Uber To know Drivers’ Speeding Rate With Smartphone Gyrometer Data

In most cases, Uber drivers have been in a hurry than need be. Once you alight and complete the ride, you are left with the app asking you how you’d rate your experience. This is quite a great privilege to air your views but when opinions are strong it’s important the company balances the drivers’ feedback as well in order to be fair to every party.

For the purpose of getting the lowdown, Uber made it known today that it has been running a pilot program that uses drivers’ smartphone gyrometer data to collate information about rides. Whether it’s checking to see if the drivers is busy playing with his phone during the ride or it’s measuring the speed rate of the driver. It is believed by Uber that this move can help them assess which of their drivers are being rated fairly and which ones may be getting a bad reputation.

Speeding is serious stuff, and it’s important that Uber keeps their drivers in check even if they are independent contractors and the company isn’t paying their speeding tickets.

The company says there’s a pretty clear safety benefit to collecting this data, in that they can more easily identify driver’s who fall outside the norm in terms of speeding. If the company can identify the average speed of their drivers in a certain area and then can cross check that with drivers who are going quite a bit faster and may have racked up some negative ratings, they’re much more well-equipped to keep a dialog open with their drivers and be more transparent when they ask them to make some changes.

According to a blog post Uber noted that “If the rating is low, we ask why. It might be that a driver is unhappy about an unruly rider. Or a rider is worried that her driver was going too fast. Either way, we need to check what actually happened. Mostly it’s about talking to both sides. But increasingly technology can help get to the truth.

This obviously has applications a little bit more far-reaching than just talking about customer satisfaction. This is really allowing Uber to harness a greater deal of data to see how their drivers are operating their vehicles in different areas.