Uber's premium customers can now push a button to tell their drivers to be quiet
Uber is giving customers who use its premium Uber Black service the option to tell their drivers to be quiet with the push of a button.
The new “quiet mode” feature was announced Wednesday alongside other new app settings available only to Uber Black users, including the option to set a preferred temperature and to request help with luggage or extra time getting to the car.
As The Verge’s Andy Hawkins point outs, this option is only for the customers who are already paying about twice the price of Uber X and four times the price of Uber Pool. Uber Black is a luxury service that uses a fleet of fancier cars and, in some places, requires drivers to have a much higher minimum rating than other Uber drivers in order to stay in the higher-end, higher-paying program.
But it’s not unlikely that the feature will be rolled out to all Uber users in the future. In a July 2018 interview with The Verge, Taggart Matthiesen, head of product for autonomous driving for Lyft, Uber’s main rival, said his company was thinking about implementing a “Zen mode.” This would be basically the same thing as quiet mode and allow users to “personalize” rides by specifying that they personally don’t like to talk to strangers while they ride in cars.
You might think the typical social norms of conversation with a person providing a service would apply here, but the question of whether Uber drivers want you to talk to them and whether they might give you a lower passenger score if you don’t has long been a subject of debate.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/15/18624906/uber-black-quiet-mode-luxury-feature-lyft-zen
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