It is an urban legend that appears regularly on social networks: the VTC company Uber would take advantage of the anguish that certain customers run out of battery to increase the bill. In an article published in 2021, but updated at the end of March 2023, the French site Le Bonbon claims to have “proven” that Uber uses the mobile battery level to increase its prices.
A statement that is contradicted however in the article in the middle, which specifies that its tests with various battery levels resulted in runs at the same price. Shared on Twitter on April 4 by the “AlertesInfos” account, which claims to transmit “source information”, a post containing this conclusion has been viewed 1.6 million times.
inconclusive proof
In fact, the Le Bonbon site actually carried out another test: a reservation with energy saving mode activated and another without activating this mode, which resulted in a price increase of around 10% in the first case. A test also carried out by Tech&Co on three different smartphones, which each time resulted in equivalent prices.
And for good reason: the methodology used does not allow in any way to isolate the factor of the activation of an energy saving mode to determine the prices of Uber trips. As these are based on supply and demand at any given time, the price of a trip can vary within a few seconds, depending on the availability of drivers in the area.
A precision that, however, is far from new. If the company admitted to having access to data related to the battery level of users’ smartphones, it has always claimed that this information was never used. A statement found in an article on the US site Mashable published in 2016, but used as a source by Le Bonbon.
This mistrust is also fueled by Uber’s decision to stop being transparent about its pricing multiplier. In its beginnings, the company showed before each race the rate of price increase, based on supply and demand. Information that no longer appears in the current version of the application.
Source: BFM TV
