Uber has grown at an exponential rate over the past couple of years. The company has rapidly expanded to international destinations and continues to do so even now. It has also come up with new ways to entice people to start booking rides using its service. Uber took six years to complete the first billion rides but it only needed less than six months to reach the second billion. The company today announced that it has now been used to book more than two billion rides since launching across the globe.
Uber revealed that 147 rides tied for the crown of being the two billionth ride as all of them started at the same time – 4:16:48 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. These rides started at the same time across 16 countries in five continents, if that doesn’t show you the scale at which Uber is operating, nothing else will.
The company is celebrating reaching this incredible milestone by offering $450 to each driver and $450 worth of free trips to each rider that was involved in those 147 rides. If you’re wondering how the company has reached the $450 figure, it’s the exact same number of cities that the service is currently available in.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said: “It took five years to reach our billionth trip, six months to reach the next billion … and we’ll hopefully reach our third even more quickly.”