Transportation company Uber just announced in an interview with Le Monde that it will be suspending UberPOP in France tonight at 8pm. The news follows a difficult week for the company. Last Thursday, anti-Uber protests turned to a mini-guerrilla warfare as taxi drivers flipped over and burnt Uber cars. On Monday, two Uber France leaders were taken into custody following an unrelated investigation — they will be judged in September for running illegal taxi operations.
In all these occasions, UberPOP was the target. As a reminder UberPOP was launched in February 2014 and is the confusingly named equivalent of UberX in France (UberX in France is the equivalent of Uber in the U.S.). With UberPOP, anyone can become a driver without any special professional license.
Many taxi drivers saw the new service as unfair competition. UberPOP was banned in many different cities and countries, including Brussels, the Netherlands and, yes, France. But today is a bit different, as it is only the second time that Uber suspends a controversial activity without a court order — the first time was UberX in Portland.
Until today, when an UberPOP driver got fined, Uber paid for the fine. But given that the Government, taxi drivers and the police were all going after UberPOP, it got a lot harder to keep UberPOP drivers on the road.
Uber France CEO Thibaud Simphal told Le Monde that the company had to suspend the service because many UberPOP drivers had physically attacked over the past few days. He also admitted that being an UberPOP driver was a tough side job, saying that drivers earned on average €8,200 per year thanks to UberPOP, or just enough to pay for their cars.
Today’s news doesn’t mean anything for UberX, Uber and UberVAN in France. All these services will continue as they are much more regulated than UberPOP — only professional drivers with a professional license and 250 hours of training can become Uber drivers.
Uber also said that it will talk to its UberPOP drivers and help them get the proper professional license to become UberX or Uber drivers. The only issue is that there are some restrictions with this license. For example, as this license was first designed for limo drivers, the license stipulates that you need to drive a big car, longer than 4.5m. The Government has also been issuing very few of these licenses over the past 6 months.
Finally, the company announced that if the Constitutional Council deems UberPOP legal, the company is ready to relaunch the service. This is highly unlikely.
Last year, when Uber introduced UberPOP, Uber was already a controversial company in France as UberX drivers were already competing against taxi drivers. It’s hard to tell whether the company introduced UberPOP to create a smoke screen and protect its UberX and Uber services, or whether the company truly believed that UberPOP had a chance. There is one thing for sure — all the other Uber services are now much less controversial and are here to stay in France.
