Just yesterday in Bangalore, I hopped into an Uber and noticed something unusual. My driver’s vehicle number ended with 1644. Just as I was about to start the ride, the app showed me my ride OTP/PIN — and it was also 1644.
For a moment, I felt like I had witnessed a one-in-a-million miracle. After all, what are the chances? I’ve been using Uber since 2018, 7 years now, and I had never seen this happen before. Naturally, I was excited, happy, and a little awestruck.
Well… I did the math. And the story turned out to be both cooler and more humbling than I expected.
Figure 1: The ride OTP matching the vehicle’s number.
The Single Ride Perspective
Uber ride OTPs are 4-digit numbers, anywhere from 0000 to 9999. That’s 10,000 possible values.
For my assigned vehicle, the last four digits were fixed: 1644. The chance that the OTP randomly matched that exact number was:
1 / 10,000 = 0.01% (1 in 10,000)
So yes — from my personal point of view, this was a rare coincidence.
The City Perspective
Then I asked: what about Bangalore as a whole?
Bangalore has a massive fleet of vehicles on the road every day. Let’s make some conservative estimates:
- Around 30,000 Uber cars and 50,000 autos are on the road (~80,000 vehicles).
- There are only 10,000 possible 4-digit combinations (for the last four digits of a license plate).
- With so many vehicles, the city’s fleet already covers all 10,000 numbers many times over.
Now consider the rides:
- If Bangalore sees ~200,000 Uber rides in a day, then, on average, we should expect:
200,000 rides / 10,000 OTP combinations = 20 matches per day.
That means somebody in Bangalore experiences this exact coincidence pretty much every single day.
Why It Still Feels Special
From the city’s point of view, this event is inevitable. It’s just a matter of scale. But from my point of view, sitting in that back seat, watching my OTP and license plate align, it felt truly magical. Even after seven years and hundreds, if not thousands, of rides, this was my first time seeing it personally.
And that’s the beauty of probability — what’s ordinary at a massive scale can still feel extraordinary when it happens to you!