Uber starts giving drivers warnings about erratic driving

Starting today, Uber is keeping a very close eye on its drivers to ensure they give a smooth ride to passengers across Asia. The startup is doing this by tapping into the data available from their driver’s smartphones, which will give away any sudden swerves, excessive braking, or over-enthusiastic acceleration.

“It’s a unique opportunity to improve road safety” using technology, says Dorothy Chou, Uber’s head of public policy for safety, privacy, and security. The idea is to use the mountain of data from all those smartphones’ accelerometers to “predict, prevent, and reduce” unsafe driving that can lead to accidents – or to nauseous passengers giving drivers a bad rating.

Uber drivers in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and one Indian city (Bangalore) will today start getting a daily report on their driving through the app.

Worse than average

These reports will not lead to punishments for lead-footed drivers – at least not yet.

“What we’re looking for is the outlier,” explains Dorothy, talking to Tech in Asia. So the daily reports allow for the different dynamics of every city – or for roads that tend to cause harsh braking – and instead watch out for things that a driver does differently from everyone else at a certain place or time. That highlights an individual’s erratic driving.

Dodging and weaving through traffic in Bangalore, India. GIF credit: author.

In addition, Uber is also now rolling out instant speeding alerts and warnings about not using a dashboard mount for the phone.

Uber first launched its daily reports in a few US cities in June.

“We were actually able to reduce harsh braking and rapid acceleration rates by about 10 percent,” says Dorothy of the initial tests. That encouraged the company to make the report a permanent feature in the app.