As Uber spends $10bn to own robotaxis, Dubai’s Zed shows why taxi fleets matter again

Uber is moving away from the asset-light model it was built on. A report by Axios in September 2026 stated that the company has committed more than $10 billion to autonomous vehicle companies, infrastructure and vehicles, with more than 30 partners pledging 120,000 robotaxis and $100 million set aside for robotaxi depots in three cities.

It has been reported that $7.5 billion of the total is earmarked for buying robotaxis over the coming years. In Dubai, one family group has owned its taxis for a quarter of a century and has followed this model for a while now. Al Ghurair, founded in 1960 and ranked sixth in Forbes Middle East’s 2026 list of the Top 100 Arab Family Businesses, started its taxi arm, Kabi, in 2000 as Cars Taxi with about 750 vehicles.

Kabi now runs more than 4,200 taxis across the UAE and, by the group’s own count, carries roughly 150,000 passengers a day. Zed is the app it has built on top of that fleet.

“The way people move around cities over the past two decades has changed and become increasingly complex. And Zed was born from this simple observation,” said Abhinav Patwa, Executive Vice President and Head of Zed.

“We wanted to build a mobility platform that genuinely understands that reality because it was built here,” Patwa added. “Ultimately, we want Zed to become more than an app people open when they need a taxi. We want it to become part of Dubai’s everyday mobility infrastructure.”

Dubai’s apps share the fare and the fleet

“The fare is calculated by the RTA under Dubai’s regulated fare structure,” Patwa said. “Ride-hailing platforms such as Zed provide the technology and booking interface that connects customers with licensed taxi services, while the platform receives a fixed fee from the RTA for each completed ride.”

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) began bringing app bookings into the taxi system in 2019, when it formed Hala, a taxi e-hailing venture owned 51% by the RTA and 49% by Careem, reported as the first such partnership between a public transport authority and a private ride-hailing company.

More platforms have since been admitted. According to RTA figures, the city’s 14,476 registered taxis carried 209 million passengers across 120.1 million trips in 2025, and 45% of those trips were booked through e-hail platforms, against a government target of 80%.

In September 2025, Dubai Taxi Company and Kabi agreed to put 9,880 of their taxis on both the Bolt and Zed apps. A further agreement that included National Taxi took Zed to 10,764 vehicles by October, roughly three in every four registered taxis in the city.

A rider who opens Bolt and a rider who opens Zed may be collected by the same Dubai Taxi Company car at the same metered fare, and the app earns the same fixed fee whatever the meter reads. When the price and the cars are common to every platform, the advantage moves to whoever owns the vehicles, runs the drivers and holds the rider’s money.

Taxi operators built the market leaders elsewhere

New York taxi medallions sold for more than $1 million in 2013 and were worth less than $200,000 by early 2020. NBC New York reported that ride-hailing apps took much of the blame for the crash, alongside the city and lenders accused of pushing drivers into risky loans.

In Japan, the taxi industry built the app that now leads the market. GO Inc. raised ¥88.6bn ($553m) on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in June 2026, the country’s largest listing of the year to date, and closed its first day valued at about ¥205bn ($1.3bn). The company behind its predecessor app, JapanTaxi, began in 1977 as a taximeter-software business founded by the Tokyo cab operator Nihon Kotsu, and JapanTaxi merged with DeNA’s MOV in 2020 to form GO.

GO now partners with roughly 85,000 taxis across all 47 prefectures and reported net profit of ¥2bn on ¥31.4bn in revenue for the year to May 2025. Regulation worked in its favour. Uber was limited to licensed taxi operators in Japan, and when restricted ride-sharing was allowed from April 2024, drivers had to be overseen by existing cab companies, with fares aligned to taxi rates.

In Europe, FreeNow, owned by BMW and Mercedes-Benz, grew through partnerships with taxi fleets, cities, authorities and unions. Lyft completed its purchase in August 2025, taking on more than 150,000 drivers across nine European markets and committing to “expanding FreeNow’s leading role in the taxi sector.”

Zed is built around the daily routine

“Dubai is a very specific mobility environment,” Patwa said. “It has a highly connected public transport network, a large tourism economy, a diverse population and very different mobility needs depending on where someone lives, works or spends their time. Being based here allows us to observe those behaviours closely and build around them.”

“Mobility is fundamentally a people business,” he added. “Behind every booking is a rider and a driver, and there is a real-world journey taking place. Our teams need to understand both sides of that experience.”

“We credit our success to our people, from office staff to our drivers, who play a critical role in delivering excellence,” Kabi said when it marked 25 years in operation. The company already runs a dedicated app for its drivers, Buddy’s, and on Zed its drivers are branded “Zeddies”.

Rhythm, a Zed feature, schedules recurring rides for school runs and commutes. A 1-tap booking mode saves a rider’s payment method and vehicle preference and shows the ETA and price on the home screen, so a regular trip takes a single tap.

“Booking a ride is something people may do several times a day, so even small points of friction become significant when repeated thousands of times,” Patwa said. “The best-designed ride-hailing app is not useful if a customer cannot get a ride when they need one.”

A cashback wallet tests Zed’s margins

Zed launched the Zed Wallet on 11 June 2026 with a campaign called “Ride. Earn 15%. Repeat.”, paying 15% cashback on taxi and premium rides, capped at Dh20 per trip, into a balance redeemable against future Zed journeys. The offer was later extended through August.

“We don’t think loyalty can be manufactured simply through promotions,” Patwa said. “People will return to a mobility platform when it consistently does the fundamentals well.”

Careem shows how far a wallet can be pushed in the region. In 2023, the telecoms group e& paid $400m for 50.03% of the Careem Everything App, an entity carved out of Careem’s non-ride-hailing businesses that offers services from laundry and home cleaning to car rentals, while the ride-hailing business remained fully owned by Uber.

“We are looking at how payments, rewards, loyalty and mobility can work together to create a more connected customer experience,” Patwa said of Zed’s own direction.

Zed did not say how the cashback is financed, and it did not share rider numbers. A platform paid a fixed fee per ride, returning up to 15% of a fare it does not set, is funding that loyalty from somewhere, and those two figures will decide whether the wallet becomes a lasting part of the business or remains a well-run promotion.

Driverless taxis are already on Dubai’s roads

The RTA began commercial driverless taxi operations in March 2026 with 100 vehicles in Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah, run by WeRide and Baidu’s Apollo Go, with fleet support from Tawasul Transport and Dubai Taxi Company. In August, Uber began matching some Dubai riders with fully driverless Apollo Go vehicles, whose fleet is managed by a local operator, New Horizon Luxury Transport. Dubai aims to make 25% of all journeys autonomous by 2030.

In Tokyo, Waymo is testing with GO and Nihon Kotsu. GO’s chief executive, Hiroshi Nakajima, has said the company will not invest in autonomous driving systems and will focus instead on the dispatch, fleet coordination, payments and remote monitoring those systems need.

“We are actively evaluating where intelligent systems can genuinely improve the mobility experience,” Patwa said. “We are careful not to use AI simply because it is fashionable. For us, the question is always: does this technology solve a real problem for the rider, driver or operator?” He named demand forecasting, vehicle allocation and identifying patterns in rider behaviour as the near-term uses. Zed has not said whether it plans to dispatch autonomous vehicles, as GO is preparing to do in Tokyo.

“Dubai is where we started, but our ambitions extend beyond the city,” Patwa said. “We want to grow thoughtfully while establishing a strong presence across the UAE first, before taking Zed into selected GCC markets where we can genuinely add value.”

Kabi-CTC, a joint venture with Capital Transport Company, which Al Ghurair describes as Saudi Arabia’s largest taxi provider, deployed its first 16 taxis in Makkah in March 2026, and the group said the fleet completed more than 200 trips during its first major night of operations.

“A customer may not think in terms of ‘taxi’, ‘Metro’ or another individual mode of transport,” Patwa said. “They simply want to get where they need to go efficiently and comfortably.”

“Our ambition is to build a mobility platform that reflects the character of the city it comes from,” said Patwa.