Electrifying our network | Hacker News Reader

Electrifying our network

uber.com

99 pointsMarkusj159 comments

Link to the actual program: https://www.uber.com/newsroom/electrifying-our-network/

From that article:

> Many drivers know about the federal tax credit for EV owners, but there are a myriad of State programs and incentives available as well as local programs provided by utilities and cities that are less widely known ... [truncated] ... In select cities, this pilot provides direct monetary incentives for driving EVs on our network.

My read of it is that they're not actually providing much in direct incentives. Instead this is meant to educate their drivers and navigate them towards existing incentive programs at the local, State, or Federal level.

Thanks. We've updated the link from https://www.techradar.com/news/uber-is-paying-its-drivers-to... to this, which seems to have more information.

Lyft purchases carbon offsets for all their rides. Don't know if they incentivize electric vehicles but it would make sense for them to do so at least as much as it costs them to offset conventional emissions.

https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/all-lyft-rides-are-now-carbon...

Huh, I didn't know this. I'm surprised they didn't advertise it harder, it just makes me like them all the more.

I don't see how this is economical for a full time driver. Maybe a Bolt would have the range to make enough money between charges. Driving a (presently available) Tesla for Uber would be a crazy money loss. No way a Leaf could do it (I drive one daily), even with the quick charge port.

So a Bolt is probably $35k, and you are supposed to drive that full time, with time out between charges, and still make enough money to pay that off and make a living?

I suppose you could cheat and use a Volt. It's electric, but can run 100% off gasoline.

Of course it just reiterates the point that Uber and Lyft were never supposed to be full time, rather a way to quickly make a buck by sharing a ride.

Until used EVs with 200+ mile range are widely available, I just don't see it being economical. Of course Uber will sucker you into leasing an EV, where you net pay after expense will probably be $3/hr.

It depends where you are. Taxi drivers in London average only 100 miles a day, and in fact all new black cabs are already required to be electric with a range extender.

If Uber design into their system a bias for shorter, central journeys going to electric cars, and longer journeys going to petrol or diesel cars, it’s definitely doable.

The new Leaf has a range of 150 miles, which is borderline. You could do it with an i3 with range extender, or with the model 3.

It helps that Black cab fares are significantly more expensive than Uber.

> If Uber design into their system a bias for shorter, central journeys going to electric cars, and longer journeys going to petrol or diesel cars, it’s definitely doable.

A bunch of short fares absolutely kills your day between the wait time and deadhead miles between trips.

Figure you can do three or four $7 trips in the same time you can do one $60 trip.

As a data point: A lot of the UberBLACK cars in Amsterdam are Tesla Model S's

I regretfully admit i’ve never sat in a fully electric car.

I wish I could pay a little more to get an Uber Green, but I think that’s only in France.

Lisbon has Uber Green, and it costs the same as UberX (which is the cheapest, since there's no UberPOP).

Ye, I was driving with an e-Golf in Lisbon. The poor guy had to charge it every 200km or something.

If you visit Montreal, try https://teomtl.com/en/ -- app-based taxi service, but the fleet is fully electric (Electric Kia or Tesla).

I tried to try it last time I visited Montreal.

Unfortunately, the confirm-your-number SMS didn't come through to my UK number despite multiple retries. I tried to notify them - but the 'contact us' form on their website attempted to send them an e-mail as me, and it was rejected with SPF and DKIM failures.

I tried a BMW i3 using ReachNow in Seattle. It was kinda weird - silent, and decelerated every time you lifted your foot off the gas (electricity?) pedal, you had to hold it down slightly to coast. But once I got used to it I found it a lot of fun to drive, and the interior had a slight spaceship feel. I thought it would make an excellent choice for commuting.

I'd switch to an EV, but unfortunately I live in an apartment and the garage doesn't provide chargers :(

Depending on where you work or live (I'm in Bellevue in a condo w/o charging in the garage), it actually is quite practical to live with an EV without charging at home.

I have an i3, and both my office and the Lincoln Square Mall have free charging. If I drive to work maybe once a week or stop off at the movie theater, I end up charging my car to 75-90% and have plenty of juice for the rest of the week. I don't drive a whole lot so I might not be a typical case, but it's definitely possible to live without a home charger.

That being said, I am working with the HOA to get them to permit me to install a charger in my parking spot since I eventually do want one for convenience.

> decelerated every time you lifted your foot off the gas (electricity?) pedal

This can be configured on Teslas (and maybe others)

The Leaf has a B mode for enhanced regen. Lift off the pedal on the highway and it deaccelerates pretty well.

Random uninformed prediction: Uber Green is coming soon. Pay a premium for good conscience (so you can justify using low-occupancy vehicles instead of public transit).

That's what I'm thinking too, and I like it. It may not even cost a premium necessarily, just longer wait times.

If you're creating additional congestion (by requesting a less common vehicle from further away) rather than taking the nearest available car, the green advantage will be lost some of the time.

Like surge pricing though, it should bring out more EVs in the Uber fleet (if a premium is charged, and routed to the driver).

At least in Lisbon, there's no premium, they cost the same as X.

Interesting! Thanks for the data point.

Over short time scales, maybe. Over longer time scales, however, this will create an incentive for Uber drivers to switch over to electric vehicles, once it becomes known that electric vehicles are more profitable to drive for Uber because their utilization is higher (in addition to saving money on gas).

Agreed. Although I think most drivers already know that. The typical Uber (at least in London) is a Prius. Still good that the financial incentive is nudging drivers that way though.

This is my #1 most desired feature on Uber and Lyft.

Take a bus

Even in that doubles the travel time and you have to switch buses twice before arriving at your destination?

It's not irrational to want to reduce one's environmental impact without bearing that level of inconvenience, even if one could reduce it to a greater extent by spending the extra time.

It's well argued that you're not significantly reducing your environmental impact by buying an electric car.

There are literally millions of used cars that will ultimately be less harmful over their lifespans than increasing the demand for new vehicles. You can't only take into consideration mileage, but must also consider the environmental cost of production, logistics, and electricity generation.

If you're going to whittle that argument down further by saying you _want_ a new car anyway, or you're drawn to reduced maintenance/fuel costs... you might as well admit that you don't actually care about the environment and just want a cool car (I won't knock that, but don't pretend that virtue is your motivation).

I agree with everything you just said (and even on principle will only ever buy a used car) -

except we're not talking about buying a new car. We're talking about using uber/lyft.

If that uber driver is does uber-driving full time, and they charge their car using a suitably green power source, then the electric car might be seeing enough use/mileage that the emissions savings make a net win after a year or so on the road.

Maybe uber-consisting-of-only-cars-at-least-10-years-old would still be better. But you're never going to get uber to implement that.

And of course taking the bus is better, but sometimes extremely inconvenient (for some definition of "extremely".

----------------------------------

Separate line of thought - I have in the past reasoned thus:

In the year 2025, millions of new cars will be produced and sold. There is nothing that a couple of curmudgeons like you and I can do about that. But the fraction of those cars that are electric vs petroleum-powered is going to depend on the number of people who by electric cars between now and then. Consumer behavior does influence the set of products that vendors make available to consume in subsequent months and years. So maybe these brand-new-electric-car-buyers are actually helping in an indirect (and impractical-to-quantify) way.

Uber Green already exists in Paris, at the same price than UberX

On form, not content: it baffles me that companies the size of Uber can’t code a responsive site, or test it on a handful of devices. Google is usually guilty of this as well.

Content is larger then viewport on iPhone SE

Looks fine on my Galaxy S7. Maybe they set a minimum size. IPhone Se has only 20% of the pixels in a modern phone screen.

I believe we disagree on the definition of modern.

Smaller size is a feature to me. I find the jugglery people need to perform I order to reach all corners of the screen comical.

I think in a few years these large phones will look like the ones used by Gordon Gekko. They already do to me.

> Smaller size is a feature to me.

I agree. I deferred buying the S9+ precisely because it is even bigger than my S7 edge, which is already stretching the limits of usability. However the SE errs on the side of "too small" for me. Moreover, the screen is positively coarse, regardless of the physical size. There aren't enough pixels on it.

Pixel density on the SE is 326 ppi. Better than most photo prints and the same as the iPhone 7 and 8. You need a magnifying glass to see them.

I don't think that's correct. I can see the coarse nature of the screen quite easily and it's highly annoying. In any case, as I said, the size is also too small to be of much use as a smartphone.

Back to the main point, TFA is responsive to screen size, but there's only so much you can expect a website to scale. Just like a current website will look bad on a 8k monitor, it will also look bad on a smart watch screen. I think the SE screen is physically and logically too small.

>I don't think that's correct.

It is:

https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-7/specs/

>I can see the coarse nature of the screen quite easily and it's highly annoying.

You are probably confusing it with a 3GS or something else. Apple has been selling “Retina Displays” ever since the iPhone 4. You can't see the pixels in any such screens at any reasonable viewing distance.

>…the size is also too small to be of much use as a smartphone

That's not a statement of fact. The SE sells very well and not only because of its price.

>TFA is responsive to screen size, but there's only so much you can expect a website to scale. Just like a current website will look bad on a 8k monitor, it will also look bad on a smart watch screen.

That's not how responsive design works, that's just bad design. There's no technical reason to specify a minimum/maximum size and work within that range.

And that's not what they did either. Their CSS is responsive, they just added a <table> element (which is notoriously bad on mobile) that can't scale beneath 334px with current font/padding/border settings. That's just laziness or ignorance.

It seems like the biggest issue here is that as an Uber driver, your downtime for refueling is lost money. With gas, that's a 5 minute downtime. With electric, it's 30+ minutes.

If they really want this program to take off, they need to partner with some green partners who will pay the Uber drivers for their charging time.

Or just charge higher rates for those who want to pay for an electric, eco-friendly option. This would be simpler and more palatable for consumers, rather than some complex charging time payback scheme.

The marginal cost of operating an EV is so much lower than an ICE car, that the charge time is more than made up for. The scheduled maintenace for my Nissan Leaf is essentially “check the fluids and rotate the tires” for the lifetime of the car. On top of that, the MPG equivalent is >100 mpg and charging in many places is free. It’s literally an order of magnitude difference in operating costs.

Depending on the Uber driver, they might not need any downtime. According to PBS, the average NYC taxi driver does ~180 miles in a 12 hour shift.

I have no idea the accuracy of that statistic. But if it's true, then an Uber driver could buy a Chevy Bolt, get 220+ miles a day out of it (one full 12hr shift), and just charge at home or garage overnight. No downtime besides their own sleeping.

A lot of fluff here without much change honestly. You can schedule rides less than 30 minutes so you don’t run out of juice but that’s it.

I’d like to see charging discounts or something else to make it economical as well.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the electric car sharing scheme comes to an end:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20180619/wheels-set-to-come-off-pari...

There are many factors for why this is so, not making money being the problem. This is a story that investors in today's EV 'sharing' companies may find prescient.

Sounds like trusting fellow users is a major factor

"They are full of cigarettes, lighters, bottles, bags with rubbish. People take drugs in the cars." François, an Autolib employee in Paris told France Info.

One Paris resident told The Local how he and neighbours successfully persuaded authorities to close their local Autolib station.

"We were sick and tired of the vehicles becoming a temporary home for drug addicts of all kinds , vagrants and toxico-tourists that roam the night in search of a place .

"There were piles of junk food , discarded bottles , cigarette butts , and yes ….. used condoms all over the pavement – this is not what you want to step across as you take the kids to school in the morning.

I find it telling that neither this or the linked blog post give specifics on the amount they are providing. I'm guessing most of the additional costs to go electric will fall on the driver.

EVs have half the per mile operating costs as an internal combustion vehicle. This increases EV utilization on the network, incentivizing the deployment of EVs on Uber’s network by drivers.

You shouldn’t buy an EV solely to drive for Uber, but if you are going to drive for Uber and have an EV, you should get more rides sent your way.

A lot of the operating cost advantage will disappear when attempting to use an EV as an Uber vehicle, though. Most EVs cost more than an ICE-powered vehicle and take longer to "fill up" when at the end of their range - so, for large portions of a day, you will have a more expensive asset deprecating in a parking lot as it charges its batteries.

I'm not sure that this is enough to actually make an EV more expensive to operate than a traditional car as a Uber vehicle, but I do think that it's worth pointing out that the workload of an Uber vehicle is enough to move a car out of the operating window that is usually used to support statements like "EVs have half the per mile operating costs as an internal combustion vehicle".

If the vehicle currently isn't in revenue service then it's not "operating." If it's not operating, then it's not contributing to operating cost. The time to recharge the batteries is variable overhead, not operating cost.

I get the point you're trying to make, but I don't think it's valid.

Fixed costs are a component of operating costs. I'm an engineer (at least by education) so I might have these terms slightly wrong, but I think the correct way to say this is that EVs have higher fixed costs and lower variable costs - and both of those are part of operating costs.

FWIW, I'm not representing this as a full analysis, just pointing out that "EVs are cheaper to operate when driven by someone as a daily driver" doesn't necessarily mean "EVs are cheaper to operate as an Uber vehicle".

Considering an extreme example: for a car that can only do 1 trip then requires a day of recharge clearly the operator is losing out on a lot of potential revenue. That is a real cost and should be factored somewhere when comparing against another vehicle which can recharge quickly between trips.

Part of operation is the maintenance required to do the work and at the very least any time spent charging above the average alternative (refueling an ICE car) is losing the operator the average wages they'd have earned operation for that long.

Agreed. Also in London at least at lot of the vehicles are being used in multiple shifts, which makes this problem even worse.

Eg: Driver A does 9am-6pm, then drives the Prius to Driver B, who does 6pm to 3am, which leaves not enough time to charge.

This is why fast DC charging makes a huge difference. There are a number of car service fleets using Teslas (e.g. the Schiphol Airport taxis in Amsterdam). When you can re-load 200 miles in 30 minutes of charging, the driver can recharge the car over their lunch break.

It seems like it would take tremendous effort on Uber's part to keep EVs viable as ride sharing vehicles otherwise you're looking at vehicles that will provide 3 or 4 trips a shift then be done for the day. Refueling an ICE takes 5 minutes tops then it's back on the road at 100% effectiveness and gas stations are everywhere. Even with the highest DC Fast Charging you're still looking at 15-30 minutes to get an EV to 80% and DC Fast Chargers are uncommon, so there would need to be a build out of DC Fast Chargers available possibly exclusively to Uber EVs. Highway speeds are nightmares for EV range so Uber would need to assign fares selectively based on vehicle types and routes. Loitering isn't an effective use of an EV so you'd need to provide parking solutions near prime pickup locations. You can safely assume an ICE has range for a 10-15 mile trip anywhere but with EVs you'd need to be aware of the battery capacities and plan routes near charging stations so EVs could top up.

It just seems like a nonstarter and I'd feel bad for an Uber driver who purchases an EV thinking it will net them more profits.

vehicles that will provide 3 or 4 trips a shift then be done for the day.

Average Uber trip: 6 miles. Range of Chevy Bolt: 200+ miles.

Sure, but there's likely at least a multiplier of ~2 or so for idling and driving between passengers. Perhaps an Uber driver could provide a real number for (total miles driven / billed miles).

The Avg Trip metric doesn't at all take into account the loiter and distance to fare mileage.

Also the MPGe mile ratings on EVs are great for comparing one EV to another but as an EV owner I do not think they're representative of the actual range of an EV.

I have an Nissan Leaf with a 24kWh battery and my 25 mile commute uses anywhere from 8-12kWh of charge. With a range rating of 84 miles, that's 28-42 miles. You might dismiss that by saying I'm driving aggressively but the Leaf's range estimator usually indicates 90+ miles when I'm at 100% charge and is based on the previous trip's performance, so I'm beating the average.

>> so there would need to be a build out of DC Fast Chargers available possibly exclusively to Uber EVs.

This is great! Doing hard things is what gives a business a sustainable advantage. Such advantage may be needed for UBER in the age of self-driving cars.

>> Highway speeds are nightmares for EV range so Uber would need to assign fares selectively based on vehicle types and routes.

maybe 20%-30% penalty on range:

https://pushevs.com/electric-car-range-efficiency-epa/

Seems manageable with DC charging, considering all the benefits.

>> Loitering isn't an effective use of an EV so you'd need to provide parking solutions near prime pickup locations.

That's a problem.

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