In the long term our competition is private vehicle ownership: Uber India President Prabhjeet Singh

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Even as the auto industry goes through upheavals and changes with a focus on EVs and digitisation, cab-hailing company Uber India wants to be a single unified platform for everything to do with mobility. Prabhjeet Singh, President, India & South Asia, Uber talks about new business, the challenges that come with managing over half-a-million drivers and how he is tackling demand that’s greater than supply.

Edited excerpts:

How is the business for your cab-hailing business?

We are at upwards of 100 percent pre-pandemic and continue to see faster growth. A few structural things have changed which is we are acquiring more drivers and riders per month than we have ever done in our history of being here. We don't share exact numbers but we have more than 6 lakh drivers and are growing every day. The two-wheeler and three-wheeler business is also growing very fast.

There have been recent announcements with restrictive laws on two-wheeler taxis….

Two-wheeler mobility is great for riders, drivers and cities, and the reason it is growing so well is that it caters to requirements for all in terms of congestion, last mile and ease of movement. That being said, we continue to engage with the right authorities for the best frameworks to continue to grow this product.

You just announced a tie-up with Tata Motors to buy 25,000 electric vehicles. Why now?

The reality is that even while the EV ecosystem is still very nascent in India, we have made a global commitment to be emission-free, in terms of all modes of transport available on our platform by 2040. For India, which is unlike other western markets, that journey will have different avatars. So most likely the ecosystem development will happen in a very unstructured manner because it's going to have its pockets of deployment. For example, for the fleets we are looking to deploy, many of them are building captive charging infrastructure, because the public charging infra is non-existent.
While our announcement yesterday was about four-wheelers being deployed, three-wheelers and two-wheelers are also going through a pace of electrification, which might be even faster because they are beginning to reach a tipping point on the total cost of ownership, which the cars business hasn’t. So we see ourselves as a catalyst to that; our job is to be able to work with all players in the ecosystem. OEMs, infra providers, fleet partners and government stakeholders, and make sure what we bring to the table is incredible precision on quantity and quality of demand, which will then put these assets to high utilisation use cases immediately.. It then makes economic sense for any buyer of the vehicle to make that purchase.

Will more aggressive training and skilling help the drivers ramp up on service quality?

We need to have the largest number of rightly trained drivers on the ground. We are not trying to make them perfectly fluent in English or perfectly dressed, so we onboard drivers who are already operating in the space and have gone through a state-mandated process. What we take them through is a two-part process – background checks, which is all the hygiene stuff, and then run a screening process. As they drive with us, we collect all the information to see ratings and how they behaved after a number of drives. Once that happens, we actually bring in a number of drivers on whom we have inputs for further training with our support centres. Certain drivers are pushed content online and have to clear that before they can drive again. So there are blockers which will limit access until it happens. We are training as many as 10,000 drivers with third parties and in conjunction with the Delhi government for the G20 event.

The big challenges in using an Uber are either bad or low wifi-connectivity or getting a car when you need it or then getting a driver to take you where you want to go and not where he wants to ply his vehicle, or a driver wanting payment in cash. How do you prevent the system from getting gamed?

The heart of the business is a ‘bits and atoms’ business which is unlike other digital companies we also operate in the physical world and have to tackle the messy parts – the bits and the atoms, all of what you describe, are events that both hurt the brand as well dilute the service quality and overall experience. At the end of the day, the driver is the face of the business and what we are doing is to get to the root cause of their behaviour and why it happens. So the first is where does the customer want to go? Earlier, fuel prices had spiked some 45 percent when demand had not caught up, office traffic hadn't resumed and drivers were of the view that if they picked up a customer it ought to be worth their while. Many drivers were also having cashflow challenges and wanted liquidity because they had come out of a long phase of no business. Solving this is based on two things: One is that of course there are a few bad actors who are disproportionately creating problems and doing it illogically because they simply use the system to their advantage and we part ways with those. The second is to understand the issues and I have personally driven a cab to get a sense of what's happening in real-time every day. So drivers are also gig workers and therefore are making a judgment call based on what else they have going on. But we are clear that if you accept a trip, you have to pick up. There was a phase when drivers would ask where you are going but that has come down by 90 percent.

This brings us to a really important question…can you get much tougher with the ‘bad actors’?

That's a carrot-and-stick approach which I hate. There are bad actors on the platform to whom we take a zero-tolerance approach... period. Safety incidents? Zero tolerance. Wrong driver? Zero tolerance, which is like if you log in with someone else's app and pick up a passenger, and if our face detection technology shows that you've done it, you're off the platform, non-negotiable. Then many of them will then go to the Union which will put pressure, and then they will go to different arms of the government, that is the practice. But we do have zero-tolerance stands. Like when you are soliciting a trip outside the app. Because it is a safety risk. Or if you nudge a consumer to go offline, I have no way of tracking it but we are running a campaign called Off the app is off the map, I then cannot intervene to support you. Or you can’t reach out to me, so that's a zero-tolerance offence. So then we do run a very kind of, distilled, stage-gated warning process. Overspeeding, driving rashly, the vehicle wasn't maintained well, issues around continued cancellation — they go to a certain set of actions that we say look, first warning, don't do this. Here's training, second warning, you can't go online, finish this training, third time if this happens then you are off the platform.

So the drivers are as intrinsic to your business as the passengers?

I think at the end of the day, the 600,000 active earners are all individuals very much like you and I but just from often a different socioeconomic background, and all they're looking for is a common set of things across the states. The number one thing they're looking for is respect. Secondly, they're looking for stability and predictability of earnings. And third is they are looking for a safety net, that if something goes wrong, does somebody have my back? And that's where our support system, in terms of calling someone, they can walk into our office, in each location. Then you put a layer of technology to enable this. So 95 percent of the drivers across the country, independent of the background, are actually looking for that, and that is incredibly energising and allows us to focus on things which matter.

Do local state regulations sometimes make that hard?

So for example, finding a car is harder in Bengaluru. But sitting in Mumbai or Delhi, it's very hard for you to probably fully appreciate what's going on locally. The reality is because of the regulatory framework there one cannot compensate drivers for time since 2018 in Bengaluru. So because of the fare structure, you can only compensate drivers per kilometre and in a high congestion city, in peak hours, the drivers are saying I don't want to drive because you are not charging the consumer what is fair pricing.

Are you saying one should only expect to get a cab once in a while when you call Uber?

No, for every vehicle you request, you should be able to get it. That's the code. But we continue to experiment with versions of these. For example, Uber reserve, priority, dispatches and pickups and I think those experiments will go on but again, not being ruled out is the heart of where I am spending the bulk of time and energy solving for the code.

You also have loads of competition now, so how do you plan to up the ante?

So who is the competition? In the long term we look at private vehicle ownership, that's our competition. Obviously, there are multiple players who operate in the market. Historically, there were players already operating even before Uber entered the market, who are of a certain size and scale, certain business models and many local competitors in different states. But I think in general, our core thesis is we continue to be competition-aware but not competition-obsessed. We’ll look at them, what they're doing, if there's something which they're doing well, we’ll try and replicate, if there's something which they are doing, which is kind of impacting our growth, we kind of find a way to learn and make sure we do a better job on what we can control. India is incredibly large, and I believe there is space for multiple players to operate.

What is your number one priority?

It is our service quality promise because the consumer will come back because of it and while we are addressing it, I am the first to acknowledge that there are still pockets that are being worked on. But demand has outstripped supply. We are a supply-constrained market across most categories. Half of it will get solved with more vehicles on the road but that was interrupted in the pandemic and this year is seeing recovery.