Will robotaxis kill blue-collar jobs? Right now, in 2026, the honest answer is: not the way most people think. Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told Fortune that the company still needs humans — not behind the wheel, but under the hood, on the floor, and watching the data. Fleet operators. Fleet technicians. People who rotate tires, calibrate sensors, and keep 3,000 autonomous vehicles from becoming 3,000 very expensive paperweights. That’s the argument Waymo is making. Whether you believe it depends on how much trust you’re willing to extend to a company whose entire business model is built on making human drivers optional.
- Waymo currently operates approximately 3,000 autonomous vehicles across select U.S. cities.
- Boston Consulting Group projects the global robotaxi fleet could reach between 700,000 and 3 million vehicles by 2035.
- BCG estimates U.S. consumer acceptance of autonomous taxis could climb to roughly 60% by 2030.
- New York City’s Department of Transportation declined to renew Waymo’s testing permits after they expired at the end of March 2026.
- Waymo originated as Google’s self-driving car project in 2009 before becoming a standalone Alphabet company in 2016.
The Jobs Aren’t Gone. They’re Just Different.
Mawakana’s core claim is straightforward: autonomous vehicles don’t eliminate blue-collar work, they redirect it. “Humans are still rotating those tires and working on those vehicles,” she said in an interview with the New York Times, adding that all Waymo fleets are fully staffed with operators and technicians. That’s a real point. A robotaxi still needs brake pads. It still needs someone to pull sensor data when a camera gets dirty or a lidar unit starts drifting. These are skilled, physical, hands-on jobs — and they’re not going anywhere as long as the fleet keeps growing.
The parallel here isn’t invisible. If you’ve followed how skilled trades have adapted to automation in manufacturing and construction — the kind of workforce evolution covered in depth in our piece on building a skilled trades workforce — you already know this pattern. Technology doesn’t always eliminate trade jobs. Sometimes it just respecifies them. A welder becomes a robotic welding technician. A cab driver becomes a remote fleet monitor. The title changes. The paycheck doesn’t necessarily follow.
That’s the gap Mawakana isn’t fully addressing. A Waymo fleet technician and a rideshare driver are not the same person, not the same training, not the same salary bracket, and not the same labor pipeline. Saying “there will be jobs” is not the same as saying “the people who lose jobs will get them.”
New York City Just Said No — and That’s the Real Story
While Waymo’s CEO was making the case for coexistence, New York City was quietly slamming a door. According to the Transport Workers Union, NYC’s Department of Transportation declined to renew Waymo’s autonomous vehicle testing permits after they expired at the end of March. TWU International President John Samuelsen didn’t mince words: “The Waymo-ization of NYC would be dangerous on many levels.” He cited incidents of autonomous vehicles blocking first responders, endangering kids near school buses, and a full system shutdown during a San Francisco power outage.
Waymo had been running eight vehicles with human safety drivers in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Past tense. The pushback came just a month after Governor Kathy Hochul had already pulled back her own support for autonomous vehicle expansion in the state. That’s not a minor speed bump. That’s two major government actors, in the same month, telling one of the most well-funded AV companies in the world to slow down.
The TWU’s position isn’t just union protectionism dressed up in safety language. Their concerns about first responders and power outages are documented, specific, and on record. When a technology fails in Chandler, Arizona, it’s a news item. When it fails in Midtown Manhattan during rush hour, it’s a crisis. The scale of consequence is genuinely different, and dismissing that as Luddism is lazy.
The Replacement Isn’t Coming — But the Disruption Already Is
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the AV industry wants to say plainly: the jobs that robotaxis create are not equivalent replacements for the jobs they displace. Fleet technician roles require certifications, mechanical knowledge, and comfort with sensor technology. Rideshare and taxi drivers — many of whom are immigrants, many of whom entered the workforce precisely because driving required no degree — don’t automatically slot into that pipeline. Retraining programs sound great in press releases. They have a poor track record in the real world.
Waymo deserves credit for at least having this conversation publicly. Mawakana saying “it’s great to see” that technology isn’t replacing workers is a more honest take than most tech executives offer. But acknowledgment is not a policy. And a company that operates 3,000 vehicles today and is eyeing a market that BCG says could hit 3 million vehicles by 2035 is not a company that’s going to stay small enough for its job-creation claims to hold.
The blue-collar workforce has survived a lot of technological disruption. It adapted to containerized shipping, automated manufacturing, GPS routing. But each of those transitions came with real human cost that corporate talking points consistently underestimated. There’s no reason to think this one is different. And if you care about your data and your digital footprint as much as your job security — two things that feel increasingly linked as autonomous systems collect more of both — it’s worth reading our anti-OSINT guide on scrubbing your personal data from the internet, because the same surveillance infrastructure powering these vehicles is cataloguing everything it sees.
The question was never whether robotaxis would create any jobs. The question is whether those jobs will reach the people who need them most — and right now, nobody has a good answer to that.
