Elon Musk and top executives at Uber are converging on a bold prediction: within the next 15 to 20 years, private car ownership could become largely obsolete, replaced by a mix of autonomous vehicles, shared mobility options, and public transit. The vision marks a significant alignment between two of the world's most influential transportation and technology leaders, even as their business models differ in important ways.

Why Are Major Tech Leaders Predicting the End of Car Ownership?

Uber President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald laid out the case bluntly during a recent podcast appearance, describing the personal automobile as "the most inefficient asset that anyone owns." He noted that a typical vehicle sits idle roughly 98 percent of the day while continuing to depreciate and generate ongoing insurance costs even when parked in a driveway. With new vehicle prices climbing roughly 30 percent over the past six years, the average transaction price now hovers near $50,000, making ownership increasingly economically irrational for many 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. Nobody's going to have their driver's license because you'll be able to get around," said Andrew Macdonald, Uber President and Chief Operating Officer.

Andrew Macdonald, President and Chief Operating Officer at Uber

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has offered a similarly ambitious timeline. Speaking on a podcast earlier this year, he described a future increasingly dominated by robot-driven rides, suggesting that "the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind" could happen within 15 to 20 years. Khosrowshahi has separately detailed how he expects vehicle ownership structures to shift during that transition, with large institutional investors rather than individual drivers owning autonomous vehicle fleets, comparing the model to how firms such as Blackstone currently manage other large asset portfolios.

How Does Musk's Vision Align With the Broader Autonomous Vehicle Shift?

Musk has voiced comparable predictions about the long-term trajectory of autonomous driving technology for several years. Speaking during a Tesla earnings call, he predicted that "all cars will go fully autonomous in the long-term," expecting it would eventually become "quite unusual to see cars that don't have full autonomy" within a similar 15-to-20-year window, with Tesla vehicles reaching that milestone even sooner than the broader industry. This convergence of predictions from Uber's leadership and Musk reflects a broader alignment among major technology executives around the eventual dominance of autonomous vehicle technology.

Musk has also offered a broader vision of how automation and artificial intelligence could reshape the economics of daily life more generally, extending well beyond transportation. Speaking earlier this year at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, he suggested that traditional employment could eventually become optional for most people as AI-driven productivity gains generate unprecedented material abundance.

What Practical Steps Are Companies Taking Toward This Future?

• Tesla's Robotaxi Expansion: Tesla has begun charging passengers for Cybercab rides in Austin, putting a purpose-built robotaxi on public roads and scaling a driverless fleet that generates fresh operating data every week.
• Uber's Multi-Partner Strategy: Uber is reportedly working with roughly 20 different autonomous vehicle partners and aims to operate driverless vehicles across 15 cities by the end of the year, with a goal to facilitate more autonomous and robotaxi rides than any other company by 2029.
• Workforce Transition Programs: Both Uber and rival Lyft are taking incremental steps toward their longer-term vision by compensating some human drivers to help train the artificial intelligence systems expected to eventually power autonomous fleets, and paying some former drivers to maintain and clean self-driving vehicles.

Khosrowshahi has acknowledged, however, that the transition raises difficult unresolved questions. "I think 10-15 years from now this is going to be a real issue and I don't have a neat answer for it," he said regarding the broader disruption autonomous vehicles could bring to the ride-hailing workforce. At the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C., Khosrowshahi framed the eventual dominance of autonomous vehicles as effectively inevitable given the safety case for removing human error from driving, identifying California and Texas as currently the most open regulatory markets for expanding autonomous ride-hailing services.

Despite the confident long-term predictions from Uber's leadership and Musk alike, both companies have acknowledged that significant technical, regulatory, and workforce-related challenges remain before autonomous vehicles can realistically displace private car ownership and human-driven ride-hailing at the scale envisioned. Whether the 15-to-20-year timeline ultimately proves accurate remains to be seen, though the shared conviction among leaders at two of the industry's most influential companies suggests the broader shift toward autonomous, shared mobility is likely to remain a defining storyline across the transportation and technology sectors in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, Tesla's stock remains positioned for growth tied to these long-term bets. At a price-to-earnings ratio north of 320, Tesla shares are priced for its future in autonomy, robotaxis, energy, and robotics rather than today's car sales, with the calendar offering multiple potential sentiment drivers in the weeks ahead, including xAI's Grok 4.7 launch targeted for September 12 and SpaceX's Starship orbital flight attempt in mid-September.