Fleet Watch · Investigation

A close look at Tower Mobility's autonomous-vehicle ambitions, its present Los Angeles fleet, and the workers bridging the two.

October 2026 · Documented public sources · Employee-reported operations · Unverified where marked

Tower Mobility has built a company around drivers. It recruits them, trains them, schedules them, monitors them, and pays them by the hour. It supplies the vehicles, charging, maintenance, insurance, and access to Uber's marketplace.

In September 2025, co-founders Daniel and Andres Munoz sat down with Harry Campbell to explain why that model works. The interview ran on The Rideshare Guy as "RSG266: Tower Mobility: The Uber Partner Paying Drivers $25/Hour + Benefits."

Campbell also published it on his Driverless Digest under a more revealing title: "Fleet Management for an AV Future with Tower Mobility."

Nobody has to read an autonomous-vehicle agenda into this interview. The publisher put it in the headline. And once you listen with that lens, Tower starts to look like a very different company.

The Rideshare Guy version flatters the present business: roughly 2,000 W-2 drivers, more than 600 vehicles, hourly wages, healthcare, paid time off, coaching, proprietary driver monitoring, in-house maintenance, charging infrastructure, and a recruiting machine that can onboard drivers at enormous scale. It sounds like a company that turned rideshare into a stable occupation.

Then the conversation turns to the future. The cars remain. The depots, chargers, maintenance, cleaning, and fleet software remain. Tower remains.

The driver becomes optional.

To be fair, the founders don't claim drivers vanish overnight. They expect human-driven service to coexist with autonomy for a long time, especially in wheelchair-accessible and medical transport, where human assistance is hard to replace. That belongs in the record. It doesn't change the strategy: Tower is building infrastructure that stays valuable even after the person behind the wheel doesn't.

So before Tower asks anyone to believe it can manage tomorrow's autonomous fleet, there's a simpler test. Look at how it manages the fleet it already has.

Tower Isn't Really Building a Driver Company

The most revealing thing about the interview isn't any single statement about autonomy. It's the vocabulary. The brothers talk about utilization, charging, cleaning, maintenance, uptime, acceptance and cancellation rates, energy costs, and keeping vehicles continuously productive.

Those aren't driving skills. They're fleet-management skills.

A human-driven Model Y needs charging, tires, cleaning, body work, parking, insurance, staging, and dispatch. An autonomous vehicle needs essentially the same support. The difference is that it doesn't need a paid employee behind the wheel for every productive hour.

Autonomous Vehicles Are a Labor Strategy

The AV industry prefers to talk about innovation and safety. Those matter. But autonomy is also, unmistakably, a labor-substitution technology.

Tower pays wages, payroll taxes, benefits, overtime, training, recruiting, and turnover costs because humans drive its cars. Software doesn't take paid time off, call out sick, quit for a better offer, or organize with the other cars. Removing that expense isn't a side effect of driverless transportation. It's the commercial proposition.

Tower's pitch to workers today is almost the inverse:

Today

We make rideshare better by turning drivers into employees.

Tomorrow

We make fleet operations more efficient by needing fewer drivers.

Management can hold both statements comfortably. Drivers can't.

The Drivers Are Helping Build That Future

Every shift produces more than rides. Every charging cycle teaches Tower about energy needs. Every breakdown adds maintenance knowledge, every accident adds risk data, every idle hour reveals something about supply placement, and every airport run maps demand.

Tower is learning how to coordinate hundreds of EVs in one of the country's biggest rideshare markets. That knowledge survives if the driver disappears. The job may not.

But the story gets more interesting when you stop looking at the fleet Andres Munoz hopes to manage someday and look at the one his employees drive today.

The Future Is Autonomous. The Present Has 150,000 Miles on It.

Tower's public image of its electric fleet is polished: hundreds of EVs, Tesla Model Ys and Kia EV9s front and center, in-house maintenance, and language increasingly pitched at the future of autonomous mobility.

Employee-reported The fleet employees see every day is less glamorous. According to current and former employees with direct knowledge of the fleet, the Los Angeles electric fleet is roughly 300 Tesla Model Ys and exactly four Kia EV9s. Many of the Model Ys have passed 150,000 miles of commercial service, and drivers regularly get cars with noticeably less usable range than they once had.

A 150,000-mile car isn't automatically unsafe. But those are rideshare miles: shift after shift of stop-and-go traffic, potholes, curbs, passengers in and out, and constant charging. At that point, a replacement plan matters. Many employees see no sign of one.

Technically, Tower Has Uber Black Vehicles. All Four of Them.

Tower's marketing puts "Tesla Model Y," "Kia EV9," "luxury electric rideshare," and "Uber Black" in the same breath. And technically, Tower does have Uber Black-eligible vehicles: the four EV9s.

According to current and former employees, the roughly 300 Model Ys no longer qualify for Uber Black in Los Angeles under Uber's current vehicle requirements. When they qualified, each car could serve both ordinary and premium demand. Uber changed the rules; Tower's fleet didn't change with them. Four EV9s let Tower truthfully say it runs Uber Black vehicles. They don't deliver Uber Black economics across a fleet of hundreds.

Want the Big EV9 Strategy? Look at Alto.

A competitor is pursuing something much closer to the premium fleet Tower's marketing evokes. Alto has leaned heavily on Kia EV9s and other premium EVs, running them through higher-tier Uber products in markets including Los Angeles.

Alto isn't an anti-autonomy counterexample, either. It also pitches its depots, chargers, and maintenance as infrastructure for an AV future. Both companies have W-2 drivers, vertically integrated electric fleets, and an eye on autonomy.

So the real question is narrower: what is each doing with its human-driven fleet while it waits? Alto built around premium-capable SUVs. Tower's Los Angeles employees see aging Model Ys, four EV9s, and no visible replacement cycle. That's not a philosophical difference. It's an asset-management one.

Newer Vehicles Went Somewhere Else

Employee-reported Tower did have newer vehicles available. According to current and former employees with direct knowledge of the allocation, Rivians originally slated for Los Angeles went to Miami instead.

There may be good reasons: a planned launch, a contract, different economics. The point isn't that another city got new cars. It's that Los Angeles already has the drivers, demand, charging, maintenance, and revenue, plus a fleet with extraordinary mileage. The newer assets went to a market whose timing and scale are far less clear to employees. Capital allocation is one of the clearest signals of where management thinks the future lies.

Meanwhile, Tower Is Consolidating Its Present

While ownership talks about sophisticated future fleets, the Los Angeles business has been consolidating its footprint. Sites have closed, and operations are being pushed into the Mission Road facility, the company's so-called "super site." Current and former employees describe a facility already running short on space as more vehicles, people, and functions pile in.

Consolidation isn't automatically trouble. Fewer leases and centralized charging and maintenance can be efficient. But it can also be retrenchment, and the difference lies in economics employees can't see. What they can see is fewer locations, more people, more cars, and less room.

Transfer or Be Treated as Having Quit

Documented Drivers who don't move from an old depot to Mission Road have been told in writing that Tower will treat them as having "voluntarily resigned." Truth in Mobility has reviewed the notice. [Quote the operative sentence here, with its date.]

That label matters. A resignation and a termination can shape how an unemployment claim is first framed and evaluated. California decides eligibility on the actual facts of a separation, not the employer's label, and a substantial change in work location can be good cause for leaving a job.

Look at the sequence: Tower moves the job, then calls anyone who can't follow a quitter. Technically, the job is still there. From the driver's side, the employer changed the terms. That sits awkwardly beside Tower's public pitch of W-2 employment as stability.

Tower Keeps Hiring Anyway

Even as it consolidates, Tower keeps hiring aggressively. Current and former employees of the Los Angeles operation say recruiting sometimes seems to bring in drivers faster than the fleet can use them.

But drivers don't create capacity on their own. A fleet is limited by cars, chargers, parking, maintenance throughput, wash capacity, dispatch, and passenger demand. Hiring faster than those grow just creates churn. Tower has boasted about recruiting at extraordinary scale. Recruiting people is the easy part. Having clean, charged, working cars waiting for them is the hard part.

The Cars Aren't Washing Themselves

The Munoz brothers rightly count cleaning as fleet infrastructure, one of the systems an autonomous future still needs. At Mission Road, the wash operation is frequently understaffed, and supervisors reportedly rotate in to wash cars.

A supervisor pitching in now and then is fine. A supervisor routinely covering a staffing gap is a department without enough people. And dirty cars mean complaints, interior damage, and a worse rider experience. Robotaxis still get dirty. Someone will still throw up in the back seat at 1:30 a.m. The car may someday drive itself. It won't clean itself.

Tower's Mechanics May Matter More Than Its Drivers

One of Tower's genuine strengths is its in-house repair staff. A technician who has worked on hundreds of the same vehicles knows the recurring failures, the problem cars, the parts patterns, and which fixes actually stick versus which just get a car through another shift. That knowledge grows more valuable as the fleet ages.

Employee-reported Current and former employees with knowledge of the department say some of the most skilled technicians privately feel underpaid and are looking elsewhere. That doesn't mean maintenance is about to collapse. It does mean there's a retention problem.

And here's the irony: autonomy makes these people more important, not less. A self-driving car still needs tires, suspension, A/C, collision repair, charging fixes, and 12-volt batteries. If Tower believes its lasting value is fleet infrastructure, its technicians may be its most strategic employees. Losing them over pay is a strange way to prepare for the future.

Then There Is LAX

Employee-reported One problem requires no speculation about robots. Over a 16-week period, roughly 8% of Tower's Los Angeles trips ended at Los Angeles International Airport. That figure comes from current and former employees who reviewed the company's trip data as part of their jobs, and it is specific enough to check: Tower has the data and can publish its own number.

Airport traffic should be a gift: a passenger in, another passenger out. But most Tower vehicles aren't approved for LAX pickups. So a driver drops off a paying rider, can't join the pickup queue, and leaves empty.

The driver stays on the clock. The battery drains, the tires wear, the miles pile up, and nobody in the back seat is paying for any of it. At 8% of trips, that empty outbound trip isn't a minor inefficiency. It's built into the business.

Empty Miles Still Count Toward 150,000

This is where the problems connect. An unpaid mile uses up a commercial vehicle's life just as fast as a paid one. The odometer, battery, tires, and suspension don't know the difference.

Stack it up. The dominant vehicle is aging. Its range is shrinking, so it charges more and sits longer. It lost access to premium Uber Black demand. It has no visible replacement plan. And it runs empty out of one of the operation's biggest destinations.

That isn't an "old car" complaint. It's fleet economics. And fleet economics are supposed to be Tower's specialty.

The Trash Pile Is Almost Too Perfect a Metaphor

Employee-reported At Mission Road, trash has piled up visibly for extended periods. Some employees have wondered aloud whether the trash bill got paid. There's no evidence of that. Missed pickups, vendor disputes, and plain bad facility management all happen. The fact is simple: the trash has sat there, and the reason is unknown.

That's enough. Tower talks about autonomous fleets, proprietary charging, real-time monitoring, and AV readiness. Meanwhile, employees at its main Los Angeles facility can photograph, date, and re-photograph a pile of garbage nobody has hauled away.

Advanced technology doesn't make mundane operations unimportant. Mundane operations are what fleet management is. Someone still has to empty the dumpster.

The Rumors Are Still Rumors

Unverified Stories about the company's finances circulate among drivers. We could not confirm any of them, we have seen no documents supporting them, and we are not repeating them here.

But the existence of rumors says something about a workplace. Sites close. Cars age. New vehicles go elsewhere. Departments run short. Trash piles up. Skilled staff complain about pay. Hiring continues. People start asking where the money's going, and a rumor fills the gap. That doesn't make it true. It does say something about employee confidence.

This Is What Operational Strain Looks Like

Strain rarely comes with flashing lights. It looks ordinary: a supervisor washing a car, a mechanic browsing job listings, a Model Y rolling in at 160,000 miles, a battery that doesn't go as far as it used to, a car leaving LAX empty, another depot closing, more people crammed into Mission Road, new hires still arriving, a dumpster still full.

Each event has a possible explanation. None of it proves Tower is insolvent or collapsing; those claims would need much stronger evidence. The defensible conclusion is narrower: Tower's public story about the future is far more confident than the present many Los Angeles employees live in. And that public story is specifically about fleet-management competence.

Autonomy Doesn't Fix Fleet Management

This is the central weakness in pitching autonomy as Tower's natural next step. Autonomy doesn't solve these problems. It raises the stakes on solving them.

A self-driving car doesn't restore battery capacity, repair its suspension, or create parking at Mission Road. It doesn't keep an underpaid technician from leaving, make a car eligible for LAX pickups, or turn empty miles into revenue. It removes one labor cost: the driver. Everything else Tower claims expertise in becomes more important.

Tower doesn't need a hypothetical 2035 robotaxi fleet to prove it can manage vehicles at scale. It already has the experiment: hundreds of cars and drivers, chargers, mechanics, washers, supervisors, dispatch, facilities, and Uber demand in a mature market. The test is already running.

So evaluate fleet management in the present tense. Does the car work? Is it clean? Can it pick up where demand is? How many miles are unpaid? How often does it charge, and how long is it out of service? Can Tower keep its technicians? Is there room? Does the car get replaced when running it stops making sense?

Those questions aren't beneath the autonomous future. They are the autonomous future.

Andres Munoz Still Needs You. For Now.

The title is deliberately provocative. Today, of course, Andres Munoz absolutely wants you driving his cars. They don't drive themselves, and Tower's revenue depends on people showing up for shifts. The founders have also said human drivers will coexist with autonomy for some time. Any fair account includes that.

It also includes the rest of the interview. Tower is positioning its infrastructure for a model where it keeps owning, charging, cleaning, and managing vehicles while needing fewer people to drive them. The driver is essential to Tower's present. The fleet is essential to its future. Those aren't the same thing.

And today's drivers are helping bridge the gap. They drive the aging cars, generate the revenue, find the charging bottlenecks and maintenance problems, and produce the LAX data. They're teaching management how a large EV fleet behaves at enormous mileage, knowledge Tower hopes to apply to fleets that won't need them. Tower is building the bridge. Its employees are standing on it.

Nobody has to accuse Tower of a secret agenda. Harry Campbell put it in the headline. And there's nothing wrong with preparing for that future; Alto, tech companies, and the platforms are all doing it. But talking about tomorrow is easy. You prove you can run tomorrow's autonomous fleet by running today's fleet exceptionally well.

Tower has a live demonstration running every day in Los Angeles. Before Andres Munoz asks anyone to be impressed by the day his cars no longer need drivers, pay close attention to what happens while they still do.

Because in Tower's autonomous future, the chargers are still there. The mechanics are still there. The depots are still there. The vehicles are still there. Andres Munoz is still there.

You're not.