How safe is your Uber ride? That question has dogged the company for years, as it has faced complaints from passengers and drivers alleging they have been sexually assaulted in an Uber.
Now Uber is revealing the scale of those complaints for the first time.
The company received 5,981 allegations of serious sexual assault in the U.S. over two years, according to a new report covering 2017 and 2018. The claims range from unwanted touching and kissing to rape.
The U.S.-only report also covers deaths involving Uber rides. During those two years, 107 people died in crashes involving Uber cars, and 19 people were killed in physical assaults during or soon after an Uber ride.
As troubling as those statistics are, the incidents they capture are rare. People in the U.S. took 2.3 billion rides using Uber in those two years. For 99.9% of those trips, no safety incident was reported, and the serious safety problems detailed in the report were even more uncommon.
"At the scale that Uber operates, we're going to see both the good and the bad that happens in society because we're operating so many trips every single day," said Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer.
"One of the unfortunate but sad truths is that sexual assault, sexual violence is far more prevalent in American society than a lot of people recognize," he said. "That exists in companies, it exists in classrooms, it exists on university campuses and homes. Uber's not immune to that."