Uber’s Andrew Macdonald on what America’s economy looks like from the driver’s seat

Few companies are a stronger barometer of the American economy today than Uber, and few executives have a clearer view of what’s coming than its president and COO, Andrew Macdonald. He shares what Uber’s real-time data reveals about consumer behavior amid surging gas prices, and confronts the uncomfortable question at the heart of Uber’s autonomous vehicle push: What does the company actually owe its millions of drivers? This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. A lot of the news right now is about rising gas prices and the Strait of Hormuz being choked off, putting pressure on everyone who drives. What are you hearing from your drivers? And what can you do to help? Raise rates for riders? How do you navigate that piece of this moment? Yeah, so that’s something we obviously focus on a lot. We think about the people that earn money on our platform holistically. We think about what their P&L [profits and losses] looks like, not just what our P&L looks like. I think the good news is, even though rising gas prices [are] really tough for people who drive for a living, when you look at the percentage that an increase in gas prices has on—how much of that flows through to—the drivers’ weekly P&L, if you will, [the impact] is actually relatively modest.I’m not saying it’s insignificant. Every dollar matters, but it’s not necessarily the extreme flow through to price that you would see in an airline industry, for example. Now that said, we are responsive to it. Driver sentiment is impacted when gas prices go up. We see it in our data right away. They also want to see a response from the c