What are you talking about? The original pitch was a black car service to fix the hailing problems of SF. It was even originally called UberCab. https://medium.com/@gc/the-beginning-of-uber-7fb17e544851
(I was at that conference: everything went wrong, but it was mostly super cold. Cars were stuck in slippery snow, so someone suggesting the idea of carpooling sounds odd, but I suspect anyone there would have loved to wait out the traffic inside a heated car.)