What Happened to Uber’s Vision of an End to Car Ownership? A Report Has Answers

Uber once touted itself as an alternative to car ownership. Data, however, show that over a decade into the ride-hailing revolution, car ownership is here to stay—even in places where Lyft, Uber, and Waymo run rampant.

In 2023 Uber had a profitable year—its first since it went public and started having to disclose its financials. So it’s worth traveling back to the early days of ride-hailing, to revisit the beautiful future proposed by at-the-time CEO Travis Kalanick. In the days when Uber had just blown up, he described his “vision†to the Wall Street Journal like this:

So what is that vision?… It’s a reflection of our mission to turn ground transportation into a seamless service. Basically make car ownership a thing of the past…If you just looked at San Francisco, the ground transportation market in just San Francisco — where people pay to get in a car and go somewhere, whether they own the car or otherwise — is $22 billion. No wonder we’re several hundred million in size just in SF, and growing faster this year than last year.

Uber is now a load-bearing pillar of the tech economy, and ride-hailing is now a regular feature of life, so it seems like a good time to check in on Kalanick’s vision. He seemed to be arguing that his app’s success in San Francisco in 2011 was an indication of a transition away from personal car ownership already in progress. Did his dream come true?

A brief report published Wednesday, compiled from census data, says, basically: LOL.

The data on car ownership show that not only hasn’t transportation become as simple as tapping your phone, being whisked away, and never having to worry about tire rotation again, but the trends look like they’re going a little in the opposite direction. In dense areas served by ride-hailing services, car ownership is basically flat since the birth of Uber, or even inching slightly up.

The report is from retired automotive researcher Glenn Mercer, who writes a newsletter called “Car Charts,†which is about car charts.

Looking at the crude totals without controlling for other factors, Mercer found that nationally, there were 800 cars per 1,000 Americans in 2000, and about 850 per 1,000 Americans now—lots more cars, as anyone would probably guess.

But instead of leaving it there, he looked closely at major metropolitan areas, focusing on the census metrics that reveal the number of “vehicles available to the members of the household†where ride-hailing services are popular. Mercer focuses on certain representative years from 2005-2024—before Uber, during Uber’s rise, and the most recent year with data.

During that time, these were the changes in the chart’s raw metric, with a one-point increase or decrease basically corresponding to, “one one-hundredth of a car per householdâ€:

• Boston: +4 points
• Chicago: -1 point
• San Francisco: no change
• Los Angeles: +7 points
• New York: -1 point
• Dallas: +10 points

In other words, no significant change anywhere, although the one tenth of a car increase in Dallas is somewhat eyebrow-raising.

Mercer’s analysis is that, he doesn’t “see any real impact on cars per household. Even in the Bay area, the ancestral home of All Things App, no movement.â€

With that in mind, did you know the cost of the average new car in the US is now over $50,000? A 2023 report by Brookings argues that young people own fewer cars than members of older generations simply because they don’t have enough money to buy cars. A Deloitte report from earlier this year found that 44% of adults 34 and under would be willing to get rid of their cars in favor of a valid alternative.

So it seems like there was nothing wrong with Kalanick’s “vision.†It would be great. It’s just too bad ride-hailing services haven’t turned out to be the path to making it a reality. Not yet, anyway.

Gizmodo reached out to Uber for comment, and will update if we hear back.