Uber is adding new features to its app to make group activities cheaper and easier to split.
Perhaps you want to arrive at a wedding at the same time as your friends or split your weekly grocery delivery with your roommates, Uber's new features will now make that possible. The company on Wednesday announced the updates at Go-Get, its annual product showcase.
The first feature, called group rides, allows up to four people with separate pick-up locations to share one car headed to the same place. Once you request a ride, you can share it with your friends and invite them to join your trip. Each rider adds their pickup location, and the app determines the most efficient route. Everyone is charged individually based on the amount of time they spent in the car.
"With group rides, we make it easier, more convenient, and more seamless for you to self-organize a group and share the ride," Camiel Irving, general manager for Uber Rides in US and Canada told Insider. "We've known that this existing behavior was taking place, but we've given people the tech to make it work for them."
The second feature is group ordering for grocery, which allows households to share their grocery orders on UberEats. Each person can add items to a shared grocery cart and Uber automatically splits the bill. You can also create recurring orders and set deadlines so everyone on the account receives reminders to add their selections.
"The whole idea behind the product is a set and forget, very hassle free experience," Therese Lim, head of product for Uber Grocery, told Insider. "It saves people time because a lot of time is spent sometimes on coordinating. What we wanted to do in this case is not just create a helper tool that would help you coordinate, but actually take the coordination out of anybody's hands and have the app play that coordination role."
The grocery feature also has a special request field for items that may not be in a store's online catalog. So for example, you can ask your shopper to grab a container of fresh cut fruit from the produce aisle or a prepared sandwich from the deli.
"Those things are not particularly part of a catalog that gets updated every day," Lim said. "But now we are allowing people to literally specify."
Group orders on Uber Eats are available starting on May 17, while group rides on Uber will roll out in the upcoming weeks, though Uber did not provide a specific date.
