the closing bell on shelter news, everyone. Uber
hosting its annual product event today and the ride hailing
giant announcing several new products and features focused on travel
and sustainability, including a new tier dedicated to electric
vehicles as well as a new autonomous delivery service for
Uber eats and the ability to book a party bus
joining me now is Ian sure, editor at large
at Cnet. Ian great to have you on the
show. What's the biggest takeaway from Uber's product event
today? I mean obviously it's the party bus,
right? You know, actually, I think what's
interesting is that they're trying to still expand out what
Uber is. I think a lot of people have
this conception in their minds of what Uber does and
a lot of us think of just the app and
ordering either a taxi or someone who is driving like
they're a taxi or a black car, but Uber
is really trying to expand way past that. Right
? And so you've got the stuff like the party
busses, you've got stuff like this new tier of
the nicer electric cars, right? So the Tesla's
instead of maybe the cheaper electric cars um and also
even doing stuff like getting actually hooked up with events
planning right and being able to make it so I
can order food at an event or even helping companies
be able to give me an Uber voucher when I
go to a party or when I go to a
commencement or something else and allow me to take there
might use their money in Uber to go home.
So this is all kind of tied into making Uber
a bigger thing in our minds, a bigger thing
in our minds, a lot of updates to help
the consumer, the passenger. But what about the
driver ian what new announcements did Uber make today?
That's going to benefit the driver, especially when it
comes to electric vehicles? Yeah, so a lot
of this is actually tied around trying to make sure
that people feel a lot more comfortable with these electric
vehicles. So for example, there's actually a whole
section of the app that they're kind of focusing around
TVs and they're going to make it so that you
can actually be able to order these nicer E V
s but also work with any E V s if
you want. Um, there's a lot more kind
of just attention being paid to that. So,
I think part of this is really helping those people
get that kind of attention and also draw more real
, more Uber driver writers to the Uber drivers who
have them. Uber is not gonna let you book
a party bus. I think that's the biggest takeaway
Ian for me as well, how many people can
fit in one of these party busses, how reliable
is it? Do you have to book in advance
or can you literally hale at the moment a party
bus? Yeah, so it depends, of course
, that's always the answer. Right, So what
does the idea here is more than Uber XL Right
. So for those of us who have done the
Uber XL or the larger SUVs, you know,
you can fit roughly maybe eight people in there,
but it's always a little tight. And so a
lot of this is actually about making it so that
you've got that next step of stuff, right?
The party busses, but also just trying to have
all these different sized vehicles there, right. There
are things that are bigger than the Chevy Suburbans.
So I think that's part of what they're thinking and
yes, of course you want to be thinking about
, Okay, well, if I'm going to order
something that's going to carry around my, you know
, dozen friends, I definitely need to plan ahead
and stuff like that, but I think generally speaking
Uber wants to be able to be, if you're
doing transportation right, that you want to think of
them and that's something that more often than not,
I don't do if I'm thinking of stuff that's either
really small or not a car related, do you
expect that this will bring in new users and I
mean, certainly the ability to hail a party bus
, even the electric vehicle build out that Uber is
adding here would seem like a few steps above what
a lift is doing right now. Yeah, I
mean, I don't think of it very much in
terms of Uber versus Lyft because part of what Uber's
problems here really is getting people to constantly use its
platform but also being able to manage costs as they're
doing it right. That's something we saw a lot
during the pandemic stuff where we were transitioning from a
lot of people using Uber ride hailing to Uber eats
was a big deal right? Changed the company a
lot of ways financially. So I think for them
it's really about okay how do we expand into all
these different areas and do it in a very responsible
way. Part of the conversation about Uber in the
previous years, especially before the most recent ceo was
about how much the company spent to grow and clearly
now they realized I think that they can't do that
. I will also Uber announcing a new autonomous delivery
pilot for Uber eats. What is this all about
? Ian and how involved are the robots in this
process? Well I don't think they get to decide
what food they bring but what happens is that they're
working with two small scale things in California and one
of them is kind of like sidewalk robots. Right
, So that'll be interesting enough itself if you are
in southern California, I believe it's west Hollywood,
if my memory serves right um they'll actually be able
to do those deliveries but then they're also going to
have deliveries by autonomous car, you're not going to
be doing, you know ride hailing it but they're
going to work with a startup that actually is doing
autonomous car stuff by the way. That startup is
also working with lift on different things. So just
to keep in mind how interconnected all these people are
. But essentially they're going to do deliveries by these
autonomous cars. Now there are as far as I
can tell, still going to be people in the
car to make sure that it's safe. But generally
speaking, the whole idea is let's get autonomous deliveries
to be a lot more normal. All right.
Ian sure. I love these product announcements. Such
a good job. Thank you for coming on the
show and breaking it down with me in the editor
at large at Cnet.