Uber has laid out the next steps in its bid to be a zero-emissions platform in Europe and North America by 2030 and globally by 2040.
Speaking at a company event in London this week that also included actor and environmentalist Edward Norton for a little Hollywood star power, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi described driving emissions to zero as the “defining challenge of our generation.”
Khosrowshahi added that Uber has tripled the number of electric vehicles on the platform in the past year alone and that 1 in 20 electric vehicle miles in North America are on Uber, 1 in 10 for major cities in Europe, and that the company is close to reaching 1 in 5 EV miles in London on Uber.
During the Go-Get Zero event, product executives from across the company laid out new functionality for drivers and riders aimed at boosting sustainable travel.
Sachin Kansal, vice president of product management for Uber, said the company is building technology that connects to a car’s battery so that it can recommend to drivers the optimal time to charge a vehicle based on electricity cost, demand for rides, historical earnings data, traffic and other factors.
The Battery-Aware Matching feature will also ensure that drivers receive trip requests only for journeys they can complete according to battery level or that end near a charging point.
Kansal said that some of the features are already available with more to come in the next few months.
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On the rider side, developments include partnerships with airports, initially including Phoenix Skyharbor, Portland International and Madrid Barajas, establishing dedicated pickup zones for customers making green choices.
Divya Dalapathi, director of product management for maps, said that airport trips make up about 15% of Uber’s business and tend to be longer than the average ride and therefore have a greater impact on the environment.
The Green Curb at Airports initiative provides perks and discounts to drivers and riders with London Heathrow Airport the first to launch a zone.
Uber also unveiled further initiatives for riders with UberX Share extending to a further 18 cities.
Later this year, riders will also have access to their emission savings, which will be shown in a way that gives context to the savings and demonstrates their impact.
Uber is also expanding its Carshare product to Boston and Toronto from its current base in Australia.
Carshare launched following the company’s acquisition of Australia-based car-sharing platform Car Next Door in January 2022.
Hollywood vs. real world
Norton, who stars in the Apple TV+ climate change impact series "Extrapolations," also joined the event to share his thoughts on Uber’s initiatives as well as the impact of technology on the environment.
“Today we’re seeing the second and third order negative effects of our actions in ways that most people weren’t paying attention to years ago. JFK Airport is closed today because of fires in Canada. We thought this was a West Coast problem, but you can’t go outside, kids are inside today with worse air quality than Delhi, in New York City.
“When you take actions, when you try to push the adoption of EVs at a big global scale on the kind of platform you guys have, there are lots of positive second- and third-order effects that aren’t even being discussed here today.”
Despite criticism of ongoing protests from younger generations, Norton said “young people should be strident, they should be loud and they should be mad.”
“We are way behind. We have been practicing short-term, quarterly-report thinking for way too long, and the external costs have got to come internal. We can’t have business models that externalize their environmental impacts.”
He said he feels optimistic about how fast consciousness has accelerated.
“We have absorbed the data and realized what we’re doing in the blink of an eye. If we go to our own youth and remember what our interaction with technology was, and we look at what’s going on today, there’s no way we could have imagined what the world was going to look like now. It would have sounded like science fiction. We have to credit ourselves with a capacity to do things over the next 50 years that we are barely imagining now. Our technological and innovation capacity give me hope. The means by which we’ll not just stop but remediate our negative impacts we’re only beginning to invent.”
He also touched on carbon credits and offsetting, which, despite criticism from many quarters, he still sees value in as long as certification standards continue to improve and the initiatives “are allowed to evolve.”
He encouraged all corporations that are flying people around on planes to purchase offsets, adding that the price of offsets is more important than the volume.
“We need corporate, voluntary leadership using offset modality to underwrite the projects at the true cost of the engagement, and that is not $6 a ton, it’s more like $15 a ton.”