Most coverage of autonomous vehicles is about Waymo and Tesla. The quieter story is the fleet operator. Companies like Tower Mobility and Alto own hundreds of electric vehicles, run their own depots, chargers, and repair shops, and put W-2 drivers behind the wheel. They market that as a better deal than gig work. It often is. It is also the exact infrastructure a robotaxi needs, minus the driver.
Waymo has already worked with Uber-backed fleet managers on cleaning, charging, and maintenance. That is the business these companies are positioning for. A fleet operator's depot, its chargers, its mechanics, and its operating data all keep their value if the person behind the wheel disappears. The driver's job does not.
The driver is essential to the fleet's present. The fleet is essential to its future. Those are not the same thing.
What a fleet operator learns from its drivers
Every shift produces more than rides. Every charging cycle teaches the company about energy needs. Every breakdown adds maintenance knowledge. Every idle hour reveals something about where to place supply. Every airport run maps demand. A company running hundreds of EVs in a major market is learning how to operate a large electric fleet at commercial mileage, and that knowledge transfers directly to fleets that won't need drivers. The workers are training the system that is meant to replace them, and they are doing it for an hourly wage.
Feature investigation
Andres Munoz Doesn't Want You Driving His Cars
In September 2025, Tower's co-founders sat for an interview published twice: on The Rideshare Guy as "The Uber Partner Paying Drivers $25/Hour + Benefits," and on the same host's Driverless Digest as "Fleet Management for an AV Future with Tower Mobility." Same interview, two audiences. We took the second title at its word and looked at how Tower manages the fleet it already has in Los Angeles. Read the investigation.
Tower's Miami Paper Trail
In the spring of 2026, Tower registered two companies in Florida and began hiring drivers to report to a specific Miami address, at $14 an hour plus tips. The address belongs to a family auto and transportation business that was marketing the property for lease the same month. Employees in Los Angeles were told the new Rivians had gone there. What the public record shows about the Miami expansion, and where it goes quiet. Read the records review.
Who Owns Tower?
If you drive for Tower, read this before you sign anything else at Mission Road. The lot you park on is also the address of a rent-to-own car company managed by the president of a Queens livery dealer whose weekly-payment leases to Uber drivers were documented by Quartz in 2017. The two sides have shared a company since 2023. A six-page records section: the entities, the 2023 Florida filings, the Queens business, CarToo, Tower's origins, and the open questions. Start here.
The $25-an-hour question
Documented The $25 figure comes from the title of Tower's own interview. Tower's public job listings tell a different story. On Indeed, Tower's Los Angeles Driver listing starts "from $19 an hour," and its Electric Vehicle Fleet Driver listing shows a range of $18.50 to $28.00. A Miami listing for the same role offered $14 an hour plus tips, driving for Lyft. The company's recruiting page still promises "brand-new, state-of-the-art electric vehicles" and "Uber Black service eligibility."
Documented We have the pay stubs. Nineteen consecutive weekly stubs from one Tower EV driver in Los Angeles, February 16 through June 28, 2026, issued by Tower EV LLC at 3800 N. Mission Road. The base rate on every one of them is $18.50 an hour. It was never raised.
$20.41
That is what the driver earned per hour worked, all in: base pay, overtime, and every dollar of tips, across 748 hours. Before taxes and before the $63.82 a week the company's health plan cost once it kicked in. On a full 40-hour week, the figure was $20.44. The best single week of the nineteen, with $135 in tips, reached $22.13.
At the advertised $25 an hour, the same 748 hours would have paid $18,712. They paid $15,429. The gap, over four and a half months, was $3,283.
This was not a struggling driver. The driver whose stubs these are held a 5.0 rating on the fleet account, with 499 five-star ratings in the last 500 and more than 1,000 rides. If the $25 figure were reachable through performance and tips, this is the driver who would have reached it. Tips added $1.65 an hour.
Source: 19 Tower EV LLC pay stubs, Feb 16 – Jun 28, 2026, reviewed by Truth in Mobility. All-in = gross pay for hours worked (regular, overtime, tips) ÷ hours worked. Paid sick time excluded from both. Table view.
All nineteen weeks
| Week (2026) | Hours | Gross | Tips | All-in / hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02/16–02/22 | 31.5 | $604.67 | $20.36 | $19.22 |
| 02/23–03/01 | 41.9 | $863.60 | $71.79 | $20.63 |
| 03/02–03/08 | 32.7 | $661.55 | $51.50 | $20.26 |
| 03/09–03/15 | 40.8 | $836.21 | $73.54 | $20.49 |
| 03/16–03/22 | 41.7 | $888.59 | $101.87 | $21.32 |
| 03/23–03/29 | 41.0 | $860.10 | $91.42 | $20.96 |
| 03/30–04/05 | 41.1 | $834.93 | $65.32 | $20.33 |
| 04/06–04/12 | 41.8 | $845.53 | $55.57 | $20.23 |
| 04/13–04/19 | 41.2 | $834.92 | $61.15 | $20.26 |
| 04/20–04/26 | 32.6 | $726.55 | $118.34 | $22.30 |
| 04/27–05/03 | 41.9 | $791.80 | $0.00 | $18.91 |
| 05/04–05/10 | 41.1 | $819.52 | $49.92 | $19.96 |
| 05/11–05/17 | 41.0 | $835.69 | $67.00 | $20.37 |
| 05/18–05/24 | 40.7 | $851.51 | $93.00 | $20.94 |
| 05/25–05/31 | 41.8 | $924.10 | $135.51 | $22.13 |
| 06/01–06/07 | 40.7 | $815.82 | $55.00 | $20.02 |
| 06/08–06/14 | 32.6 | $635.45 | $26.34 | $19.48 |
| 06/15–06/21 | 40.8 | $840.79 | $79.02 | $20.62 |
| 06/22–06/28 | 41.8 | $809.90 | $20.86 | $19.39 |
What "plus benefits" cost
The benefits are real, and the stubs show them. Health insurance began about ten weeks in, at $63.82 a week pre-tax, roughly $1.60 for every hour of a full week. Paid sick time appears once: eight hours. After taxes and the medical deduction, a full week's take-home averaged $668. In Los Angeles County, that is a one-bedroom apartment and not much else.
Where the $25 comes from
We can't say what Tower told its interviewer. We can say that on these stubs, the only way a driver's all-in rate approaches $25 is heavy overtime at $27.75, and the company rarely scheduled more than an hour or two of it. The one path to a higher base rate on this record was leaving the driver's seat for a coordinator role at $20, which pays no tips, and on these numbers earns about the same as driving.
Tower has every driver's pay record. If its drivers average $25 an hour, the company can publish the number. We will print it.
Send your pay stubs
One driver's record is one driver's record. The more stubs we have, the harder the number is to argue with. What we need, and what we do with it:
- A photo or PDF of your stubs, any period. Black out your name, employee number, and address if you prefer; we will redact anything you miss.
- Your site, your scheduled hours, and whether any weeks were short for your own reasons, so we don't misread them.
- Whether the stub includes tips, overtime, or a bonus, so we compare base pay to base pay.
- We store originals offline, publish only aggregates and redacted excerpts, and never name a driver without written consent.
Send to: truthinmobility@proton.me
Alto, for comparison
Documented Alto is the other vertically integrated, W-2 rideshare fleet operating in Los Angeles, and it has pursued a premium-EV strategy centered on vehicles like the Kia EV9. Alto also talks openly about supporting autonomous fleets with its depots and maintenance capability. We don't cover Alto as a counterexample. Both companies see the same future. The useful comparison is narrower: what each one does with its human-driven fleet while it waits, and how it treats the people driving it. Alto coverage is in progress.
What we watch for
These are the questions we put to every fleet operator. Their answers, or their silence, are the story.
- What do drivers actually earn, against what the company advertises?
- How old is the fleet, and is there a visible replacement plan?
- Where is new capital going: into the market that already has drivers and demand, or somewhere else?
- When the company consolidates, who gets reclassified as having "resigned"?
- Is the company recruiting faster than it has working cars?
- Does the company hold permits, partnerships, or pilot agreements with any autonomous vehicle developer? If so, what does that mean for the drivers it is hiring today?
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