Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, can Uber Go Green? It may surprise you to learn that Europe's biggest lobbyist for electric cars isn't an automaker or the battery industry. It's Uber. That's surprising because in recent months there has been a slowdown in electric car sales and automakers want a reprieve on their green goals. Not Uber, though the right hailing company has been leading the charge to get regulators to change the rules and get more
electric vehicles on the road. On this week's episode, I got to ask the company CEO, Dara Kosroshai about it. He was in London recently making the case that Uber customers should op for the electric car in their app, even if it means waiting a few extra minutes. As an occasional Uber taker, the green feature is something I am familiar with and it is a step in the right direction, But it's only available in two hundred cities out of the ten thousand that have Ubers. As you'll
hear in the conversation. In twenty twenty, Uber set some big goals about going electric for twenty twenty five, twenty thirty and twenty forty. It's unlikely that the company will meet the twenty twenty five goals, and even the twenty thirty goals are going to be a stretch, but the company is sticking with them because uberc is going electric being good for business, not just for the planet. There
are other reasons to go electric. We talk about driver lesque cars and I tried one of those for the first time in San Francisco this summer, and we talk about flying taxis a climate solution. I haven't tried yet, but we and stop. There few CEOs of major companies sit down with a climate journalist, so I asked him about carbon accounting and also about a just transition. That's why this is one of our longer episodes. Whether you're a fan of uber or not, what the company does
on climate will have a big impact. Welcome to Zero, Dara, thank you.
It's great to be here now.
I'm an engineer. I studied chemical engineering. You're an engineer. You studied electrical engineering. And sometimes I think about the background, the education and what that brings to the jobs we do, and for me, it's very much being informed by the science, being curious about the world, asking good and hard questions.
Is there anything from your engineering days This is a while back that you still carry in running a company that's one hundred and fifty billion dollars worth and operates in seventy countries.
Very much so, very much so. And for me, what engineering taught me was how to break down complex problems into much simpler artifacts and then solve those artifacts and then recompute into a more complex answer. I still to this day remember And it's a very basic precept vector math, right, which is you look at three dimensional problems. And for me, I was always like challenging myself figure out the answer
to the three dimensional problem. When you break it down to single dimensionary problems, you get very simple answers and
you can work your way through it. And I think with business and in many things in life, people tend to over complicate things and sometimes people want to They almost want to show off their ability to understand complexity, etc. Those are people who I think succeed and engineering really taught me that break down the problem, make it simple for yourself, understand what's core and what's not core, and then move on the.
Other thing we do as engineers is solve problems.
Yeah, And have problems.
When you were made CEO of Uber, there were plenty of problems you had to deal with. There was Uber having the reputation of a toxic culture. It seems you've changed that and made it a happier place to work. Then during the pandemic, people stopped taking ubers because well, we were all locked down and you had to pivot to deliveries. And that's now nearly half of your revenues. And in that same period you also set out ambitious
climate goals. This is a climate podcast, we're going to talk about that.
Sure.
So in twenty twenty, Uber pledged to be all electric in Europe, US and Canada by twenty thirty and everywhere else by twenty forty. The company also committed eight hundred million dollars toward that goal by twenty twenty five. Your latest sustainability report for twenty twenty three says you spent about four hundred and forty million dollars. What have you put it to work?
The most significant part of our investment has been incentives for drivers to essentially make more money per ride. I think that everyone in terms of these climate goals has had really good intentions, but they will remain good intentions until and unless you can create economic flywheels to really start to scale those ambitions into the reality of business.
And for our business, there's a flywheel that has to happen, right, is if you want more riders to take electric rides, you actually have to have drivers who are driving evs and are hybrids to start with as well. And you need the supply in order to create the demand. If you don't have enough supply, then if someone asks for an Uber Green, they may be waiting twelve thirteen minutes. That's not good enough. So we had to get the
economic flywheel going. And our business is always starts with supply. How many drivers, quality drivers can we get on the platform. As it related to climate, it's how many drivers can we convince to buy the next vehicle, make that purchase an EV And as a result, we have to make it economically attractive to these drivers. Their vehicles are their offices.
They make a living with these vehicles. So the majority of our investment has gone to create incentives per ride, incentives for drivers who are driving EV on Uber to make more money. And those incentives originally started fifty cents a ride. Now in the US it's based on a certain number of rides. You make a special incentive if you have over two hundred rides, and we have these incentives all over the world. That makes driving an EV on a per trip basis more profitable for the average
Uber driver. That allows them to afford to pay somewhat more for those evs because they do tend to be more expensive. There is in a secondhand market, and that creates a flywheel that we're talking about.
There's also the question of the upfront cost, because if they have to get that extra earning, they have to buy that car. And one hope was that you would charge say a Londoner, which is me, when I take an Uber here, I pay a clean air fee and that goes into a pot that would help subsidize the buying of the vehicle because it still is on an upfront basis most of the time a little more expensive
than your gasoline car. Has that happened. Have you helped drivers subsidize the purchase of the vehicle, not just once they have the vehicle, actually make more money and how many electric vehicles have you helped?
Very much? So? So the London has been a huge success for us. If you step back. Right now, the average Uber driver is moving over to EV's five times faster than the average driver. That's a big success, but still we got a long way to go. About ten percent of or overall miles or EV in Europe and California, it's closer to twenty percent. Here in London, we're approaching
a third of our miles being EV. A big part of that was a clean air fund where we are reinvesting that clean air fund to make it easier for drivers to buy vehicles. There are great deals going on with Kias right now in London. It's pretty extraordinary you see on the streets here. So that has definitely been a success, and I think London again was a tip
of the spear, so to speak, our top marketplace. More generally, what we're trying to do is we're investing in the per trip incentive and then we're working with our OEM partners to secure discounts on purchase of the vehicles. We also a lot of our drivers may not want to jump into EV's cold, so to speak, so we've also
established rental programs. For example, Hurts is a big partner for us that allow drivers to kind of try before you buy, Understand what it means to drive an EV some of them have charging anxiety, etc. Understand where chargers are available, how much time it takes, and then switch over from a rental to a purchase as well. So hopefully we can work with industry to make it more affordable, and then we're going to put our investment, the majority of our investment on a per ride basis.
But how many drivers have said that they've used your subsidy to actually buy an electric vehicle?
So one hundred and eighty two thousand drivers are now on evs on the platform. It's about three times what it was last year when I was here for first Go Get event. How many specific drivers have bought specifically because of our discounts, I actually don't know. My guess is it's a significant number. But is it over fifty or fifty or below fifty, I'm not sure.
About ten percent of all miles driven are electric now on the Uber platform. London is far ahead.
That's a third.
But the target one you'd set it was for London to be one h percent electric by twenty twenty five. Even if it's the end of twenty twenty five, that's you know, fifteen months away, how are you going to go from a third to one hundred percent.
I think those targets at this point are going to be very difficult to hit for us. And you know the fact is that I've always said that climate is a team sport, and we need government to come in, we need industry to come in. We certainly are leaning in with our own pocketboats and with a bunch of our innovation as focused on making evs more delightful, available for everybody. So while I think those twenty twenty five targets will be very challenging for us to hit, we
got twenty thirty targets. We got twenty forty targets, and for us, you know, these targets drive outsize ambition at the company. One of the wonderful things that I love about Uber is like we put these targets in place, the whole team rallies behind them. It excites everyone. We have a new sustainability leader, Rebecca, who came from Tesla as well, which is one of the leading companies in that space. So you know, we're going to push to
hit those targets. Twenty twenty five is going to be hard, but we got our twenty thirty targets that are ambitious, and certainly twenty forty targets that are both ambitious and I think doable.
Over the past two years, we've seen a number of pioneering sustainability companies face the kinds of challenge you're facing, which is set out an ambitious goal. Maybe you're not going to be able to hit it, or maybe you're able to hit it, but in the process you've had to invest money to get there, while your competitors have not. So the pioneers get punished one way or another, whether
they meet the goal or they don't. And a Cambridge University report that just recently came out said that pioneering companies shouldn't be punished. Instead, one way out for them is to lobby governments to raise the ambition for everybody to level the playing field for your sector. And that is something you're doing now. You announced in September that you warn the European Union to have all right heling be electric by twenty thirty, and you say climate is
a team sport. How many other right healing companies or taxi companies have joined that lobbying effort.
I'm not aware of any at this point. And you know, I do think that while short term some of the pioneering companies, as you have said, may have a disadvantage because they're investing where others aren't, I do think that long term climate investment makes sense. Right. It's ultimately when you look into EV today for an Uber driver, we're not telling the Uber driver to buy an EV because it's good for the climate now it is, or because it's going to help us hit our targets. It is.
You know that that purchase is going to help us hit our targets. We're telling it to buy an EV because it makes sense. And if you look over a two year to a five year timeframe, you take an into account cost of petrol versus charging, you look at maintenance costs, it actually makes economic sense for a driver to buy an EV. And so I think actually the formula that we have is yes, this is the right thing to do. It is can we afford to invest
eight hundred million? We can, and we have. Now it's about making the economics work, and I think we're on a good path.
As a platform, and as the largest right hailing platform, you also have consumers who may not think green. But if it shows up as the first option, which is kind of the default, and default is a very powerful place to be. It really is you can actually drive behavior change. Why just making it easier for somebody to get an electric noweres are you doing that?
Well, Actually, what we're doing now is that many times when you order a regular Uber X, you're gonna get a Tesla or you will get an EV So it's happening to me. Yeah, I mean, if you're trying to change, you should have used an Uber Green. But that's okay, yeah, exactly. So you know, we run this marketplace, and the marketplace essentially is very flexible in terms of the kind of cars that we can dispatch you and obviously we want to dispatch an efficient dispatch that's within five six minutes,
so the driver isn't driving them any empty miles. It's important for congestion in the city and emissions in a city as well. But what we're seeing is that one in four Uber customers actually has had their first experience with an EV on Uber. So a lot of what we talk about is moving drivers over. But as you know, the EV experience as a writer is really nice. It's quiet, the cars are new, spacious interiors, especially the backseat, et cetera.
So I do think that there are these preconceived notions about EV's. I think unfortunately EV's have to some extent become politicized. Right is are you on the right or left? Et cetera. They're just really good products. So to the extent that we can increase exposure to this next generation of vehicles, which we truly feel are a better way going forward and good for the environment, then it can be a win win for everybody.
And I've heard you say that on the Uber platform, electric rides get higher tips. Yes, is that the reason why they get higher tips? That is just a better ride, or is it that the people who are choosing it are just I don't know, I'm making a moral judgment here, but more moral people who want to support drivers more.
We think it's a combination of both. You know, it's not a directly causal relationship, so there's some correlation there. I think you're absolutely right. But the experience is a good experience. The ride is a really cool ride. And I drive a Tesla, and I'll tell you I've heard many times people, first of all, that they have trouble with the handle, although they're getting much better at it, and when they get in the car, they're like, Wow, this is really cool.
You know.
They like it. It's something different and delight usually translates into better and then hopefully more tips for the drivers, which is great.
Now I do take Ubergreen most of the time, et cetera.
I'm doing the experiment.
But Uber provides electric option or a green option, only in two hundred cities. You operate in ten thousand cities. Now I've not done the math, but I'm pretty sure majority of those cities have electric cars now, if not all ten thousand, at least five thousand of them. So why is the green option still only in two hundred cities.
Well, first of all, we focus on our largest cities, right, So the two hundred cities tend to be the cities that have the most rides, et cetera. And for us, it is about this flywheel, right. We've got to establish a supply. A supply you can build demand and the flywheel can start working. And the fact is that if you try to do things ten thousand times, you're going to be less successful if you try to do two
hundred times. So our ambition is absolutely, we want to get to the ten thousand cities, but we have to operationalize all this on the ground, and the operationalizing can take some time. Now, I would tell you that a lot of people focus on cars. Uber is much more about other types of transportation. So in many markets now we're sponsoring kind of There are electric three wheelers in India and increasingly electric two wheelers in a lot of
Latin American countries, and we're sponsoring that. But the big emissions come from cars, which is why the focus is there.
There's also now an option in Uber in some places, at least it's there in the UK where you can book public transit. You can book a eurostart to go to Paris. How much of the business is coming from actually ordering a public transit from the platform.
It's a small but growing part of our business and the growth rates are very impressive. And for us. The first theme for us is that our number one competitor is personal car ownership, right, and we want in the US, we want you to get rid of that second car, and in many other places in the world we want you to get rid of the car. You know, cars are utilized three to four percent of the time, very inefficient use of space, very inefficient use of emissions, if
you want to call it that, et cetera. And so what we see is that in cities that have high public transit penetration, Uber does very well. Why because people use public transit often for community to work, et cetera. There are different circumstances where transit and Uber and trains, and for example here in London and a lot of other cities, line bikes can put together offerings on demand, offerings that can serve you in a multiplicity of situations that you might face.
I've been in London for twelve years and I don't have a car, and one reason I don't have a car is because I can either get a taxi your right hailing option and rest of the time transit really work.
So the theory that customer, so to speak, the.
Theory makes sense to me. But there's still the goal that you have to try and get to electric and lobbying on your own is going to be one thing you're doing, but that's not going to take you all the way. The other thing you're doing now is you are partnering with automakers. So you announced a partnership with BYD, the Chinese electric car giant really now the world's largest electric car maker. Where you want to bring one hundred thousand cars onto the Uber platform from bad By when.
I'd say by twenty thirty, although we don't have a specific timeframe there for BYD, but certainly our ambitions are significant, and we've always said that climate is a team sport. No one company can succeed here, and anyone's success kind of adds to the whole right. Climate success in the US helps China, Climate success in China helps Europe and vice versa. So really, in terms of the ecosystem, we
need governments to play their part. We need OEMs to manufacture a four doable, high quality cars, and then we need the charging infrastructure to also come into play, not just in the center of cities where a lot of more fortunate people live, but in the neighborhoods and areas where our drivers live as well, many of whom don't have garages to be able to charge overnight. So we're working with obviously governments, with OEMs like BID and many
other OEM partners with charging partners. We announced a great venture with Octopus Energy and BID and ourselves to bring a thousand chargers to our drivers at incredibly affordable rates as well, So it really is working with the ecosystems to drive success there. And Bid is a terrific manufacturer. They've got scale and they're building excellent cars.
After the break, I asked Dara what a just climate transition would look like for Uber's workforce. By the way, if you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Spotify and Apple. It helps other listeners find the show. How are you going to manage geopolitical tensions that are rising with China with the West because your goal to go electric is sooner in Western markets in US, Canada and Europe you want to be electric by twenty thirty, whereas the rest
of the world twenty forty. Of course, cheap Chinese evs that are good, safe, effective would help your goal, would make your life easier. But how will you manage it with the geopolitics?
I think the good news is that there are many OEMs and local oem so for example, Tesla is a terrific OEM and very popular model in the US. Volkswagen and many other European manufacturers are also moving their ev offerings and broadening them in ways that are quite constructive. So I think their first approaches work with local OEMs and encourage them to keep making investments not just in evs, but also to develop secondary markets for evs as well.
About two thirds of our drivers are buying used cars versus new cars, so that's an important development as well. I think from my standpoint, we can control geopolitics different countries,
different nations or areas like the EU. They are going to make their decisions based on considerations that can't just take climate into account, their other considerations, their local manufacturing sectors, economies, etc. We think that we have enough flexibility with a player, with both local players and then Chinese players, to bring these vehicles to the world right and a BYD vehicle in Brazil is just as valuable as a BID vehicle
in London as well. And while tariffs are not a good thing for the climate, they may be necessary based on what governments are trying to achieve. We think we can work with kind of reality as it is and accomplish our goals, you know, with or without tariff so to speak.
We've talked about electric vehicles as a new term climate solution. You have clear targets, but autonomy and autonomous vehicles can also help meet your goal. They are more energy efficient and they can be cheaper in the long term, and that can be a game changer to try and make electric cars a reality. I rode in a Weimo in San Francisco two months ago, I think, and I was amazed.
It was great and how.
Well it managed. It felt like it was a human driving the car, but it felt weird when the steering wheel was moving on its own. Yes, and you know, I hadn't done one before, so I did go in with trepidation, but I walked out just after one and I felt good. It was a wow moment.
It really was.
And I think about climate solutions all the time. There are plenty of good ones, but very few where I go wow, and autonomous vehicles can do that. What is your vision for Uber and bringing autonomous vehicles to people?
So if I step back, we think that the future for Uber is electric, shared, autonomous, and ultimately multimodal as well. We think autonomous brings incredible promise in terms of safety and affordability and availability. Ultimately, the autonomous driver it's a single driver that just keeps getting better and better and better year after year after year. Versus newer drivers who have to learn every single time they have to earn their license. The autonomous drivers learned its license and is
just going to get better. So for us, safety is incredibly important here. Their footprint is electric with which is great, and I share the same exact experience when I first took that Weayma it is a delightful, wonderful experience. So I think it goes back to what I was talking
about in terms of evs. The best way to drive EV adoption is if the product is great, and the product is delightful, and the product is a product that drivers love or riders love, and so I do think that automis can be a complimentary part of the solution, which is, if it's a great experience and it happens to be electric, why the heck not? Why isn't that great? It also make the streets safer. It'll also hopefully help not you, but many give up their personal car as well.
So it is absolutely part of the formula, but it is again it's a part we have to go electric shared we think is a really important part of sustainability as well, so we're investing actively in building up uber x share. Now it's combustion vehicles and evs as well, but to get two or more riders in a car really helps the climate footprint. Then you have autonomous, and then of course you have multimodal, which is transit, et cetera.
All of it has to come together in order for us to get to the promised land, so to speak.
Uber was early in autonomy, and then it got out of autonomy. You sold your business in twenty twenty, and now you're back in it with partners, you have way more coming onto your platform. You're working with Cruise. Do you regret losing the edge?
No, no, not at all. And I would tell you that first and foremost in terms of that decision was really what our expertise as a company afforded us. Uber is a software company. We move fast. We're constantly innovating, pushing the envelope, and that kind of speed and that kind of culture is difficult to achieve, both with software and hardware. There are very few companies that have done it. The pacing of building autonomous, the care that you have
to take the pacing of building hardware. You know you take kind of one shot every three years, so to speak, in terms of platforms. It requires a level of perfection and a level of planning that wasn't part of the Uber DNA. You know, part of innovation is making all kinds of mistakes and being okay with it, and being okay with that process of making a mistake, learning, gaining better the next time, the next time, the next time.
And the cultures in terms of how we were building for marketplace and for eats, was very different from the culture of how we were building for Autonomous and they are almost two different companies. And ultimately we decided that, you know, the main quest for Uber was to build this marketplace that allows anyone to get anything, go anywhere, really wire up and on demand and logistics system for your local city, and then drive it to a sustainable
future as well. And when I look at the autonomous players, you know, the only thing Weimo's working on is autonomy. The only thing Cruise is working on is autonomy. Or we ride or a wave here. That's their singular passion. And I think companies that have singular passions tend to succeed. It was time for us to figure out what our singular passion is and just like we work with many OEMs and many drivers out there, we're going to work with many autonomous partners.
Now they're on your platform in some places. So right now, what is the hold up for you to scale it quickly?
The biggest holdup is availability of autonomous vehicles right it is. The technology is still proving itself out. There are very few players who have taken the driver out. Wemo is one of them. So it really is the pace of maturity for autonomous and the regulatory framework as well. Not every every country or city has the kind of regulatory environment that you need. That is the real hold up. And then of course there's hardware. Right these are very
expensive vehicles today. The economics of autonomous don't pencil out based on the revenue you can make on ride share. I do think they will pencil out over the next five to fifteen years. So it's a combination of technology, hardware, platform, and ultimately economics that'll make it work.
Now. The thing that spooks people, and it did when I sat in a Waydow, is that there is no human there. And when an autonomous card gets into an accident and someone gets killed or hurt, which has happened in the past. Regulators can come down, and they can come down pretty hard. They can shut down a service which they've done, or cause a recall. And the limited number of autonomous vehicles that there are, in one way, it might feel unfair because humans probably and in numbers,
actually make more mistakes, yes than robots do now. But should we hold robots to a higher standard.
I think we should, and it may seem illogical in some ways or unfair, but I think that people understand that humans are fallible. We should be aiming higher for autonomous and this technology. How much higher is a debate. Should a robot driver does it need to be three times better, five towns better, ten times better. I think
that's up to the regulators. The other consideration is that when autonomous makes a mistake in one way or the other, there is only one driver who is essentially maybe driving one thousand people, ten thousand people, or one hundred thousand people, So the cost of a mistake can be significantly higher and kind of the blast radius of a potential error can be much higher, which again I think logically makes sense in terms of the higher hurdle right different drivers,
human drivers that are making mistakes all the time for different reasons, and having one poor driver on the road, you have to get off the road. But that threat is a localized threat, so to speak. With autonomous the
driver is much bigger, so to speak. So again, I do think it makes sense to hold a higher hurdle, higher bar, But ultimately, I think the promise of this technology, which is becoming realized, is it will be safer, it will save lives, and I think we will be seeing it in the next five to fifteen years, and I think that's a terrific thing. We will then, I would say in the next three to seventy years, start to
focus on economics. And anytime you build a newer product, every company, including us, you're willing to accept lower returns because it is a product that's growing. It's an investment in the future. I think ultimately the reason why we're doing it it is safer, it will be cheaper, and so yes, while the margins on autonomous will be lower than not autonomous in the early years, we think long term it can be great for business and it can be great for society.
So the other thing that is even further out, although it could be as real as this year is flying taxis. Yes, there is likely to be a Chinese company that may have a commercial service before the end of the year, and there are a few others waiting in the wings stink to be on the Uber platform. Now. I've had a long running skeptical fight with a professor of flying taxis, and I'm skeptical at is that it's the problem with autonomy.
If the step towards going to something that is such a new mode of transport is so many, it will just take longer to get there because people are not familiar, people feel trepidation, people will want to see how it goes, and that just extends it. The other one is, of course, the technology, which has been getting there now, so that that's one place where my skepticism has been more moderated
because the technology is real. You can actually see them at least in trials right now, and if one becomes commercial, you know it's real. Uber was ahead of the game, and an Elevate program that was about flying taxis just like the Autonomy one. You shut that down. How are you thinking about faying taxis today?
I think very similarly. And then we merge Elevator into joe By Aviation. We have a big investment in joe b really for the same reason it was. Building hardware is different from building software and networks. But I'm very optimistic about what's going on with vertical takeoff and landing.
Even more so than av you know, I think.
Av will touch more people, right, and will affect more lives. But I think if you step back, the cities of the world are building in three dimensions, right, So commercial living has gone in three dimensions, residential living has gone three dimensions. But our transportation systems are in two dimensions. And you know, maybe they have two planes, right, there's the on surface and then some places have metro subways, etc. But essentially two planes, and or.
There's the boring company which never worked out, but you.
Know, you know it's but it's the same idea, right. It's no wonder that our transportation infrastructure, no matter how much investment goes into it, eventually becomes overwhelmed. And so you need to introduce at scale, this third dimension into our transportation infrastructure and battery technology, fly by wire technology,
the sonic envelope of these vehicles. It is happening, and I do think that it will start with use cases that are specific, you know, call it bus routes, going to train stations or airports for example, is a great use case. That's what Joe Baviation is starting with. And then over a period of time it will expand from the you know, I do think in some ways the commercial the beginning of the commercial introduction of these two technologies, there's going to be quite a competition to see what
gets commercial faster. Ultimately, autonomous will touch more people, but Vitol is absolutely going to be part of our life going forward and it will save so much time.
When you think about climate solutions, there is a tendency, the right one to think about carbon as a constraint and you want to reduce emissions. That's the point, right, this is a climate solution. However, the other dimension is how is it a better solution? So we've talked a lot about the better solution. Now let's come to the
carbon constraint. When I look at your sustainability report and your carbon accounting, you have Scope one and Scope two emissions, which are direct emissions that come from either maybe natural gas if it's burned in a building, or power that's being supplied to you in the form of coal or gas given offices in the world, very small fraction of
your emissions. Majority of your emissions come from the fuel that is used by the drivers driving Uber, and you're talking about how that can go electric and eventually that electricity becomes decarbonized, so you get to zero. There's a portion of your carbon emissions that are embedded in your activity that you do not count today. So take deliveries. For example, when I order Uber Eat and I am vegetarian, so I don't typically order meat. I'll eat it when
I'm traveling, but never at home. But people do order meat, and so if you're ordering a hamburger versus you're ordering dall, the common footprint of those deliveries very different. Just like you can drive people to take electric cars by changing the green option in your app, you could be doing the same thing by getting people to buy more vegetarian food. But you're not accounting for those emissions today, So that doesn't give you the incentive to do it. Why don't you have it in.
Your cost I think it's a great call. It's certainly something that we should and we'll look at our focus right now in our delivery business is more related to the packaging that all food comes from, right, that vegetarian meal often comes in a container that is not compostable, may not be recyclable, etc. So that's the problem that we're trying to take on first. In terms of sustainable packaging, we for example, announced a pilot in Paris now to
fund sustainable packaging in Paris. We now have a marketplace, for example, where restaurants can easily identify and buy sustainable packaging that applies to every single piece of food or even grocery that you buy on Uber Eats, and I believe at this point that should be our focus. I think once we solve sustainable packaging, or once we feel like we have enough momentum and sustainable packaging, because we don't today. Even some restaurants are confused about what packaging
is sustainable versus what is not sustainable. Sometimes they think they're being sustainable, they have the best intentions, but technically they're not where they need to be. We're very very early, unfortunately as it relates to our delivery business, to really start to scale sustainable packaging. Once we do that, I'll take on your point of view.
There, you could start at least by accounting for the emotions even if you don't set targets. And I appreciate these are all hard things and you have to take on harder challenges as you solve the easier ones.
I think the other issue for us with accounting, and it's a good point is I'll have to as I think about your your issue live, it is going to
be difficult for us to understand exactly what restaurants are offering. Yeah, right, the weight of that hamburger, right, two hamburgers may have a very different climate profile depending on the size of that hamburger, the ingredients, etc. And the fact is, while we have a general view of what the ingredient list is, it's going to be much harder for us to specifically understand what's happening. But again, it is definitely something for us to consider.
It's sort of the power of the platform, which brings you supply and demand, is also one where you can drive change. And it's not a problem that just Uber is dealing with companies like Unilever, you know, who have two billion customers, but two million suppliers are also having to deal with it. They're having to go to them and be like you have to report this because we're
all in it together. This is how we meet our goals. So, yeah, it's a hard problem and you have to think through it, but I feel like there are ways in which you can get to it. It's an additional step somebody has to do, but it makes you a little more conscious about both the business as you run it, but also the choice so that it can.
Make and it might make for more healthy eating too, so that might not be a bad thing.
Yeah. The other thing that comes on climate that we we don't talk about when we talk about solutions. We talk about technologies, we talk about carbon but the third piece, which is crucial is people. I'm sure you've heard of the phrase the just transition, the transition that will bring people along. Now, let's take one solution autonomous vehicles. That will mean eventually fewer people driving cars, so fewer drivers.
How are you making sure that the drivers who are earning their income on Uber today will be ready for a future where technology is doing their job instead.
Well, it is a real issue that we have to think about, and we have been very clear with our driver based to some extent, our drivers on our platform are competing against the next driver who comes onto our platform, whether that's a human driver or a robot driver. So I think drivers understand how the platform works, and there's constantly new supply of drivers coming onto the platform. So for us, one is communication being very clear. Second for
us is finding different use cases. So for example, there are going to be real challenges in terms of delivery and providing autonomous delivery. It's promising, but coming out of the restaurant, putting the food in or delivering the food in high rise provides different logistical challenges. Same thing in terms of grocery shopping. Right, So one is offering different types of work for drivers to be able to transition into over a long period of time, maybe they go
from driving to delivering to shopping. We're even now working on actually there's a group of our drivers and some non drivers who are working on AI labeling and translation and essentially training AI agents as well as another kind of work. So that to the extent that there are autonomous vehicles coming onto the platform, maybe our drivers are training those autonomous vehicles. So we are working with expanding
the scope of work. But I think the question that you're asking, it's a very big question in terms of the role of automation in general. Now, I do think that there's a drama in terms of our robots going to replace the humans. What we've seen over and over again in history is that robots complement humans and then humans can move on to different kinds of work or higher value work. My hope is that the same happens
in terms of the transportation industry. But we're definitely doing our part in terms of expanding the scope of the opportunities on the platform.
And within that same framework there so that the esg. The environmental witch we've talked about the social side where there has been a move over this period to have more and more benefits being given to the drivers. Yes, and in some places like here in the UK you have vacation pay, in other places you get pensions etc. You've said you prefer or it is actually better for the driver to have the hybrid choice that they're not an employee. They are able to come on the platform
and leave it when they want. And why is it better for them do not have employee benefits?
Well, the number one, two and three reason why people come onto the platform or drivers come onto the platform is flexibility. Flexibility and flexibility employment benefits always come with demands, right, which is where are you going to work, when are you going to work, what are your hours, et cetera.
So there's a trade off, right. With flexibility, drivers get to make their own work hours where they want to go, and we think ultimately the best solution is retain flexibility, but then add to that certain protections that you associate with full time jobs, whether it's a minimum pay or pension benefits, time off, insurance, etc. So we think the
hybrid solution is a better solution. It makes driving for Ruber, delivering for Uber more attractive, so our network becomes more liquid ETAs get better, improves the quality of our network as well. We think that's the right solution going forward. Thank you, Tor, Thank you really appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to zero and now for the sound of the week. That's the driver of the future, an algorithm driving away more. Also, please do check out an excellent investigation from my colleagues into how Uber has been selectively locking out some drivers in New York City between rides and thus dramatically reducing their pay. You can read that investigation on Bloomberg dot com and it's linked
in the show notes. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who owns more than one car. You can get in touch at zero pod at bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is might Le Rau, Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Stage boun and head of Talk is Brendan Newnan.
Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Aaron Rudkoff, Schawon Wagner, Ethan Steinberg, Jessica Beck, and Monique Molima. I am Akshatrati Banks