Not paying a human to do the driving would make Uber/Lyft much cheaper, it's the dominant cost component of a ride if you do the math.
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.
And it’s not like there isn’t competition, we have both Lyft and Uber overlapping in many places and people can chose between them.
I’d really like to see a chart or something shows where Lyft/Uber fees goes.
There has to be a lot of inefficiencies. My suspicion is there is a lot of white collar bloat.
Previously customer service was non-existent. If a taxi didn’t show up, we just got screwed. There wasn’t even anyone to call for the issue. On the apps I instantly get a credit to help ease the burden and the driver has their rating reduced.
For many reasons customer service is very expensive and it’s not yet automated. That’s one big additional variable to keep in mind.
And that's not the first time I've had such poor service recently. Lyft used to be pretty good a few years ago but not it's just garbage.
You could call the dispatcher, who was physically local to you. Today's apps, maybe you get some ZenDesk type thing, or in-app chat to some large, faceless corporation, and my admittedly limited experience is these things tend to be very dismissive of customers, viewing support mainly as cost and trying to get rid of customers rather than addressing issues.