Uber executive Andrew Macdonald says personal car ownership will fade in favor of shared and automated mobility

Uber is pressing a familiar mobility message, but with a stronger break from the car-ownership model. In comments carried by Yahoo Finance, Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s president and chief operating officer, characterized private car ownership as “the most inefficient asset,” arguing that people will increasingly rely on alternatives for everyday travel.

Macdonald’s forecast points to a world where the need for personal vehicles declines sharply. He said that within roughly 15 to 20 years, most people would get around using bike networks, scooter services, public transit, or autonomous vehicles rather than owning cars.

The remarks build on Uber’s core business model, which links riders to drivers and, increasingly, to app-based mobility services designed for point-to-point trips. If the driver’s license era is giving way to app-mediated movement, the appeal of owning a vehicle diminishes, especially in dense areas where parking, insurance, and maintenance can outweigh the benefits of occasional use.

In that framing, vehicle ownership becomes harder to justify economically and operationally. Cars sit idle most of the day for many owners, while mobility platforms aim to keep vehicles in motion by matching demand to available capacity. The executive’s “inefficient asset” characterization is essentially a cost-and-utilization argument: cars are expensive assets that do not produce value while parked.

The discussion also lands in a wider policy and technology debate about how people will travel as automation advances. Autonomous vehicles, in particular, could reduce the labor and credential barriers that shape how mobility markets function, potentially making trip-by-trip access feel more like a utility than a consumer purchase.

Still, the company did not provide specifics in the reported comments about timing by region, adoption rates, or what share of trips Uber expects to handle directly versus what governments or other operators would manage. It also did not outline milestones for autonomous systems or for scaling scooter and bike usage to replace vehicle ownership at the pace implied by the 15 to 20 year horizon.

Uber’s business challenge, in practice, is that shifting from car ownership to app-based mobility requires sustained capacity, safety, and affordability, along with regulatory alignment. Even if the direction of travel is clear, execution depends on local infrastructure and rules, not just product vision.

What to watch next is whether Uber, in future updates, translates Macdonald’s broad prediction into measurable commitments, such as service targets in specific cities, partnerships that broaden transit integration, or progress indicates around automated driving offerings and the conditions required for them to operate at scale.