The wildly popular on-demand private ride requester Uber today announced a brand new feature: fare splitting. It is a simple feature, but a much-needed one to bring in new customers while fostering the happiness of the current user base.
Request your ride, tap the up arrow next to the driver’s information, click split fare, choose your friends, and hit send. Your friends tap the text message link, go directly to the app, and confirm the fare split. Uber handles everything else.
“At Uber, we love math – we have a whole team dedicated to it,” says the blog post. “But we understand that not everyone does. So we are going to do the long division for you.”
The market surrounding Uber is extremely competitive, not just with taxi cabs, but with other ride sharing platforms like Car2Go, Lyft, and SideCar. This is the most recent, in a long line of moves, made by Uber to stay on top.
So now you can avoid being “that person” when it comes time to collect money from your friends. The fabled Uber SUV trip that has always been too expensive is now attainable if you split it six ways. Who knows, you might even be able to split the ultimate Uber ride, the Uber Chopper.