Uber Is Now Recruiting 50,000 Drivers A Month

The figures were first announced in an interview with the CEO and cofounder Travis Kalanick at TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco. Uber then confirmed the figures in an email to Mashable.

The most recent Uber monthly recruitment figures are 30,000 more than May's figure. (What Uber has not reported is the number of traditional taxi-driving jobs it is destroying. Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents 50,000 drivers, believes that "If the Ubers of the world are successful, we'll be reduced to nothing.")

Uber is available in 45 countries and operates in 128 cities. It raised more than a billion dollars in June and is valued at more than $18 billion.

But the app has been controversial for traditional taxi drivers - Uber works out the cost of the journeys in the same way as using a taxi meter, which often, only traditional cabs are legally entitled to use.

Many capital cities in Europe including London, Paris and Berlin have seen drivers stage protests in opposition to Uber, with traditional cab drivers claiming that people using Uber have an unfair advantage because they are not subjected to the same kind of fees and regulations as traditional taxis are.

Uber has even been banned in the country that invented the word, Germany, for violating the country's Passenger Transport Act.

In June, The Independent conducted a test, pitting Uber against London's traditional black cabs. The paper found that Uber was both quicker and cheaper than getting a black cab on the same route.

In the Disrupt Q&A, Kalanick was asked whether he minds being called the "Darth Vader in the startup world." He told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington:

When you're scrapping that hard, it requires you to be abnormally perfectionist, abnormally fierce.

Watch Michael Arrington in conversation with Uber's Travis Kalanick at TechCrunch Disrupt.