Brave New Autonomous World Takes Shape On America's Highways

Wall Street remains hyper-focused on whether the hyperscalers' AI-driven data center buildout, now approaching $700 billion and roughly 10 times 2020 levels, will ultimately generate enough returns to justify the massive spending boom.

Goldman analysts, led by Mark Delaney, focused on the "impact of AI on profit pools" and, more specifically, on the incremental profit AI-enabled initiatives in the transportation space could ultimately generate.

The good news is that nearly a year after Delaney's June 2025 note to clients, his team found that the "pace of autonomous technology commercialization has accelerateProfits of Autonomous Mobility," driven largely by expanding vehicle deployments in the U.S. and China, as well as rollouts in Europe.

"These deployments are enabled by both captive technology development (e.g. at Waymo, Tesla, Pony AI, etc.) and a growing set of merchant Physical AI tools, including from companies such as Nvidia (e.g. Alpamayo)," Delaney said.

The autonomous ecosystem

Potential global autonomy ecosystem market size in 2035

Delaney's new estimate for the U.S. robotaxi market is set to top $19 billion by 2030, up from a prior $7 billion forecast, and continue rising to $48 billion by 2035.

How the analyst's forecast shifted in just one year:

His team expects the global robotaxi market could reach $415 billion by 2035, with vertically integrated operators potentially generating gross margins of 30% to 50% and approximately $150 billion in gross profit by 20235.

Even though the rollout of AVs will unfold over a decade rather than all at once, the analyst still warned that the proliferation of these robotaxis will be highly disruptive to "existing markets in the long term."

Delaney offered color on the incoming disruption, and it is something Uber and Lyft drivers should be paying close attention to, because over the coming years, their livelihoods could increasingly come under pressure as consumers gravitate toward cheaper rides from robotaxis.

In a worst-case scenario, taxi medallion holders and others will likely become increasingly infuriated by the emergence of these robotaxis.

Here's more from the analyst about the disruption:

While a portion of AV volumes will likely be incremental demand (e.g. as new use cases become affordable or possible), we believe autonomy could also disrupt existing markets in the long-term. We frame risks and scenarios including to human-operated rideshare/taxis, trucking, and light vehicle unit sales in the United States in this report. We estimate the economic size that could potentially be disrupted in the US is ~$440 bn. This is comprised of wages for taxi/chauffeur/shuttle, delivery and truck drivers per BLS data, an estimate for the share of bookings from rideshare allocated to drivers, and how much auto sales could decline in a scenario where personal transport demand is served only by AV rideshare.

There are already signs of change, with Waymo's share in SF reaching 30%, 20 months after being fully launched (per Yipit), and our base case view is for 5% cannibalization of UCAN rideshare gross bookings from AVs (and 16% in a bear case) by 2030.

Here are the current robotaxi deployments across America:

Google searches already show consumer interest.

AV profitability is improving:

Profitability surges in 2030s 

The proliferation of AVs will not just be limited to robotaxis. Delaney expects the last-mile delivery bot market to explode in the early 2030s.

Beyond AVs, Delaney expects penetration rates for vehicles with autonomous capabilities to begin to soar worldwide by the early 2030s.

In addition to robotaxis, Delaney expects autonomous trucking to become another major profit pool, forecasting the U.S. Class 8 AV trucking market at $16 billion by 2030 and $105 billion by 2035, with the global market reaching about $560 billion in 2035. Gross profit from AV trucking could top $135 billion in 2035 and around $300 billion cumulatively over the next decade.

He noted that AV trucking companies across North America, including Aurora, Kodiak, Waabi, and Plus, are set to rapidly expand their fleets in the coming years.

AV trucking costs per mile are set to collapse by the end of the decade and remain range-bound around the $2-per-mile mark by the midpoint of the next decade.

Profitability for AV trucking will be a story in several years.

"Overall, we expect these improving cost dynamics and scaling up of the AV trucking fleet to drive an increase in the global gross profit pool for AV trucking from close to zero in 2025 to ~$135 bn in 2035," the analyst noted.

What's clear is that America's highways, as well as those in many other developed countries, are set to be flooded by AVs. Fleets are already operating, but real scaling begins next year. This will disrupt workers ranging from taxi drivers to delivery drivers and even truckers.

In equities, Goldman highlighted Alphabet, Tesla, Uber, Aurora, Amazon, Pony.ai, Rivian, Mobileye, Lyft, TE Connectivity, Hesai, XPeng, and Volvo Group as beneficiaries of AV deployment.

There's a lot more in the Goldman note titled "Analyzing the Impact of AI on Profit Pools - Part II - A Transportation Case Study." Professional subscribers can read the full note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.