Driving automation is expected to improve working conditions, support the present transport workforce to remain on the job longer, safely and healthy, and make the job more “attractive” for the next generation of professional drivers. Yet, is this just a matter of getting technology into vehicles? To pluralize a predominant technocentric outlook on automated driving, our research adopted the work activity’s point of view, concretely the bus driving activity, to explore how work experience in urban passenger transport can contribute to the design of future automated buses. The study followed a qualitative approach with a group of bus drivers providing public passenger transport service in a metropolitan area of Portugal. The bus drivers presented a set of conditions that should be considered when discussing future transport systems with automated buses: employment and working conditions, the work organization (bus services timetables) and even the urban environment (road infrastructure). Our findings also reveal the integrative nature of work experience since, in the face of a technological change promising to reconfigure the technical conditions of work, it links the actual ways of working to a possible future work situation with automated buses.