A brand new, no option Ford Fiesta like the one I rode in, can be bought for under $14000 (which surprised me...I would've guessed at least 20). For easy math, if it lasts 140000 miles before being scrapped (and i bet it would do double that if maintained), that's 10¢ /mile. Maintenance over that time...2¢ should be close, 30 MPG at $3= 10¢. Insurance, misc., lets add 3¢ to get us to a nice round 25¢/mile.
My trip was a bit under $9 for maybe 5 miles. Assume he had to drive 5 miles to get to me, total time 15min. Uber takes $3, gives him $6. I kicked in an extra dollar. 4 trips like that/hour= $28 for 40 miles=70¢/mile.
so driver gets paid 45¢/mile, 40 miles/hour= $18/hour. $14 without the tips. This ignores the financing/opportunity cost of the money, which would add another nickel or so, but I'm assuming he'd have a car anyway. Taxes should be nil as the standard mileage rate is nearly 2x the actual costs. For my driver, a college kids with a cheap car and an hour or two to kill between classes, I can see it. Wouldn't take much more car to eat any profit, though.
This is why it seems like a grey area to me. The waitress I tipped 20% at lunch probably makes $3-4 /hour before tips, and is working a lot harder than the uber driver.
If you try REAL hard with an econobox you can make the numbers work on some trips. It’s also highly dependent on density of drivers and even some local laws.
No matter what Uber and Lyft say about their “insurance” programs, in Colorado the insurers say you must have the intermediate level “almost commercial” insurance to drive for a ride share, or you are uncovered. And the ride shares also say you are uncovered by their insurance any time you are not with a customer or responding to the app. This means you take a break and head three blocks away to the 7-11 for coffee... if you trusted either your personal insurer or the ride share, you’re SOL. You are NOT covered at all during any little driving interludes.
The personal insurer will say you were working. The ride share insurer will say you were not on a pick up or with a customer and you were not insured at the time.
YMMV literally in your area depending on what your insurance commissioners have decided to force the insurance companies to do. Anyway...
Besides needing to double that insurance cost...
Mr Money Moustache (for whatever you think of him, and for me, it’s not much) actually documented his time as a driver. He did choose to use a slightly more expensive vehicle, electric because — well whatever, he lives in the Boulder zone — and literally calculated the ROI on all trips he was “assigned” by the app throughout the process.
What he found was the app will, of course, push you to accept trips that don’t make money. And he would refuse them. The app would start pushing. The company would send messages threatening him. And supervisors and managers would start saying he would be terminated as a driver if he didn’t go get those customers because “he was closest”... and we are all on the great big family team wanting our company to be successful and not have those poor customers wait for a driver further away, now would we?
Now he was doing it as an experiment and didn’t need the job or the money, so his response was generally to tell them to stuff it. He was quitting eventually anyway. But the real world experience he documented shows the pressure drivers are put under to accept non-profitable work. And many don’t bother calculating it.
So... all trips are not created equal. And there’s a lot of internal pressure to take them. Anytime there’s a weak number of drivers and you’re logged in and closest to a person wanting a ride, watch out. You don’t get paid if you pick them up and drive an hour out of your way and no fares coming back the other direction.
For slightly more anecdotal evidence, there’s whole forums dedicated to discussions of the “secrets” of Uber and Lyft drivers who actually make money. They talk about where to be, when, to both maximize the profits and also trick the app into thinking no drivers are there, so the higher prices kick in. Like anything with variable income, both companies have accidentally turned messing with their algorithms into game theory for the small sub-set of drivers who pay attention. That can apparently be quite lucrative.
Those same forums will discuss how to truly track P&L and some sun-set of their drivers do it AND share it. It’s not high.
Do they make more than a waitress? Probably. No argument there. Do they always know when they are? Doubtful.
The girl that drove me a long ass way into the country into no cell coverage and down a dirt road didn’t make anything I’m sure, in her brand new VW. Just the alignment it probably needed sooner after the washboards wiped out the profit from the trip and the large tip. I told her she could leave me at the gas station over a mile from home. She declined. I tipped enough to pay for about 1/3 of the alignment with a coupon. LOL. What’cha gonna do? I offered. We can’t even summon either company out here.
Since then, I’ve gotten a list of three who drive for these companies and LIVE out here and they’ll take a fare from a cell phone call if they’re at home. I feel less bad about that. They’re driving out here anyway ... hopefully they stop and get their groceries or something while they’re in town that they needed anyway.
I’m also not going to feel too bad when I have to sue them personally if we whack a deer out here and it causes me some sort of permanent injury or hospitalization. I suspect the settlement from the ride share won’t cover it. Not a pleasant thought suing the neighbor who’s just trying to get by, or whatever, but ... if it comes to that... zero effs given as they say. The $10/hr they were making won’t seem worth it then, unfortunately. Just an ambulance ride will blow right through the top of the local cap on small claims court, even if everything turns out okay.
I should note that my need for this out here has been once in six years, so I’m not exactly putting these folks at any particularly large risk. They’re risking far more in city traffic anyway.
It’s a very risky job without the add on insurance around here. And that will suck the profit margin down to where it’s not going to be great money.
The really wild one is where either company will put you in touch with a company that will lease you the car by the day. Nobody on any fiscal forum has anything nice to say about those. Almost the equivalent payday lenders, those. Not good. Sucker a lot of really poor people into driving for pennies.