E-hailing drivers: The end is near

 Robotaxis are coming. For the thousands of Malaysians working in the gig economy, the clock is already ticking.

Imagine this. You wake up tomorrow and open the Grab app. But instead of a driver’s name and a photo, you see a car with no one in it pulling up to your doorstep.

No driver cancelling on you three times in a row. No wrong turns. No surge pricing. Just a clean, quiet ride to work for half of what you pay today.

Now imagine you are the driver who just lost that fare. And the next one. And every one after that.

This is not a thought experiment. On April 1, 2026, Grab and Chinese autonomous vehicle company WeRide launched a driverless shuttle service in Singapore’s Punggol neighbourhood.

Eleven autonomous vehicles. Two fixed routes. No human behind the wheel. The service, branded Ai.R, is still free and limited in scope, but the signal it sends is unmistakable: the driverless taxi is coming soon to our shores.

It is also a warning to the thousands of people who depend on driving taxis or ride hailing vehicles for a living to be prepared for yet another disruption.

Globally, the autonomous ride-hailing revolution is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. Waymo operates robotaxis in ten American cities. Baidu’s Apollo Go has completed 20 million fully driverless rides across China.

Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin last June and is rolling out across Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas and Miami, with its purpose-built Cybercab entering mass production this month at under RM120,000 per vehicle. For context, each Waymo robotaxi costs roughly RM400,000.

Tesla’s vertical integration—designing its own chips, software, batteries and vehicles end-to-end—gives it a cost structure that no competitor can match. The Cybercab has 50% fewer parts than a Model 3, courtesy of gigacasting technology that replaces hundreds of stamped steel components with single massive aluminium castings. Elon Musk has claimed that the Cybercab could eventually operate at roughly RM0.50 per kilometre.

To put that in terms Malaysians can relate to, a Grab ride from KLCC to Bangsar currently costs around RM10 to RM14. At Tesla’s projected operating costs, that same trip in a robotaxi could cost as little as RM4 to RM6. Half price, no driver to pay, available around the clock.

The economics are devastating for human drivers. And they will only get worse.

But the question that should haunt every e-hailing driver in this country is not when robotaxis will arrive. It is what they plan to do when they do.

Consider the scale of what is at stake. Malaysia’s gig economy encompasses approximately 1.64 million workers, spanning e-hailing, food delivery, courier services and freelance digital work.

Over 160,000 of these are registered e-hailing drivers, the overwhelming majority with Grab. For many, this is not a side hustle. It is their primary source of income, averaging around RM4,100 a month, modestly above the national median salary of RM2,864.

These are not wealthy people. Many are former taxi drivers who already survived one wave of disruption.

When ride-hailing decimated the taxi industry, Malaysia went from 120,000 operational taxis to just 40,000, with 30,000 abandoned outright. Tens of thousands adapted by switching to Grab, learning new apps, buying new cars, taking on new loans.

Now they face the prospect of doing it all over again. Except this time, there may not be a new platform to absorb them.

How long do they have? Full autonomy on Malaysian roads is still some years away. Our regulatory framework has barely begun to contemplate it. The chaotic nature of Southeast Asian traffic presents challenges that even the best AI has not fully cracked.

Baidu’s recent system failure in Wuhan, where over 100 robotaxis were stranded mid-traffic, underscores how far the technology still has to go.

My best estimate is three to five years before the first commercial robotaxi corridors appear in Kuala Lumpur or Putrajaya; a decade before autonomous rides take a meaningful share of the market.

That timeline sounds comfortable. It is not. A decade passes quickly, and the taxi drivers who dismissed ride-hailing as a distant threat in 2012 were out of work by 2020.

Will these jobs fully disappear? Not overnight.

There will be a transitional period where human drivers and autonomous vehicles coexist, much as traditional taxis still limp along alongside Grab today. New roles will emerge: remote vehicle operators who monitor robotaxis from command centres; fleet technicians who maintain, calibrate and repair autonomous vehicles.

But these require technical skills that most current drivers do not have.

The Gig Workers Act 2025, which came into force on March 31, 2026, mandates social security contributions and written contracts for gig workers. It is progressive legislation, but it is designed for the gig economy as it exists today, not the one that is coming.

The i-Saraan Plus scheme, which matches retirement contributions up to RM600 a year, is welcome but laughably inadequate in the face of wholesale job displacement.

The hard truth is this: drivers cannot wait for the government to save them. They need to start preparing now. That means treating the next few years not as business as usual, but as a runway to retrain and reskill. The drivers who survive this transition will be the ones who saw it coming and refused to stand still.

The gig economy gave millions of Malaysians a lifeline when formal employment fell short. That lifeline has an expiry date. The app will stop ringing eventually.

The only question is whether you will have prepared for the silence. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.