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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

My brother in law is a mechanic. He sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.

I also get a lot of happy drivers saying "this is my first day / week".

I see a lot of crazy driving too. All in all, it seems like there is a learning curve to being a profitable Uber driver. It is not necessarily easy to accomplish.

The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.

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> The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.

That's a large part of Uber's success: they are able to leverage the many people who have a car and occasionally have nothing better to do. There are even people who will drive for fun or as a way to kill boredom. Of course, those people will happily take a fraction of the pay that a professional taxi driver would. And those rides will be cheaper for consumers compared to taxi rides.

It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

> It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

It's only good for customers when they need to get a ride for certain times and only for some time. One of the reasons why taxis get regulated is because taxi companies need to guarantee service throughout the day. Drivers who only drive on the side will not provide that service, moreover if the regular taxi drivers are driven into bankruptcy because of uber drivers taking all the profitable times prices on average actually go up and especially for off peak times.

> This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

Uber's biggest lie is that these are the only stakeholders in the equation.

I love people who somehow think that taxi industry is filled with clean, perfectly maintained cars, fairly paid workers with great benefits and just the epitome of great citizens without any corruption.

Do you think I am one of those?

If so, why?

I see lots of people here from different countries describing very different experiences and wondering why they don't align.

It's insane. Thank God for tech companies for disrupting one of the worst industries on the planet. Uber and Lyft are, IMO, some of the best examples of the virtuous nature of "move fast & break things" as a business philosophy.

Uber are worse where I live. They cancel on you, they accept the fare and then just screw around for 20 minutes until you cancel, then if you try to rebook the price has magically gone up. At most times of day they are more expensive than the normal cab firms.

This all seems to come down to the rates of pay available to drivers getting worse, presumably as the VC money runs out. Thankfully the old cab firms have managed to cling on in the face of years of massive market distortion, and are still there to pick up the slack.

That's fine. They don't have to be better everywhere for me to be happy they exist. People attack Uber without dealing with the very obvious problem that in many, many markets, for both drivers and riders, they're an enormous improvement over the status quo.

And in many markets they were a market-distorting entity that drove already competitive firms to the wall by dumping VC money, meanwhile also circumventing rules which were in place for passenger and public safety.

I'm really not fine with that.

In what markets did Uber decrease passenger safety relative to existing cab companies? I have literally never been in a locality where the cabs were safer than Uber.

So early on in London there were problems with drivers not having proper insurance to carry passengers, for one, so if anything went wrong there would be no cover (and the driver was technically driving illegally as insurance is required). In some places (again like London) there were also requirements for background checks and registration before someone could be a driver, which uber worked around or just ignored when they entered the market.

These are just two examples from one market.

Okay. Not having taken London cabs, I cannot disagree with you. What I can tell you is that Ubers in NYC are much safer than cabs in NYC, and Ubers across Africa are much safer than their cab equivalents. To the degree that Uber's technology actually achieves something that cab companies cannot, it's punishing bad driver and rider behavior via the rating system.

> [Mechanic brother] sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.

At the median rate for my city (Boston), those drivers were paid $1.07/mile* or $214K. They probably paid under $50K in gas, oil, tires, and repairs to that point, so they’re quite a bit ahead even if they have to throw the car away. Even at $0.66/mile for some of the worse cities, that’s still $132K in gross income.

* https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/02/how-much-does-uber-pay/

Not that I doubt an article on a predatory loan website but…

You make the assumption that they are driving ~3800 miles a week and I can tell you, as a truck driver who is mostly out on the highways, there’s no way in hell they are doing those kinds of miles city driving. That’s like 550 miles a day seven days a week.

When I drove a cab the lowest rate was $1.45/mile (for medical vouchers) and some days it cost me money to haul people around and my expenses were only like $140/day (gas + lease). Though, once in a while I’d have a really good day with some big cash calls and take home a few hundred bucks but mostly I averaged ~$100/day take home (before taxes which I didn’t actually pay). Mostly, depending on the season and what was happening in town.

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