SO YOU WANNA BE AN UBER DRIVER?

START REVISING, IT’S NOT QUITE AS EASY AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE...

FULL DISCLOSURE: I did actually want to become an official Uber pilot for this trip, believing signup to be little more than an internet interview and insurance document. And a Prius. But the process is comfortingly less of a private hire Wild West these days. For a start, you need a private hire licencefrom a council that licenses Uber to go with your UK driving licence. That will involve an enhanced DBS check (Disclosure and Barring Service – a police check), a medical, a driving test and in some cases, a “topographical assessment” to prove that you can get where you need people to be. That would cost £480 for a three-year deal, plus fees for the tests in the case of my local council. You need to be 21 and also visit Uber’s ‘Greenlight Hub’ programme, have photos taken, do some online courses, and that’s before you’ve even got an eligible car and insured it. Sounds like hassle, but it’s actually quite comforting if you’re regularly using the service as a passenger. Once completed, this sets you up for three years until renewal. For that, you’ll get 75 per cent of each fare, with Uber getting 25 per cent – the average in the UK works out to about £18.72 per hour. Not bad when you consider you can work as and when.

But a lot of Uberrelated stuff is actually quite surprising. Founded in 2009 and launched in 2010 in San Francisco, Uber now handles 23 million rides a day and 7.64 billion trips a year (2022). The revenue generation from that little lot was $9.3 billion (£7.4bn) in Q3 of 2023, thanks to 131 million active users, representing 70+ countries and 10,000 cities. There’s Uber Freight in the US, and various grades, sizes and versions of luxury Uber.

Under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company has committed to operating as a zero emission platform in the US, Canada and European cities by 2030. Big business, this ride-hailing stuff – anyone wish they’d thought of it first?