Ride-sharing app Uber represents many things: convenience, a second income, cheaper transport, innovation.

But if you are a taxi driver, the company’s recent investments have a less welcome message. They’re going to do you out of a job.

Three days after taxi drivers took to the streets of Mexico City in protest against Uber’s tax-free status, the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick affirmed the drivers’ worst nightmare. It is actively developing a driverless taxi.

• Uber threatens legal action against taxes
• Technology could kill 5 million jobs in Australia
• Why you should never, ever use UberX

“The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car – you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” Mr Kalanick said in May.

“When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.

“So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”

Contrary to expectations, the taxi industry in Australia doesn’t oppose self-driving cars. It looks forward to the day.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who would likely still ride a bike. Photo: AAP

“I would say it’s almost inevitable, yes,” said Blair Davies, chief executive of the Australian Taxi Industry Association (ATIA), a national lobby for taxis.

“Driverless vehicles are going to be out there and people can either own them privately, as you do a private motor vehicle, or there’s going to be public vehicles out there that people can hire which are effectively going to be providing a taxi service.”

Driverless cars are a thing of the near future. Google aims to have a driverless car on the roads by 2020, while Apple is also looking for a driverless solution.

Electric sports car manufacturer Tesla aims to have a function in their cars that lets them drive autonomously on stretches of highway, and they’re just one of many automakers which have self-driving cars in their sights.

Uber’s investment in self-driving cars has, in characteristic crash-through style, poached some of the top minds in robotics in the US.

With a war chest in the billions, the engineers at the National Robotics Engineering Centre of Carnegie-Mellon University couldn’t refuse offers from Uber to bring their vehicle automation nous to the cause.

Carnegie-Mellon and Uber said in a joint press release that the moves at NREC were a “strategic partnership”, which saw the cherry-picked engineers from the organisation’s Pittsburgh HQ move to Uber’s warehouse nearby.

But while Mr Kalanick has the sci-fi dream in sight, he said on Twitter it’s 20 years away. In the meantime, drivers will continue earning money.

Drivers on @uber_nyc making $90k/yr Driverless car is a multi-decade transition. Let’s take a breath and I’ll see you in the year 2035

— travis kalanick (@travisk) May 28, 2014

Taxi industries all over the world have protested the encroachment of Uber. Last week a London cabbie took his protest to Mayor Boris Johnson on the street and was told to “f— off and die, and not in that order”.

The ATIA is not taking the risk to their industry lying down. It has a section for taxi apps on its website which doesn’t list Uber. It has railed against the encroaching options in transport.

In Australia, states vary on their acceptance of Uber. Queensland and New South Wales fine drivers while Victoria allows them to operate, but the company pays the driver’s fines. Protests have been organised in Perth, Melbourne and the ACT.

Google has already removed brake and accelerator pedals from their cars, so what could go wrong? Photo: Getty

In the ATIA’s 2014 annual report, state taxi associations referred to Uber as “illegal ride sharing”, and called for extra regulation to level the playing field, but the issue is not competition so much as the extra rules and costs licensed taxis must deal with compared with Uber drivers.

“From a taxi industry point of view we’re watching the (driverless car) technology with great interest,” Mr Davies said.

“If you have driverless cars that are readily available, affordably priced and convenient people might say ‘look, we can certainly downsize the number of vehicles in our household’ and instead of having two or three vehicles in a household they can downsize to one,” he said.

But as a Columbia University study pointed out, a driverless taxi service could completely swamp regular taxis. Just 9000 cars at $25,000 each would be needed to bump regular New York City taxis out of contention by undercutting them on price.

And while bad for taxi drivers, self-driving cars could be better for the planet and other drivers, too.

Far fewer cars, from 245 million down to 2.4 million, would be on the road with the take-up of self-driving cars, with a similar reduction in fuel, a PriceWaterhouseCooper report states.

It looks like the real losers from self-driving cars are the taxi and Uber drivers; that job’s days appear to be numbered.