05/01/2026
Uber doesn't want to be just a rides app anymore, "Uber is becoming an app for everything." In 48 hours, it unveiled a massive expansion of what Uber is becoming.
Wednesday at GO-GET 2026, Uber introduced:
• Hotel bookings and partnership with Expedia (700K+ properties)
• Travel Mode — an in-app concierge with OpenTable reservations
• Uber Eats "room service" delivered to your hotel door
• Shop for Me — request from any store, listed or not
• AI-powered Voice Bookings + unified search
• Eats for the Way — a snack waiting in your Uber Black
• Uber One international perks- earn perks while traveling
Then Thursday, an even more ground breaking announcement that's sitting a little more under the radar: this autonomous fleet they're building.
Moving from a gig economy to a hybrid model:
•Gig model - current model
•Driver-led fleet model - Hertz/Oro employees driving Herta/Oro vehicles
•Autonomous model - Lucid Gravity autonomous robotaxis
With these new services and models come interesting partnerships:
Lucid — $500M, 20K+ vehicles
Nuro — $200M+, Level 4 autonomy
Nvidia — compute platform
Hertz/Oro — fleet operations
Rivian — $1.25B, up to 50K vehicles by 2031
This is a massive addition and shift to their current ecosystem and forces us to reconsider how this current relationship between customers and Uber will evolve.
Furthermore, it brings a plethora of questions to the table. Will driving for Uber no longer be an additional source of income for roughly a million US workers? Will the streets and highways start to fill up with autonomous vehicles much sooner than anticipated? And what other future partnerships are on the horizon as our world shifts and turns right before our very eyes?
The company’s latest update bundles hotels, food, and transportation into one seamless experience.
