How Uber Is Building Uber for Trucking
As Uber battles taxis and other ride-hailing apps in cities across the world, the company is beginning to move quickly into a much larger transportation market: trucking.
This spring, Uber unveiled Uber Freight, a brokerage service connecting shippers and truckers through a new app. Conceptually, “Uber for trucking” seems like a logical extension of the passenger transport business.
But the logistics industry has totally different dynamics. For one, it’s business to business. Most truckers are owner-operators or they’re part of very small companies with a handful of vehicles. The industry has well-established ways of doing things. Truckers basically work in the places where Uber’s ride-hailing service doesn’t. And unlike Uber’s ride-hailing service, the company can’t bring a huge new supply of drivers onto the market to change the dynamics of transportation. As it is, there are somewhere north of 3 million truck drivers in America, between long-haul and delivery.
Uber Freight was born out of the marriage of an internal team with members of Otto, after Uber acquired the latter company early last year. Since then, the teams have split up into self-driving research and development, managed by Alden Woodrow, formerly of Google X, and the Uber Freight team. Freight has a floor of one of Uber’s offices in downtown San Francisco and a large operations team in Chicago.
Uber has had a brutal last year. The company's culture has been critiqued from the inside and outside as sexist and fratty. The problems led to the ouster of a series of top executives, including founder Travis Kalanick. Even in trucking, Uber's acquisition of Otto has led to a lawsuit filed
