NYT article exposed how Uber’s 'Growth-at-all-costs Strategy' led to hundreds of thousands of sexual assault and misconduct reports.
In a recent exposé by Emily Steel in The New York Times, Uber’s sexual assault and safety crisis was exposed in more ways than one. The NYT article revealed the real numbers behind the amount of sexual assaults that have taken place during Uber rides, heartbreaking stories that exemplify their failures, and just why this problem has not been dealt with despite a plethora of possible solutions, some of which have already been proven to work.
Important Statistics and Key Facts from the NYT Article
- Uber knew about sexual misconduct concerns as early as 2012.
- Built a risk-prediction tool (“Safety Risk Assessed Dispatch”) using 43 indicators like “creepy driver” feedback and bar-heavy pickup spots.
- In 2018 testing, it correctly flagged 15% of assaults, but by 2024, it was still sending out high-risk trips.
- Claims 99.9% of U.S. rides happen without incident — yet court docs show 400,181 sexual assault or misconduct reports from 2017–2022.
- Publicly, Uber only admitted to 12,522 serious sexual assaults in that period and downplayed the rest as “less serious.”
- Tested in-car cameras in 2014 but refused to require them, citing contractor status.
- The “Women Driving Women” program, which has been proven to improve safety, was shelved in the U.S. over lawsuit fears (projected cost: $100M+).
- A 2018 internal marketing email pushed for constant safety messages to control media coverage.
- Ending forced arbitration in 2018 triggered 3,000+ lawsuits; one firm alone settled 100+ cases in July for undisclosed sums.
- First U.S. Uber sexual assault trial is set for September 2025, involving a 2016 attack on an 18-year-old college student.
Uber Sexual Assault Court Reports Reveal a Stark Contrast to Company Messaging
During her investigative reporting, Steel looked under the hood at the discrepancy between Uber's public image as a safe rideshare service and the internal documents, court records, and employee interviews, which revealed a much deeper problem.
Uber publicly brags that sexual assaults during Uber trips are rare, thanks to the industry-leading safety tools they have developed. And this may actually be true. However, the problem is that Uber has been slow to actually implement some of their most effective measures, and in some cases, has discontinued effective strategies altogether.
They have also not always been transparent with their passengers about the real and present risks of taking an Uber and the serious crimes that have happened hundreds of thousands of times on their watch.
The NYT article suggests that Uber’s questionable decisions are influenced by a ‘growth-at-all-costs’ business strategy, which puts a sharp focus on profits and cutting costs. The company has a history of prioritizing rapid expansion and market share over other considerations. For example, by classifying their drivers as independent contractors, Uber can avoid paying overtime and health insurance, and have less responsibility for the actions of their drivers than they would for traditional employees.
But this distinction is a big part of how their ‘profits over everything’ approach has affected others.
“[Our goal] is not to be the police…Our bar is much lower and our goal is to protect the company and set the tolerable risk level for our operations.”
This quote comes from a 2021 brainstorming document discussing Uber’s global safety standards. It clearly shows an almost disdain for having to keep their customers safe, a clear message that their standard for safety is much lower than that of the law, and a clear message that their goal is to “protect the company.”
And, in my opinion, this quote reveals a lot about this whole problem and Uber’s position on it.
Uber Reports a Fraction of the Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct that Occurs During Trips
Court records, which the NYT article also gained access to, show that there were many more Uber sexual assaults and sexual misconduct reports than the company has previously disclosed.
Uber likes to say that 99.9% of rides in the U.S. happen without any problems. But when you’re talking about millions of rides every single day, that 0.01% adds up to a staggering number of assaults.
I could not find any reputable sources, including any of the reports that Uber has released, about the number of daily or annual trips that Uber completes in the United States. However, Uber itself reports that it completes 36 million trips per day globally (based on their second quarter figures from June 30, 2025).
Because many more Americans use Uber than people in Morocco, for example, we can't determine how many rides Uber gives each day in the United States just by comparing the US population to the world population.
But what we can do is take Uber's direct claim that “99.9% of Uber trips end without any safety-related reports” and use that figure to get an understanding of just how vast that 0.01% can be.
Uber recently boasted in an investor report that 36 million Uber trips are taken each day, and 0.01% of them end with some type of safety-related report, like sexual harassment or sexual assault. That would mean that there are 360,000 safety-related events during Uber rides every single day around the world.
We can further use the estimate that around 30% of Uber’s active users are in the United States. So, 30% of those 360,000 daily safety reports that occur globally would produce an estimate that 108,000 safety-related issues occur in the US every day.
Let me be clear. These calculations are based on figures I have taken from Uber's own reports and other reputable data-collecting organizations. These are my estimates, and they are only that: an estimation. This number has not been released by Uber or any other organization. It is merely based on simple math.
In the New York Times article that this blog post is about, it was discovered in court records that in the years 2017 to 2022, there were actually 400,181 reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in U.S. Uber rides. That means that the court records showed an average of 66,697 reports occurred each year.
When you compare that to my estimate of 108,000, you can see I am but off. However, that is likely because the court records are from the years 2017 to 2022, and I am using figures from June 2025. For my estimation to be true, daily US safety incidents must be increasing. But are they?
According to the NYT article, Hannah Nilles (Uber’s head of safety for the Americas) acknowledged that the number of incidents in recent years has gone up along with overall ridership.
Like I said, these are purely my estimates based on data and simple math, but the math does appear to check out.
Why Did Uber Report Such Vastly Different Numbers Than the Court Records?
Publicly, Uber has shared a much smaller number in their reports. They claim that during the time period in question (2017-2022), there were only 12,522 serious sexual assaults.
Even though Uber hasn’t released updated figures for the last three years, the court records discovered by the NYT suggest the number of incidents is going up, not down.
Hannah Nilles claimed about 75% of the 400,181 reports that the NYT found were “less serious” and included things like comments about the passenger’s appearance, flirting, or “explicit” language. She also suggested some could be false reports from riders looking for a refund.
Hannah and Uber expect that the rate of the most serious assaults will be lower than the 2017 number when the numbers for 2023 through 2025 are released.
According to comments from Uber employees in the article, they acknowledge the obvious: sexual assault and misconduct in Uber rides are likely underreported for very obvious reasons. Survivors may fear retaliation, feel ashamed, or do not want to file a report because the driver now knows where they live.
So, How Did Uber Calculate The Numbers They Reported?
In the NYT article, it’s revealed that Uber’s publicly released numbers are so much lower than reality because:
- Uber cherry-picked and then chose to only count the “most serious categories” of sexual misconduct in their safety reports.
- This means they only counted 5 out of 21 categories to track internally and include in their Uber investor and media reports.
- The categories Uber reported include things like rape and forced kissing, but they left out other serious issues, such as masturbation or threats of sexual violence.
- Uber also omitted specific data patterns, like day-of-week and time-of-day trends, because internal presentations warned that revealing them could have “serious business implications,” such as fewer riders during these high-risk times.
- According to Uber’s head of safety, Uber chose the five categories because they were “the least subjective” and therefore easier to track.
So, their so-called “low” numbers in their publicly released reports weren’t exactly the full story. Instead, they were essentially cherry-picked, using only the most narrowly defined subset of the incidents that took place.
Lucky for us, Uber doesn’t get to decide what is and isn’t sexual assault in real life.
Uber Invented Advanced Tools to Predict and Prevent Sexual Misconduct—They Just Don’t Use Them
Internal documents reveal that while Uber has developed advanced tools to predict and prevent sexual misconduct, these tools have not been fully utilized. One of those tools was a machine-learning model called “Safety Risk Assessed Dispatch,” which was created to forecast high-risk pairings of drivers and passengers using over 40 factors, including "creepy driver" feedback, incident history, and trip location.
Despite learning that this tool could predict 15% of sexual assaults in a 2018 test, a 2024 document revealed that the system was still allowing high-risk trips.
According to a statement from Uber's head of safety, the company does not use this tool to block all high-risk trips because it could leave people stranded and potentially in more danger.
That makes sense, right?
Or does it make more sense that they didn’t want to miss out on those dollars? This statement seems to highlight NYT’s claim that Uber's claim they’re commitment to safety is at odds with its profits-at-any-cost business model.
Since 2014, Uber has also had in-car cameras to deter misconduct, but has chosen not to mandate them because this could force drivers to be classified as employees instead of as independent contractors.
The company has also used a "women driving women" program. This allowed women passengers to select only women drivers and vice versa to protect the female drivers as well. Uber found that this program made rides much safer, but it delayed its U.S. rollout due to fears of discrimination lawsuits, which they estimated could cost the Uber corporation, which is worth around $1,860,000,000, about $100 million.
Uber is constantly launching new safety messages to counteract negative media coverage. Some Uber employees told NYT that they weren’t very comfortable with not being transparent, and another spokesman admitted to "trashing" rape victims to a newspaper. According to a former employee, this selective reporting downplayed the true scope of the problem.
One Example from the NYT Article of a Woman’s Harrowing Journey and Uber’s Failure to Help Her
At 5:50 AM one Friday in December 2023, a woman called Uber customer service in the early hours to report that she had just been raped by her Uber driver.
She reported that she had been drinking, and so as not to drink and drive, she ordered an Uber. Nine hours later, she found herself waking up in a motel room with the Uber driver she had been connected with the previous night.
The Uber driver fled after she became frantic.
According to a copy of Uber’s internal investigation, the Uber system shows that the woman was picked up at 8:53 PM the previous evening at an apartment complex. Her destination was a residence 22 minutes away.
But at 9:10 PM, the driver diverged from the route, and again at 9:13 PM. Then, made an eight-minute stop “near” a gas station.
At that point, Uber sent their standard automated notification to check on her (this notification is sent when an Uber vehicle has an active passenger and the vehicle has stopped or left its predetermined route for a certain number of minutes). The woman did not respond to the notification.
After leaving the gas station area, the ride continued to deviate from its route, and at 9:29 PM, the Uber vehicle stopped at a Motel 6.
Uber sent another notification to the passenger at 9:35 PM, but again she didn’t respond. Four minutes after the final notification, Uber tried calling her using their robocaller software.
She didn’t pick up.
The trip remained active, with no recorded movement, until the Uber driver marked the ride complete at 2:01 AM.
For 4 hours and 32 minutes, she was presumably at the Motel 6 being raped by her Uber driver.
Uber immediately banned the driver. One month later, an internal investigation discovered what the report called “a concerning fact pattern.”
The same Uber driver was accused of sexual misconduct for inappropriate comments in two separate past incidents. Additionally, they found that on another trip, the same Uber driver had an unknown incident where a 22-minute ride lasted nearly five hours.
Again, in this separate instance, three automated attempts to contact the rider went unanswered. The report called the unanswered notifications ‘a signal that something could have gone wrong’.
You think?!?!
The report concluded, “Are our actions (or lack of actions) defensible?”
I’m going with a strong “NO” here, but I’m guessing they found a way to defend it.
Contact Us to File an Uber Sexual Assault Lawsuit
Uber decided to end forced arbitration in 2018. This opened the floodgates for all the women and people who were sexually assaulted or raped while using an Uber, despite Uber’s capability to have potentially prevented or stopped the attack.
Now, more than 3,000 survivors have taken the company to court.
Some cases have already started settling quietly for undisclosed sums. But for those that have not been settled in negotiations, the very first U.S. Uber sexual assault trial is set for September 2025. This case is centered on a brutal 2016 attack on an 18-year-old college student.
If you were sexually assaulted in an Uber, FileAbuseLawsuit.com is now accepting Uber sexual assault cases. Contact us today using the contact page or the form on this page.
CALL 209-283-2205 FOR LEGAL HELPIf you’re interested, we took the numbers that Uber reported, the numbers that were revealed in the court documents, and the number of sexual assaults and sexual misconduct that go unreported according to actual experts, and came up with an estimate about how many people could actually be suffering from sexual assault in Ubers.
We Did a Little Math to See How Many Sexual Assaults Might Have Actually Occurred in Ubers
Stats Uber Released
From 2017 to 2022, Uber publicly reported a total of 12,522 sexual assault incidents. The company provided a breakdown for three specific periods:
- 2017-2018: 5,981 incidents
- 2019-2020: 3,824 incidents
- 2021-2022: 2,717 incidents
The Actual Stats in Court Documents
According to court documents, the actual number of sexual misconduct and sexual assault reports Uber received from 2017 to 2022 was significantly higher—a total of 400,181. Based on the ratio of Uber's original reported numbers, these incidents would be distributed as follows:
- 2017-2018: approximately 191,142 incidents
- 2019-2020: approximately 122,208 incidents
- 2021-2022: approximately 86,831 incidents
This means that Uber received an average of almost one report of sexual assault or misconduct every eight minutes in the United States during this time frame.
Estimated Stats Including Unreported Incidents
Considering that a significant portion of sexual assaults go unreported, a thought exercise was conducted to estimate the true number of incidents. Using the common statistic that approximately 65% of sexual assaults are never reported (meaning the 400,181 figure only represents 35% of the total), the estimated numbers would be:
- 2017-2018: 546,120 incidents
- 2019-2020: 349,166 incidents
- 2021-2022: 248,089 incidents
This calculation results in a total of 1,143,375 incidents over the six-year period, averaging about 200,000 incidents per year. While these numbers are a theoretical exercise, they are based on established data from reputable organizations like RAINN and the Bureau of Justice Statistics regarding underreporting. They suggest that the actual number of sexual assaults and misconducts in Uber rides could be far greater than any of the previously reported figures.