Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew MacDonald says the personal automobile's days may be numbered—not because Washington bans it, but because the math no longer works for consumers.
"In some future world, maybe not five years, but 15 or 20 years, everyone's going to be like Harry—nobody's going to own a car," MacDonald said on the 20VC podcast, hosted by entrepreneur Harry Stebbings. "Nobody's going to have their driver's license." He predicts bikes, scooters, public transit and autonomous vehicles will fill the gap.
The case, MacDonald argues, is economic. New vehicle prices have climbed 30% over the last six years, even as the car itself sits mostly unused. "The individually owned car is the most inefficient asset that anyone owns, and certainly at any level of price point," he said. "It sits idle 98% of the day. It's depreciating. The ongoing operating costs are actually high—even if you're not driving it, you're paying for that insurance clip."
Uber has positioned itself to capture that shift. The company scrapped its own self-driving fleet years ago but now runs a platform strategy, partnering with autonomous-vehicle developers Waymo and Waabi to bring their cars onto its network.
MacDonald, a Canadian who graduated from Ivey Business School in 2007 and started at Bain before joining Uber in 2012, is now the company's longest-tenured employee. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who joined in 2017, described him to Stebbings as "an execution machine" who is "very good at driving people." MacDonald credits his own success to two principles: making decisions based on what's best for the company, and mastering the business itself—he says he now knows ride-hailing "better than anyone in the world."
He is not alone in the prediction. Khosrowshahi has said he expects "the majority of our trips" to eventually be fulfilled by autonomous vehicles, likely within a similar 15-to-20-year window. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk has gone further, arguing that AI-driven productivity could eventually make even retirement savings unnecessary, telling the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum earlier this year that "work will be optional" the way growing your own vegetables is optional today.
What MacDonald describes is not a mandate but a market response. Rising sticker prices, insurance costs and depreciation are pushing consumers toward alternatives, and capital—Uber's partnerships with Waymo and Waabi chief among them—is following that demand rather than waiting for a subsidy or a regulator's permission slip.
That distinction matters. Progressive planners in cities from San Francisco to New York have spent years trying to engineer Americans out of their cars through fees, restrictions and mandates. MacDonald's version of a car-free future runs on a different engine: price signals, competition and technology that simply outperforms the alternative on cost. If the driver's license fades away, it will be because consumers found something cheaper and better, not because government told them to give up the keys. That is the difference between central planning and free enterprise doing what it does best.
