Trading the driver's seat for the owner's seat

Here’s one I keep running.

Picture a rideshare driver pulling in $20,000 a year. That’s real money, and it costs about thirty hours a week behind the wheel — nights, weekends, the surge hours when everyone else is already home. The deal is simple and old: trade your time for the fare, one ride at a time.

Now the Cybercab arrives. Same roads, same riders, no driver. That $20,000 job doesn’t get cut in half — it gets absorbed. The car that used to need a person stops needing one.

Most takes on this end right there: the drivers lose. But there’s another ending, and it’s the one I keep coming back to. What if the driver stops renting their hours to the car — and starts owning the car?

So run it. A robotaxi with no driver can earn close to twenty-two hours a day. Conservatively, once it’s running, one car throws off somewhere around $7,000 a year to whoever owns it. To replace $20,000 of driving income, you’d need about three of them.

Three cars. The equity to own them runs around $15,000 — and that’s the whole trick. Fifteen thousand dollars buys back a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year job, except now the cars do the driving and you get the thirty hours a week back.

No fifteen grand lying around? Set aside about $1,250 a month — roughly what the driving already costs you in gas and wear — and in twelve months you’ve moved from the front seat to the owner’s seat. The thing that was going to replace you is working for you instead, around the clock, while you sleep.

I’m not going to tell you which car or which company to do this with — that’s not what this note is for. The point is just that the math closes. For the first time, the person being automated out of a job can own the thing doing the automating. Whether they actually get that chance is the fight worth having.

— Jonas

Autonomy roundup — what you may have missed

• The fleet is quietly building out — before the public even notices. More Cybercabs turned up rolling around Dallas this week, and at the Houston robotaxi depot, idle Model Ys are being staged (hazards on) to join the fleet. The cars go from sitting to earning before any ramp gets announced.

• One Cybercab spent this week doing the expensive homework — testing in a nighttime Austin downpour. Clear-day miles are cheap. The flooded-street, rain-at-night miles are the valuable ones, and the whole fleet inherits whatever that one car learns.

• Waymo is now running ~500,000 paid rides a week — on track to pass a million by year-end. Driverless ride-hail isn’t a demo anymore. It’s a half-million-rides-a-week business, and it’s still accelerating.

• The ownership scaffolding is going in. Hertz spun out Oro Mobility to run AV depot operations for Uber’s fleet; Lemonade launched autonomous-car insurance. The unglamorous questions — who insures it, who cleans it, who runs the depot — are finally getting real answers.

• Texas’s mandatory AV authorization regime took effect Thursday (May 28). Dry on the surface, but it’s the scaffolding that makes fleet ownership real — and it’s landing first in the state where a lot of this is already happening.

• The timeline that matters for today’s thought experiment: Tesla’s own guidance puts meaningful robotaxi revenue — and the owner “add your car to the fleet” program — at 2027. The window for regular people to own a piece is a 2027 event. Which means the time to get ready is now.

Reply and tell me where the math breaks (or doesn’t) — I read every one.

And if you want to run your own version of the math — different income target, different cost assumptions, different car — the modeler at remount.co/modeler lets you change every assumption.

You’re getting this because you signed up at remount.co. This is a thought experiment, not financial advice and not an offer of securities. Reply anytime or write hello@remount.co.