Here's a business strategy so audacious it almost demands respect: if you can't beat the robots, legislate them into depending on you.

That, in essence, is what Uber appears to be doing. According to documents reviewed by WIRED—including one obtained via public records request—Uber's lobbyists have been quietly shopping legislative language to state lawmakers that would entrench the company's position as the indispensable middleware layer between riders and whoever (or whatever) is driving the car.

From Existential Threat to Revenue Stream

Rewind a decade. Travis Kalanick, in one of his more lucid moments, openly worried that autonomous vehicles would make Uber irrelevant. His nightmare scenario: a world of cheap robotaxis owned by tech companies with no need for a ride-hail platform to sit in between. He was right to be worried.

The company's answer, under current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, has been to flip the script. Rather than build its own self-driving stack—a notoriously expensive, technically brutal endeavor that burned Uber's original AV unit to the ground before it was sold to Aurora—the company repositioned itself as the agnostic commercial platform for whoever does crack full autonomy. Khosrowshahi told investors in 2024 that Uber wants to be "the go-to commercial platform" for all AV players globally. The company has since signed agreements with more than 25 robotaxi operators, with vehicles from Waymo, Nuro, Baidu, and Volkswagen's MOIA either live or incoming on the Uber app in select cities.

It's a smart pivot. But the lobbying strategy layered on top of it is where things get interesting—and more than a little self-serving.

The 85 Percent Rule Nobody Asked For

In New Jersey, a lobbyist representing Uber circulated draft legislative language that would, for a three-year window, require any platform offering driverless ride-hailing to ensure that human drivers handle at least 85 percent of trips. Read that again slowly.

On its face, this sounds like worker protection. And Uber will absolutely frame it that way. But follow the incentive structure: a mandate like this would effectively make it illegal for a pure-play robotaxi company—think Waymo, Zoox, or Tesla—to launch its own standalone ride-hail app in New Jersey. If you can only serve 15 percent of your rides autonomously, you need a human-driver fleet to fill the gap. And who has the largest human-driver fleet in the country? Right.

The proposed language was pitched to New Jersey state senator Andrew Zwicker, who is sponsoring a bill that would establish the state's first formal rules for self-driving cars on public roads. As of now, the 85 percent restriction is not part of that bill, which could come to a vote this fall. But the fact that it was floated at all tells you everything about Uber's theory of the game.

Worth noting: the New Jersey bill as currently written already has teeth that would specifically hamper Tesla's robotaxi ambitions—it requires AV systems to use multiple sensor modalities rather than cameras alone (a direct shot at Tesla's vision-only approach), and mandates that vehicles have steering wheels and brake pedals for emergency operation, which rules out purpose-built robotaxis like Zoox that were never designed around human takeover.

Washington, DC: The "Hybrid Networks" Soft Sell

New Jersey isn't the only front. In Washington, DC—where Waymo has been locked in a months-long regulatory standoff to get robotaxi service approved—Uber's representatives have been working a slightly softer angle. A DC council bill introduced by member Charles Allen in April would permit driverless services under defined conditions. In an email obtained through a public records request, Uber lobbyist LáVita Gardner thanked an Allen staffer for committing to let ride-hail companies participate in the district's AV program, writing that "allowing for hybrid networks will be critical for a smooth transition that supports both technology and human drivers."

"Hybrid networks" is the phrase Uber keeps returning to—the policy idea that human drivers and autonomous vehicles should coexist on the same platform as the technology scales. It sounds reasonable. It also happens to be a framework that keeps Uber structurally essential for years.

Uber's Defense: Everyone Else Is Worse

To be fair to Uber, the company's spokesperson Noah Edwardsen offered a rebuttal worth taking seriously. The AV industry's own policy proposals, he argued, have been "largely unworkable" because they've ignored driver concerns and, in some cases, "tried to cynically lock out competitors and create monopolies." He pointed to failed AV legislation in Maryland and New York as evidence that the industry needs to do better at building coalition support.

That's not entirely wrong. Waymo and others have sometimes pushed legislation drafted with the assumption that regulators will simply get out of the way, which tends to go poorly in states with strong labor constituencies. And there are genuine worker protection issues worth legislating around autonomous vehicle deployment.

But there's a meaningful difference between advocating for worker protections and designing market-entry rules that happen to eliminate your most dangerous competitors. Uber is doing both simultaneously, and conflating them is convenient.

The Real Stakes

If Uber succeeds in getting "hybrid network" mandates written into law across multiple states, it doesn't just protect driver jobs in the short term—it locks in a business model where Uber remains the toll road between AV developers and passengers for years. That's not inherently evil, but it's worth being clear-eyed about what's being optimized for here.

The AV developers, meanwhile, are playing the long game. Waymo's unit economics only start to look compelling at scale and without revenue-sharing arrangements eating into margins. Every legislative friction point that delays pure-play robotaxi apps is, from their perspective, value being transferred to platforms like Uber.

Kalanick was right: autonomy is existential for the ride-hail business model. Khosrowshahi's bet is that Uber can survive by becoming the ecosystem rather than a participant in it. The lobbying strategy is the hedge. And for now, it's working exactly as designed.