Uber Freight added a brand new feature to its smartphone program Monday, targeting small trucking fleets. The corporation’s digital loading board also matches independent truckers with shippers.
The ride-hailing company sees freight hauling within an attractive area for growth. The business is splintered, providing thousands and thousands of truckers and tens of thousands of motor carriers as possible customers. Almost 90 percent of all motor carriers operating in the U.S. possess six or couple trucks, as stated by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates the trucking market.
The usage of cellular trucking apps is on the upswing and has the capacity to develop into a $35.4-billion market by 2025 from North America, according to a report by Frost & Sullivan.
For now, the program only supplies a flat rate for truckers hauling its heaps — there’s no negotiating.
Another freight app called Convoy lets truckers to”bid up” or pay off a higher rate should they estimate the speed is too low to make money hauling the load.
There are about 6.6 loads for every accessible truck trailer, based on DAT Solutions, which monitors freight and rates. One year ago, there were 3.5 loads per van.
Uber Freight pays truckers within a week as soon as they receive confirmation that the load has been delivered, Berdinis said.
Uber Freight has tested the program with a handful of small business truckers such as Phil DeKnight, owner of DeKnight Enterprises of all Marshalls Creek, Penn.. His firm has only three drivers.
The program also has details regarding the loads, including delivery and pickup times, which other load boards don’t include, ” he said.
There’s much more as truck capacity stays tight and there is more cargo than available trucks to haul it. That’s pushed company to Uber Freight as shippers plug into its community of truckers for help, Berdinis explained.
The”fleet mode” tool of the Uber Freight program is directed at fleets with 10 or fewer trucks. It enables dispatchers to locate and assign loads according to multiple motorists’ accessibility without leaving the Uber Freight app, said Eric Berdinis, senior product director at Uber.
Additionally, it is big. Trucking hauls nearly 71 percent of tonnage carried by all modes of domestic freight transport. The business accounts for about $676.2 billion in cargo company, or 79.8 percent of overall revenue earned by all transport modes, as stated by the American Trucking Associations.
“A lot of small carriers spend a lot of time chasing down sporadically following 30, 60 or 120 days — we eliminate that issue for them,” he said.
The national hours-of-service principle for truckers restricts them to driving no more than 11 hours each day inside a 14-hour workday.
“This enables dispatchers to log in and view the list of available cargo loads and see their drivers’ availability,” Le said.
Uber started its load-matching app in Texas in May 2017.
The goal of fleet mode would be to increase communication between dispatchers and drivers that can connect through the app, stated Xinfeng Le, an Uber product manager.
“We hope to get rid of a few of their inefficiency that exists today with a great deal of back-and-forth communicating with dispatchers and drivers,” Le said.
“After launching Uber Freight, we had a good deal of small fleets needing to use us but couldn’t because the program was intended for owners with one truck,” he explained.