Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has been one of those oddly delightful traditions in Technology — a quirky anthropological record of what millions of riders leave behind in their rush to get from point A to point B. For a decade, the company has catalogued everything from smartphones and laptops to the more eyebrow-raising items like live fish, a toboggan, and a single Louboutin shoe. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you wonder about the lives of strangers in a way that no other data really can.
This year, there’s a new player in the lost-and-found game: robotaxis.
Thousands of items were left behind in autonomous vehicles on Uber’s ride-hailing network over the past year, the company revealed this week. The usual suspects are all there — phones, keys, wallets, passports, headphones. But then there are the stranglers that make you pause: a set of dentures, a bag reading “I Heart Hot Dads,” and a blue hat that says “Emotional Support Human.” The robotaxis, it turns out, attract exactly the same quirky human clientele as their human-driven counterparts.
Here’s what gets interesting, though. Even in a future where nobody’s behind the wheel, someone still has to deal with all this stuff. And Uber sees that as a genuine business opportunity.
The company has spent years locking up partnerships with autonomous vehicle players — Waymo, Motional, Avride, and others. But the real milestone came in March 2025, when the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service launched in Austin. That’s when things started feeling less experimental and more like an actual business. Since then, Uber and Waymo have expanded to Atlanta, with more AV providers joining the app.
The sheer volume of lost items in just a year gives you a sense of how many robotaxi rides are actually happening through Uber’s platform. We’re talking thousands of items in 12 months — that adds up to a nontrivial number of trips. The underlying message from Uber is clear: their existing infrastructure is already built to handle lost-item recovery, and they’re not about to let robotaxis change that.
When a rider leaves something in a robotaxi, the recovery process mirrors what you’d do in a regular Uber ride. You open the app, go to the activity tab, select the trip, and reach out to customer support. Then you can message, chat, or call an agent. If the item turns up, you have two choices: pay $15 for an Uber Courier driver to deliver it the same day, or pick it up in person from an AV depot where the vehicles are stored and serviced.
Uber Courier is essentially a rebrand of Uber Connect, which launched back in 2020 as a way to send packages and personal items between local addresses. But the company is keen to emphasize that its robotaxi support network is more than just a repurposed delivery service.
Amy Satrom, Uber’s global head of autonomous support, said in a statement that tens of millions of lost items are reported on Uber each year, and they’ve spent the last decade building systems to help riders reunite with their belongings quickly. The pitch is that as autonomous rides scale, they’re bringing that same expertise to AVs — combining fleet operations, support teams, and their hybrid network to make getting a lost item back simple, even when there’s no driver in the seat.
In February, Uber announced Uber Autonomous Solutions, a new business division that signals bigger ambitions around driverless tech. This division offers companies a suite of services for operating robotaxis, self-driving trucks, or sidewalk delivery robots — basically handling all the operational tasks that come with running an autonomous fleet.
The ambition is real. Uber plans to offer robotaxi rides through its app in as many as 15 cities globally by the end of the year, and they’ve said they intend to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world by 2029. That’s a bold claim, but given how quickly they’ve already moved from “interesting experiment” to “operational reality” in places like Austin and Atlanta, it’s not entirely outlandish.
What strikes me most about this whole situation is the counterintuitive nature of it. You’d think that robotaxis — sleek, futuristic, algorithm-driven machines — would bring a kind of cold efficiency to urban transportation. And yet here we are, watching people leave behind their dentures and emotional support hats just like they would in a regular car. There’s something almost comforting about that. Humans are still humans, even when the driver isn’t one.
Uber is clearly betting that their ability to handle the messy, unpredictable side of transportation — the lost-item logistics, the customer support, the human element — is going to be a competitive advantage as the industry shifts toward autonomy. The robotaxi might not need a driver, but it still needs someone to deal with the 15-pound yo-yo someone forgot in the backseat. And right now, Uber is positioning itself to be exactly that someone.
