Uber aspires to reinvent itself as all-in-one transportation app JAMES MCLEOD
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was in Toronto on Thursday, announcing plans for $200 million in Canadian investment to expand autonomous vehicle research and build a new engineering hub in the city.
The San Francisco-based ridehailing company is working to expand its service offering, and executives say that the Toronto branch of the company will contribute to that effort by increasing from around 200 employees to more than 500 in the next few years.
The push to expand comes at the same time that Uber is trying to pivot and put its scandals in the rear-view mirror. The company is trying to rehabilitate its brand after dealing with waves of controversy, from complaints about a sexist workplace culture, to stories about poor working conditions for drivers and a company reputation for combative relationships with local regulators.
Uber is also presenting itself not as a simple ride-hailing app to replace taxi service, but it now has aspirations to be a “platform” for transportation of all sorts.
A new product — dubbed “Uber Express Pool” — launched in Toronto on Thursday, and it plays into that broader transportation vision.
The original Uber Pool service launched in Toronto in 2016, offering cheaper rates if a rider is ok sharing the car with a stranger who’s going in the same direction. Express Pool builds on that by requiring riders to walk up to 250 metres to hop on their ride, and walk about the same distance when they’re dropped off.
Andrew Macdonald, the company ’s Toronto-based vice-president for Uber’s Americas operations and global business development, said the company aspires to be a seamless, simple app that will let users hop in an Uber Pool from their home to a subway station, then pay the transit fare right through their app, and then once they get off the subway, the same person could grab an e-scooter for the final few blocks from the subway station to the office.
When journalists walked into Uber’s King Street West office for a briefing about Express Pool, they were ushered past a bright red electric Jump bike — not available for customers in Toronto, but part of the company’s growing suite of transit options.
Uber has also invested in Lime, an electric scooter company that’s the darling of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and through a partnership with transit payment service Mosabi, Uber is developing relationships with public transit agencies too.
But making all of those services simple and seamless involves solving a whole lot of significant engineering challenges, and Macdonald said that’s what workers at the new Toronto engineering hub will be doing. Some of the extra Toronto engineering talent will also be devoted to the company’s autonomous vehicle research.
But what if Uber has larger ambitions for Express Pool and the rest of its suite of services, and it’s actually aiming to compete directly against public transit system? Macdonald was unfazed by the question. He said he sees Uber and transit as complementary services in taking on Uber’s real competitor: individual vehicle ownership.
Macdonald said that he can understand why people might be suspicious of the company’s real ambitions, and he said that Uber will just have to prove itself. “We’re in the process of, in a lot of ways, rebuilding our reputation . ... So we often don’t get the benefit of the doubt ...”
Uber is trying to shift perceptions away from the brash Silicon Valley tech firm that reportedly built a secret “greyball” program to frustrate regulators’ efforts to investigate it, and allowed sexual harassment to flourish among the company’s male-dominated workforce.
In fact, Khosrowshahi’s tenure as CEO began in 2017 after Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick was ousted as CEO in the face of mounting scandals.
As part of the image rehabilitation, Uber announced a rebrand: the new Uber logo is slimmer, and now 75 per cent lower-case.