UberXL comes to New York

In May, Uber launched its super-sized, value-priced SUV service, Uber XL, in San Francisco; and today, it comes to New York. With the larger vehicles in this fleet, your entourage can travel in one car, not two.

Now, New Yorkers can reserve bigger vehicles like Toyota’s Highlander, Honda’s Pilot, and Nissan’s Pathfinder for a better price than UberSUV. Uber is pitching it both as a family product and as a way to get all of your friends from party to party.

For a six-person car, UberXL service has a base price of $4.50 compared with $14 for UberSUV. It’s also a bit less per mile ($3.25 versus $4.50) and per minute ($0.60 versus $0.80). As an example, Uber says a trip from Manhattan to JFK International airport will cost $125 using UberSUV; the same ride on UberXL is only $75.

Considering that Millenials travel in packs and the app already has a built in fare-splitting feature, UberXL is poised to capture this demographic.

It’s still unclear why Uber is offering a cheap SUV option in addition to UberSUV, which is significantly more expensive than UberXL. As we’ve noted before, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of difference between Uber’s many services other than the exterior of the car.

UberXL has already launched in Sydney, Singapore, Boston, and San Francisco.