Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It’s not even a question. You could buy an overpriced car that you can’t afford with a high interest rate and it would still be much cheaper. I think you need to go back to first principles on this one.

hold up hold up hold up.

So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did it a little bit this year just to see how it changed. They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the total fares collected.

Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine, though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era, where the way you got a ride was by calling up a dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers got to take home about 85% of the total fares.

So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-automated system where the driver is taking in significantly less.

And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha! The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are simply proving my point~!!1!"

Here's the deal:

* Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance, something that would have to be carried by the company if the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver

* More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce vastly more overhead costs, even though one would expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-dispatch system would cut overhead.

I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides actually more expensive.

But where are the cars themselves coming from in this scenario? Are these still other people's cars which Lyft/Uber are essentially paying you to put on their platform? I don't think you can afford to pay people that much less than drivers are paid per hour. Is Uber/Lyft taking care of gas/maintenance or is the owner on the hook for that in the middle of whatever else they might be doing? Or does Uber/Lyft own the cars, in which case you've just replaced one big cost (paying drivers) with another big cost (owning a fleet of vehicles)?

Labor is significantly less than half the cost for operating an Uber/Lyft.

$20? Where do you use Uber? In a rural area to go 2 miles?

Good thing you can buy a car for $5k

I'm not so sure. AAA estimates that it costs $10,728 to own and operate a new vehicle per year which is driven 15,0000 miles per year. This includes all the costs like depreciation, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc, and works out to be $0.71 per mile.

At least in my town, Ubers are more expensive than that. I can't seem to find a trip anywhere for under $15, even if its a few miles away, or like $3 per mile. Longer trips are more economical, but for example, my airport (40 miles away) is quoting me $80 at the moment, or $2 per mile. Also, these prices don't include tip.

I think if you lived in a big city with public transportation and occasionally took Uber, it would be more economical than a car. But as a 100% replacement, Ubers appear to be 3 to 5 times more expensive than having your own car.

And by the way, that AAA data is from a brand new car. You can easily go cheaper by getting a reliable used car.

source: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...

Assuming no deadheading and equivalent vehicle costs, you're probably looking at about 50% of current Uber costs if there were autonomous vehicles today. Whether that qualifies as "way down" I guess is a matter of perspective.