they should not fight back. It does mean that drivers who plan ahead, organize effectively, and advocate strategically can position themselves to transition into new work and share in the economic value created by the shift to AVs.

It would be irresponsible not to state plainly that AVs appear to represent an inevitable paradigm shift for reasons that go beyond the technology simply existing.

“This transformation will happen. We can guide it toward a safer, more equitable future or let it unfold haphazardly around us. There’s a future in which manual driving becomes uncommon, perhaps even quaint, the way riding horses is today. It’s a future where we no longer accept thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of broken spines as the price of mobility. It’s time to stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention.” — The New York Times. ‘The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course’. By Dr. Jonathan Slotkin. December 2, 2025.

Autonomous vehicles are often framed as a story about technology, robots, or artificial intelligence replacing human labor. As Dr. Jonathan Slotkin recently argued in a New York Times op-ed, another meaningful issue AVs address is public safety. When viewed through that lens, it becomes clear why the adoption of AVs is unlikely to be stopped. Preventing deaths and life-altering injuries will outweigh preserving specific job categories, particularly when displaced workers can be included in the economic transition.

The critical question is no longer whether AVs will arrive in New York City, but how the City manages their introduction and who benefits from it. For TLC drivers, fleets, and other operators in the city’s for-hire transportation market, the priority should increasingly be ensuring that any future AV licensing framework is subject to the pre-existing TLC licensing regime. This is the most important fight ahead, and the one most likely to deliver durable benefits for drivers and fleets.

It is also worth remembering that approximately 70% of all TLC plates are held by individual drivers.

First Principles: Fight for NYC AV Licenses

Let’s peel back the proverbial onion to its core and think from “first principles”, a term Tesla CEO Elon Musk often uses (Note: Musk just launched a driverless taxi service in Austin).

First-principles logic works up from basic truths rather than relying on assumptions. Musk often cites the example of electric vehicle (EV) batteries to explain why many people misjudged the feasibility of mass EV adoption. While opinions about Musk are varied and strongly held, when judged solely on technical and engineering achievements, few can argue against his intellect.

“Someone could say…battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they’ll always be, because that’s the way they’ve been in the past…if you apply that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t [ever be] able to get to that new thing.”

So, how is this relevant to our discussion on autonomous vehicles in NYC?

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One thing we know almost for certain is that New York City will not allow an unlimited number of autonomous vehicles on its streets. From first principles, New York City is one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, and it requires unique policy choices to ensure that people and goods can move efficiently. If that is true, then driverless vehicles, particularly those conducting paid or for-hire trips, will inevitably be subject to strict regulation, licensing, and numerical limits.

This is the angle that TLC drivers, advocates, and other stakeholders must focus on.

The priority should be ensuring that any regulatory structure governing autonomous vehicles requires them to operate within the existing Taxi & Limousine Commission licensing regime, including taxi medallions and TLC plates, in order to conduct paid for-hire trips in the five boroughs. AV operators, such as Waymo or Tesla, will naturally prefer a new licensing framework, or no framework at all, to minimize the cost of market entry. This would closely mirror the early strategy used by ride-hailing platforms in New York City before the for-hire vehicle (FHV) license pause, often known as the TLC Plate Cap, was enacted in 2018.

Establishing the rules upfront is critical. Policymakers, including the City Council, understand the consequences of allowing regulation to lag behind deployment. An early and clearly defined AV framework is essential not only for protecting taxi medallion values, but more importantly for ensuring that displaced drivers can share in the economic upside by holding licenses that AV operators must acquire to operate in NYC.

This is where advocacy should be focused now: securing driver futures by ensuring that anyone who replaces them must pay for the right to do so.

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AutoMarketplace reports on and invests in New York City’s for-hire transportation (TLC) industry and the wider automotive mobility landscape.

AutoMarketplace.com is a data intelligence and market infrastructure platform for New York City’s for-hire vehicle ecosystem—delivering proprietary indexes (AYX, APX, AIX), real-time analytics, and marketing services across taxi medallions, TLC plates, and commercial insurance.

Check out AutoMarketplace on YouTube. Interested in advertising with us? Click here.

We wanted to make a quick note this morning as a follow up to yesterday’s article.

Upon further investigation, after several readers reached out to us, the NYC Council’s autonomous vehicle (AV) licensing bill specifically uses the term “taxi”.

We wrote:

“NYC Council Members Justin Brannan, Gale Brewer, and Frank Morano have introduced Intro 1457, a proposal relating to the licensing and use of autonomous vehicles, or AVs, as for-hire vehicles (“taxis ” or “FHVs”)”

Per Section (Title) 19 of the Administrative Code of the City of New York, Chapter 5: Transportation of Passengers for Hire by Motor Vehicle (§ 19-502 Definitions) a “taxi”, “medallion”, and “for-hire vehicle” are technically defined as follows:

• “Taxi”, “taxicab” or “cab” means motor vehicle carrying passengers for hire in the city, designed to carry a maximum of five passengers, duly licensed as a taxi cab by the commission and permitted to accept hails f…

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“This bill would require the [NYC] Taxi and Limousine Commission to make rules regulating the use of autonomous vehicles as taxis, particularly with respect to licensing, safety, vehicle standards, reporting of trip and fare information, and insurance.”

— New York City Council summary of Int. 1457-2025 (Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure)

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CNBC, along with several other media outlets, has confirmed an earlier InsideEVs report that Tesla appears to be ramping up efforts to launch a robotaxi service in New York City. However, unlike Waymo, Tesla has yet to apply for the required permits from the New York State DMV and NYC Department of Transportation (DOT).

Tesla is looking to hire “Prototype Vehicle Operators” to support its robotaxi and autonomous driving (AV) ambitions in NYC. The position, based in Flushing (Queens), offers up to $30.60 per hour (“+ cash and stock awards + benefits”).

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“If I were to own a Tesla, can I use the self driving feature for TLC work?”

- Recent post from NYC TLC driver Facebook group

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“When Uber and Lyft first came to the city, there were no laws in place to stop them from flooding the streets…We didn’t see them coming back then and I think today, we’re still paying the price. This is a way for us to get in front of it…If Uber and Lyft want to go AV, then they need to work with existing medallions…That would prevent them from creating another bubble and steamrolling us” - NYC Council Member Justin Brannan

It isn’t clear if the plan would also give a priority on self-driving licenses to FHV license owners.

Link to article

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