Uber has a plan for its millions of drivers, and you're probably not going to like it: the company wants to outfit your car with sensors to collect real-world data for autonomous vehicle companies and AI model developers. Yes, you read that right—your car becomes a data-harvesting machine for the same self-driving tech that will eventually replace you.
Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's chief technology officer, revealed the plan at a TechCrunch event in San Francisco last week. "That is the direction we want to go eventually," Naga said, describing how Uber's nascent AV Labs program—currently a small fleet of dedicated sensor-equipped cars—could expand to millions of human drivers' vehicles.
The pitch is straightforward: autonomous vehicle companies need massive amounts of real-world driving data to train their models, but collecting it is expensive. According to Uber's CTO, "The bottleneck is data. Companies need to go around and collect the data, collect different scenarios." With millions of drivers globally, Uber could offer AV firms access to diverse scenarios at unprecedented scale.
But here are the questions Uber isn't answering yet: Who owns that data? Will drivers get paid for it? Can they opt out? And perhaps most importantly: why would any driver help build the technology designed to eliminate their job?
Naga acknowledged regulatory hurdles—states need to clarify what sensors mean and what data-sharing entails before this can happen at scale. But the fact that Uber is publicly floating this idea tells you everything about where they see the future heading. Drivers aren't partners; they're temporary infrastructure.
Uber already operates what it calls an "AV cloud"—a labeled sensor data library that its 25 autonomous vehicle partners can query for model training. The system lets partners test trained models in "shadow mode" against real Uber trips, simulating how their self-driving systems would perform without actually controlling the vehicle.
