Uber Trivia
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49 free Uber trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Uber began as UberCab, a way to summon a black car after two friends paid $800 for a New Year's Eve driver, and grew into a company that moves 42 million trips and deliveries a day. This quiz covers the rise: Garrett Camp's idea, Ryan Graves as employee number one, UberX and the amateur-driver model borrowed from rivals, the China retreat to DiDi, Uber Eats, the 2019 IPO and the acquisitions from Careem to Postmates to Delivery Hero. It also covers the trouble: Greyball and the Ripley kill switch, Susan Fowler's blog post and Kalanick's fall, the hidden 2016 breach and its $148 million settlement, the Uber Files and Macron, Proposition 22, the UK Supreme Court, the guide-dog case and the Dutch privacy fines, plus the newer chapters of robotaxis, air taxis and the first profit. It suits business-news readers, tech-quiz nights and anyone who has ever argued about surge pricing. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Uber, Uber Eats and the founders, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city is Uber headquartered?
San Francisco
San Francisco's oldest cab company, DeSoto, rebranded as Flywheel and sued Uber for predatory pricing in 2016, but a federal judge threw out most of the case.
Q 02What was Uber originally called when it was founded in 2009?
UberCab
UberCab dropped 'Cab' after city and state regulators ordered it to cease and desist as an unlicensed taxi service, and it kept operating anyway.
Q 03Which co-founder of StumbleUpon came up with the idea for Uber?
Garrett Camp
Garrett Camp was partly inspired by struggling to find a taxi on a snowy night in Paris, during a 2008 trip with Travis Kalanick.
Q 04What does Uber call the higher fares it charges when rider demand outstrips available drivers?
Surge pricing
Surge pricing sent Sydney fares soaring during the 2014 cafe siege; after angry replies, Uber made rides out of the city centre free and refunded riders.
Q 05Who was Uber's first employee, briefly its CEO in 2010 before Kalanick took over?
Ryan Graves
Ryan Graves landed the job by replying 'here's a tip' to a Kalanick tweet seeking a product and business-development hire, then tweeting his email address.
Q 06What could riders summon when Uber's app first launched?
Only black luxury cars
Only black luxury cars at first, booked through licensed limo firms, but Uber let everyday drivers join once cheaper rideshare rivals emerged.
Q 07Which Uber service, launched in July 2012, was priced about 35% below its original rides?
UberX
UberX drivers still needed commercial licences until April 2013, when Uber began adding everyday drivers in their own cars to match rideshare rivals.
Q 08Which former Obama White House adviser became Uber's head of policy and strategy in 2014?
David Plouffe
David Plouffe was fined $90,000 in 2017 by Chicago's ethics board for lobbying Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Uber's behalf without registering.
Q 09In 2018, an Uber self-driving test car killed a pedestrian in which US state?
Arizona
Arizona's governor suspended Uber's self-driving tests after the Tempe crash, and police said the backup driver had been streaming The Voice on Hulu.
Q 10Which city's transport authority refused to renew Uber's licence in 2017, citing public safety and security?
London
London: after Uber appealed, a court in 2018 granted it a 15-month licence on probation, with conditions the regulator would monitor.
Q 11Uber sold its China business in 2016 to which Chinese company, in exchange for a stake?
DiDi
DiDi's deal ended a costly battle in which Uber had lost more than $2 billion, and DiDi also invested $1 billion in Uber.
Q 12Uber merged its Southeast Asian business into which company in 2018, taking a 27.5% stake?
Grab
Grab and Uber were fined about S$13 million in total by Singapore's competition watchdog, which also ordered Grab to end its exclusive taxi-fleet deals.
Q 13Uber's 2016 purchase of self-driving truck startup Ottomotto led to a trade-secrets lawsuit with which company?
Waymo
Waymo accused Otto's founder of taking confidential files from Google's self-driving project; Uber settled by giving Waymo about $245 million in Uber shares.
Q 21What was 'Greyball', revealed by The New York Times in 2017?
A tool to deny officials rides
Greyball was a tool to deny officials rides by showing them ghost cars; once it was exposed, Uber vowed to stop using it that way.
Q 22What did Uber's secret 'Ripley' system do when authorities raided its offices?
Locked staff computers remotely
Ripley locked staff computers remotely; it was named for the Alien heroine and her line about nuking the entire site from orbit.
Q 23Whose 2017 blog post on harassment at Uber set off the crisis that felled Kalanick?
Susan Fowler
Q 14Who did Uber's board pick to succeed Travis Kalanick as CEO in August 2017?
Dara Khosrowshahi
Dara Khosrowshahi was a surprise pick: finalists Meg Whitman and Jeff Immelt had been known contenders for weeks, while his candidacy stayed secret.
Q 15The man who became Uber's CEO in 2017 fled which country as a boy, on the eve of its revolution?
Iran
Iran: after his family fled in 1978, the new government seized their conglomerate, and he grew up in New York state.
Q 16Which US rival went public in March 2019, weeks before Uber's own stock market debut?
Lyft
Lyft listed in March 2019; days before Uber's own listing that May, drivers for both apps walked out worldwide in protest at low pay.
Q 17Which Middle Eastern ride-hailing company did Uber buy for $3.1bn in January 2020?
Careem
Careem was split in 2023, when UAE telecom giant e& took a majority of its super app business while Uber kept Careem's ride-hailing arm.
Q 18Which US delivery rival did Uber buy for $2.65bn in December 2020?
Postmates
Postmates was agreed to less than a month after Uber's bid for Grubhub fell through, as Just Eat Takeaway won Grubhub instead.
Q 19Uber sold its flying-taxi division, Elevate, to which company in December 2020?
Joby Aviation
Joby Aviation took over Elevate in what both firms called an expanded partnership, and Uber invested a further $75 million in Joby.
Q 20Uber's self-driving unit ATG went to which company in January 2021, in a deal valuing it at about $4bn?
Aurora Innovation
Aurora Innovation also got $400 million from Uber, which took a 26% stake, keeping a hand in self-driving tech it had stopped building itself.
Susan Fowler's post set off outside investigations, after which Uber fired more than 20 employees in June 2017.
Q 24How did Uber disguise the $100k ransom it paid hackers after its 2016 data breach?
As a 'bug bounty' payment
Uber booked it as a 'bug bounty' payment, and the hackers signed nondisclosure agreements falsely saying they had taken no data.
Q 25How did the 2016 hackers get into Uber's systems?
A cloud log-in found on GitHub
A cloud log-in found on GitHub opened Uber's Amazon Web Services storage, from which the hackers downloaded unencrypted files.
Q 26How much did Uber pay in 2018 to settle with 50 US states over hiding its 2016 data breach?
$148 million
$148 million settled the states' case; when Uber revealed the breach, it fired security chief Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies.
Q 27The 2022 'Uber Files' were leaked by which former lobbyist to The Guardian?
Mark MacGann
Mark MacGann's leak prompted Uber to say its past behaviour was not in line with its present values and that it had changed since 2017.
Q 28Which French leader was revealed by the Uber Files to have secretly aided the company's lobbying?
Emmanuel Macron
Emmanuel Macron, then economy minister, later said he was proud to have backed Uber and would do it again.
Q 29Which California ballot measure let ride-hailing firms keep treating drivers as contractors, not employees?
Proposition 22
Proposition 22 was ruled unconstitutional by a county judge in 2021, but the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld it in 2024.
Q 30Which country's Supreme Court ruled in Uber BV v Aslam that the company's drivers are workers?
The United Kingdom
After losing in the United Kingdom, Uber promised drivers the minimum wage and holiday pay, but counted only time spent on trips.