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Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters

Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities — one solution to a world that feels, for most people, more expensive every day. 

Starting Wednesday, riders in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco will be able to save 50% off the price of an UberX trip by booking with Uber’s new “Route Share” feature. 

The company announced Route Share and other new features and discounts designed to help customers save money on rides and deliveries at its annual Go-Get event. The aim is to attract and maintain a loyal customer base that continues to use the Uber app in spite of outside economic pressures.

The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer. He noted that there will be dozens of routes in each launch city — like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC. The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers. To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders. 

Riders can book a seat anywhere from seven days to 10 minutes before a scheduled pickup, and the app will provide them with turn-by-turn directions to get them from their house to the corner where they’ll be picked up.

Uber is relying on the same underlying technology that it uses for Uber Share, its shared rides offering where riders can get 15% to 30% off the cost of an UberX ride by pooling with others. Kansal told TechCrunch that Uber completes millions of shared trips annually and has been seeing more traction lately as riders look for more ways to save. Hence, Route Share. 

“Because of the size of our network, both on the consumer side as well as the driver side, and our core matching and market-based technology, it allows us to do something like this and put multiple people in the same car while creating efficiency and predictability for their commute,” Kansal told TechCrunch. 

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Uber envisions a future where Route Share could qualify for pre-tax commuter benefits. However, as a spokesperson noted, the company would need to find a way to match those trips with Uber XL vehicles. That’s because only six-seater vehicles would meet the eligibility requirements.

A potential progression of Route Share would involve autonomous vehicles, particularly in chaotic cities like New York City, where no self-driving car companies have deigned to test. 

Uber has partnerships with 18 AV companies and during its first-quarter earnings delivery last week, the company reported it has grown to an annualized rate of 1.5 million mobility and delivery AV trips on the Uber network. 

One of Uber’s more recent AV partners is with Volkswagen. The two plan to work together to add autonomous versions of VW’s ID. Buzz AD electric vehicles to the Uber app — specifically for shared rides — starting in Los Angeles in 2026.

“You can see a natural extension of us being able to bring Route Share to autonomous vehicles, as well,” Kansal said. “[Route Share] has a lot of advantages for the autonomous vehicle. It’s a very well-defined route, and so the pickups and drop offs are predictable.”

Other ways frequent Uber users can save

Image Credits:Uber

Each of Uber’s Get-Go events has a theme. Last year, it was focused on ways to help people spend more time together. This year, with economic uncertainty looming due to President Trump’s tariffs, mass layoffs across the tech world, and AI coming for all our jobs, Uber is focusing on cost savings for riders. In the process, Uber hopes to create a predictable cash flow and stickiness that keeps riders engaged with Uber. 

“Of late, what we have heard very loud and clear is people feel very uncertain, people feel overwhelmed, and people are feeling the prices in many different walks of life, and there’s this need and desire to get more affordable options,” Kansal said. “So everything we’re announcing is squarely focused on how we make life more affordable for them.”

One of Uber’s new features is “ride passes,” which riders can use to “protect their price for a one-hour window each day on their selected routes.” There are two ways this will work. Either riders can pay $2.99 to lock in a price on a specific route, or they can pay upfront and buy a bundle of prepaid trips. They can buy five, 10, 15, or 20 rides for an “even deeper discount.” 

The price lock offer will be available for riders in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. starting Wednesday, with the rest of the U.S. and Brazil to follow. In the fall, price lock and prepaid passes will be available for teen accounts, too. 

On the Uber Eats side of things, Uber is going deeper into its partnership with OpenTable and launching a feature called Dine Out, which lets customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Ireland, and Australia book tables via OpenTable on the Uber app. When they reserve (either on the Uber app or on OpenTable’s app), they’ll get a discount on an Uber ride to the restaurant. Additionally, OpenTable members will soon be able to use their points on Uber and Uber Eats — not unlike Uber’s partnership with Delta Air Lines

These kinds of deals could offer savings for riders, particularly during peak demand times when surge pricing is in effect. But they’re likely more beneficial for people who frequently use Uber’s service. Prepaid packages often feel cheaper due to upfront discounts, but riders could also overestimate how much they’ll use them.

Uber’s pricing strategy is also not transparent, and some reports have suggested that riders with prepaid credits or gift cards get higher fare quotes compared to those paying per ride. (Anecdotally, whenever I switch my payment method from my personal card to my business card, the price of the ride jumps a few dollars.) 

An Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch the price lock feature is based on historical prices of that trip, and the prepaid pass protects against price spikes and adds discounts that are also based on historical prices.

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Uber Member Days
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The Amazonification of Uber: Part II

Three years ago, I wrote about the Amazonification of Uber, an evolution of the transportation company into a closed business loop that feeds customers back into other Uber channels. At the time, the focus was on how Uber creates customer stickiness by, for example, actively cross-selling food delivery customers into grocery, and grocery into alcohol, and then alcohol back into mobility. 

Today, Uber appears to be moving beyond its focus on transportation and working to become a convenient super app, an aggregator of services, a daily-use lifestyle platform with its best offerings tucked behind a paywall. 

Case in point: Uber this week is launching its first Uber One Member Days, the company’s own version of Amazon’s Prime Day. Prime Day is a two-day shopping event exclusively for Amazon Prime members, a consumerist hype fest that leads people to spend more than they normally would on material objects because THE DEALS! 

Amazon has seen sales rise every year since launching the event in 2015, and last year, the company is estimated to have topped $14 billion in sales.

Uber is a long, long way away from achieving such scale, but the potential is there given the company’s global presence, logistics technology, and network of drivers — both gig and autonomous. 

The first Uber One Member Day goes from May 16 to 23 and promises tens of thousands of deals across Uber’s own product lineup as well as its various retail and hospitality partners.

Uber customers will have access to 20% off Uber Black, 30% off Uber Reserve, and 40% off Uber Comfort. Other deals include: 

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  • 3,000 Delta Skymiles points for people who’ve linked their Delta and Uber accounts and taken 10 trips during the week. 
  • Oura rings discounts.
  • $20 off your next Ticketmaster purchase if you spend $3 on groceries.
  • Free food from almost every fast food restaurant, including a Chipotle burrito, a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee, and a 10-piece chicken nuggets from McDonald’s.  

“We want to create delight for Uber One members,” Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch. “This should be a great savings period for them. But also for folks who are not members right now, it’s a great way for them to get an introduction into membership as they become members during this period.”

Uber is always working to grow its Uber One membership base, which is at around 30 million members today. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call last week that members “tend to have high retention.”

“They spend three times more than non-members, as well,” Khosrowshahi said. 

As Uber works to aggregate more partnerships outside of food and grocery delivery (just look at its recent tie-up with Home Depot) and combine those deals with its membership program, the company is mirroring Amazon’s evolution. Amazon started as a digital bookseller. Then it began selling everything. Now it also owns the infrastructure for both e-commerce and digital life, whether that’s AWS cloud services or Prime Video. 

For many, Amazon is a way of life. With Uber One Member Days, the company is signaling that it, too, wants that kind of ubiquity. And it’s betting that asset-light mobility — not packages delivered in Rivian vans — could be the next backbone of digital consumer culture.

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UP.Labs-Porsche’s newest startup wants to be the Plaid of automotive retail

As serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, scaled, and then successfully sold mobile auto repair service startup RepairSmith to AutoNation, he was plagued by a persistent problem. 

The automotive retail industry has a communication problem. And it’s an expensive one. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops — each one with an array of software systems — lack a common language to make communication with manufacturers and other businesses easier.

“We had this problem of, ‘how do you work with dealerships and shops and talk to them as you’re running around repairing cars and trying to refer them business or get parts from them?’” he said. “And it’s very fragmented, very difficult, very costly to build all these custom integrations with the different stores.”

For instance, the average dealership relies on more than 40 different software systems, ranging from dealer management systems and customer relationship management tools to digital retailing, service, inventory, and payment processing platforms.

Milne compared it to the financial services industry 20 years ago. Fintech company Plaid, which connects bank accounts to financial applications, helped close that communication gap. Milne wants to do the same, but for automotive retail. 

Milne is now founder and CEO of a new startup called AutoUnify that has built an API to allow dealerships and service shops to communicate in real time with the manufacturers and software vendors that power their operations.

AutoUnify has been operating quietly for nine months and is based in Santa Monica, California. After piloting with multiple customers in 2024, AutoUnify is now opening its sales to the industry.

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AutoUnify is the latest startup to come out of a multi-year partnership between UP.Labs and Porsche. The startup has also raised $5 million in a round led by UP.Partners. Those funds will help the startup scale its workforce from the nine it employs today to about 20 by the end of the year.

“Really the focus for the rest of the year is building the technology and building the sales pipeline,” he said.

Image Credits:UP.Labs

UP.Labs is not a venture firm, even though it emerged from, and operates in parallel with, UP.Partners. It’s not a corporate accelerator or incubator either. The company, which launched during UP.Summit 2022 in Bentonville, Arkansas, is structured as a venture lab with a new kind of financial investment vehicle.

Up.Labs strikes partnerships with major corporations — Porsche was the first — and then works to identify the industry’s biggest problems and create startups with business models that will solve those pain points. In an unusual twist, these startups don’t simply serve the company, in this case, Porsche. To be successful, they have to be able to serve the broader market. 

Up.Labs has also locked in similar deals with Alaska Airlines and JB Hunt. 

Up.Labs CEO John Kuolt said they’ve uncovered some of the automotive industry’s biggest challenges while working with Porsche. To date, the companies have launched four startups, including Pull Systems, a software-as-as-service platform that provides performance management software to EV suppliers, manufacturers, and operators, and Sensigo, which created an AI platform that allows service technicians to quickly diagnose problems in modern, software-defined vehicles. 

AutoUnify is its fourth startup, and one that stands out as one of the most critical and most difficult issues to solve, according to Kuolt.

“It’s exactly the kind of breakthrough we build for: a company that not only tackles a technical challenge, but fundamentally reshapes how an entire industry operates,” he said. 

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