There’s plenty of Uber news in this week’s roundup, and not all of it good. Senior RSG contributor John Ince gives us a behind the scenes look into Uber’s Special Investigations Unit, how Uber’s business is still “sustainable” after billions in losses, and Uber’s Big Event tech announcements.
When rides go wrong: How Uber’s investigations unit works to limit the company’s liability. [The Washington Post]
Sum and Substance: PHOENIX — Inside the 23-story Bank of America Tower in downtown Phoenix, a team of nearly 80 specialized workers grapples with some of the worst incidents that happen in Uber rides. Armed with little more than a phone headset and GPS ride data, these agents in the Special Investigations Unit have to figure out what went wrong.
But when they make a determination, the SIU investigators are coached by Uber to act in the company’s interest first, ahead of passenger safety, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former investigators. Uber has a three-strikes system, investigators said, but executives have made exceptions to keep drivers on the road. For instance, a New York-area driver allegedly made three separate sexual advances on riders, said an investigator assigned to the case. After an executive overruled the investigator, the driver was allowed to continue working until a fourth incident, when a rider claimed he raped her.
The agents are forbidden by Uber from routing allegations to police or from advising victims to seek legal counsel or make their own police reports, even when they get confessions of felonies, said Lilli Flores, a former investigator in Phoenix — a guideline corroborated in interviews with investigators, alleged victims and plaintiffs’ attorneys. …
“Our job is to keep the tone of our conversations with customers and drivers so that Uber is not held liable.”
My Take: Okay, we’ve got a problem here. We have lots of problems here – but what are we going to do about it? The problems are that Uber receives many complaints, and sometimes there is something there.
It looks like Uber is putting these complaints in a basket and coming up with a way of handling it that looks like they’re trying to get away with something. Not really – they’re just doing what companies do when they’ve got lots of problems and they don’t look so good together. But does this means there is a bigger problem out there?
He drives 60 hours a week for Uber. He’s still homeless [SF Chronicle]
Sum and Substance: Branson showers in a gym and keeps personal possessions neatly stashed in a duffel bag, so riders are none the wiser. Weaving past a cluster of parked RVs and scattered cars, Gary Branson pulled his dark-blue Prius onto a sandy median on the Great Highway and motioned at the Pacific Ocean.
“Welcome to my bedroom,” he said wryly. “Cars drive by at 50 mph a few feet away, but I do have a lovely view.”
Branson’s Prius, immaculate inside and out, is both his home and his workplace. He is an Uber driver, putting in some 60 hours a week behind the wheel to ferry passengers around San Francisco. Late at night he drives to a location where it’s legal to park, reclines the navigator seat, wraps his burly 6-foot-2-inch frame in a red plaid blanket, and tries to block out the traffic noise to get some shut-eye…
“It looks like I’m making it work, but I’m still a homeless person,” Branson said. He choked up when asked whether he gets lonely.
His situation underscores what critics call ride-hailing’s poverty wages and precarious nature. Although he earns about $1,200 a week (averaging $20 an hour) after Uber’s cut, work expenses such as gas, oil changes, new tires and other maintenance, traffic tickets, car payments, car insurance, cell phone bill and self-employment taxes eat a big chunk of his income. Then there are unexpected car crises, such as when his engine and battery conked out, costing him $3,000, or when his car got rear-ended. Two weeks ago, he drove over a rough patch of road and ended up paying $1,140 to repair the front suspension. …
Branson doesn’t think becoming an employee in itself will do much for his finances, but it’s what comes next that he’s counting on. “Step one is us becoming employees,” he said. “Step two is that we can form a union and begin to negotiate a more reasonable percentage” of ride fares for drivers to keep. Uber’scut is generally 30%, but he and other drivers say that’s too much — and that it sometimes takes much more.
My Take: This is a story you just don’t want to let pass you buy. It’s a real story, and an honest story. It’s a story that most of us don’t want to hear ….but should.
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Uber CEO says business is ‘absolutely sustainable’ after losing $5 billion in three months [CNN Business]
Sum and Substance: Uber is blowing through billions of dollars, but CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is undeterred. In an interview with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour that will air Wednesday, Khosrowshahi defended Uber’s business model, which involves the company investing heavily in promotions to entice customers to its on-demand ride and meal-delivery offerings.
“The model is absolutely sustainable,” Khosrowshahi said. “The business, for example, is still growing 30-plus percent on a global basis. And anytime you have a business that has the kind of market size of trillions of dollars in terms of transportation and food and global commerce, it makes sense for a company to invest.”
Uber (UBER) lost $5.2 billion in the three months ending in June, its largest quarterly loss ever. Stock-based compensation related to its initial public offering accounted for $3.9 billion, but the remaining $1.3 billion in losses were still 50% higher than the year before. Uber’s stock has fallen roughly 30% since going public in May. It raised $8.1 billion in one of the largest public offerings ever.
My Take: This is an odd collection of sentences. On the one hand, give the Uber CEO credit – he got his talking points across. But somehow it seems far fetched. We won’t know the outcome here for several years, and by then chances are pretty good that this Uber CEO will be gone.
25+ launches from Uber’s Big Event [Techcrunch]
Sum and Substance: Uber’s best bet is to use its ubiquity and product breadth to beat rivals in ride hailing, scooters and food delivery. It’s the only U.S. company doing all three, but competition threatens to nibble away at its margins on each. But if it can become your one-stop shop for getting yourself or a meal from point A to point B, it might be able to salvage its share price and survive until self-driving cars change its economics.
So today atUber’s own San Francisco launch event it unveiled a slew of changes across all its products, designed to promote Eats and micromobility, make life easier for drivers, keep riders safe and make transportation more accessible. The big highlight? Two new visions for the future of Uber’s home screen.
Uber’s new V2 test that highlights Uber Eats that’s now running in nine markets
One test adds a prominent Uber Eats button to the bottom of the screen, and it’s already reaching some users in U.S., Canadian, European and Australian cities. An even more aggressive version replaces the hallmark map with two big buttons in the screen’s center: one for ride hailing, one for Uber Eats. Clearly it’s imperative to Uber to can get more of its nearly 100 million users Eating. This version is now testing in nine markets.
“We want to be the operating system for your everyday life,” says CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “A one-click gateway to everything that Uber can offer you.” Uber’s share price rose 1% to about $32 following the news, but that’s still way down from its $42 IPO price due to a stock-wrecking earnings report in August that the company lost $5 billion.
My Take: And so it goes. Uber had to have an Apple- type event in San Francisco, and here it is. Whether there’s any news here is another thing. We’ll see if any of these pan out to be something helpful for drivers, but we all know what drivers really want: more pay!
Readers, what do you think of this week’s roundup?
-John @ RSG
