Currently in a pilot phase, the service will be made available by Uber by the end of the year.
Currently in a pilot phase, the service will be made available by Uber by the end of the year.
To reach the masses, Uber India is gearing up to enable passengers to book bus seats using the Uber app.
A top Uber executive said that currently in a pilot phase, the service will be made available by the end of the year, with a rollout in several cities for 2023.
“Uber hopes to open an entirely new addressable segment… so that we can serve the common man holistically,” Prabhjit Singh, president, Uber India and South Asia, said in an interview.
He said that experimentation with high-capacity vehicles had started recently and the entire technology was being developed in India.
Uber, he said, was trying to address the main concerns of bus passengers, which were belief in a seat, ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) launch, tracking and the comfort of traveling in an air-conditioned vehicle.
“We also explored technology that can help in dynamic routing based on supply and demand, rather than a bus plying on a fixed route. We took elements of the pre-booking, dynamic routing, tracking experience and brought it together for high-capacity vehicles,” said Mr.
The pilots were working in the Delhi-Gurugram route with Gurugram Municipal Authority for public transport users, some corporate for employee transport and some fleet owners, where a commuter could book directly.
“The last game is to be able to take it to multiple cities and serve a larger segment of the population. I want to serve the next 100 million consumers. It will take us three to five years to expand and expand India.” to maintain it,” Mr Singh said.
A passenger can buy a subscription pass for the service, which will cost much less than Uber Go and help decongest.
“We are keen to reach as many cities as possible, especially in the top 8 cities, but for this we need to work with local policy makers as many cities do not have a regulatory definition to define this service” With the work needed to define the service he said.
He said, “We are looking forward to launch it in many cities by the end of this year and by 2023. Commuters in many Indian cities in 2023… hope to be able to book buses very soon, including Mumbai.” Uber, which has completed 9 years in India, is now providing its fleet of cars, autos and two-wheelers on its app. It has expanded operations to 120 cities and has over 6,00,000 drivers on its app, Mr. Singh said.
“India has been an incredibly fulfilling market for us, a market where we are very excited about long-term growth prospects. Ride hailing has very little penetration here, so there is huge room for us to grow,” They said.
For example, ride hailing in the US entered about 3.9% of the addressable population, but in India the number was less than 0.5%. He said the company is no longer losing sleep over what its immediate rival did.
“Because our competition is with privately owned vehicles. We are focused on delivering experience rather than chasing vanity metrics. We will focus on mobility business only and we want to be a one-stop multi modal mobility solution [provider],” He added.
“Our paths are very different from being perfect because we are no longer competing with a riding player. We are competing for the big pie,” he said.
“India is our fastest growing market globally, both in terms of trade volume and value. It will only grow exponentially as we are introducing new services like two wheeler, three wheeler and bus. India is not only important to us as a market but it is also a great source of innovation which we export globally.
‘Very big’ investment in India
The company’s technology centers in Bengaluru and Hyderabad have more than 1,000 engineers who are creating end-to-end designs for its global operations and 500 more engineers to be hired soon.
He said the company will make “huge” investments in India in the next few years.
“India is a shining star in the overall Uber ecosystem globally. Post COVID business “roaring” is back. Now our business is bigger in both volume and value than it was before the pandemic. More drivers are joining the platform and buying new cars. I am very optimistic and optimistic about the future of ride hailing and the growth of Uber in India,” said Mr. Singh.