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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever.

During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride.

At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF.

From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes.

How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.

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I know plenty of Uber (and normal taxis) drivers around the airport here who pick up a someone, then ask if they mind taking someone else. Because it is usually vans and business customers, they don't care and actually kind of like talking with other business guys who probably went or are going to the same seminar/conference etc. The driver will then load up whatever fits who are waiting for taxis or drivers and only report 1 person to the service. As this is hotel to airport to hotel, there are not many ways of uber, lyft etc detecting this unless someone rats them out. I asked a driver and obviously he responded with Uber screws me, I screw Uber.

How do people pay the driver? I guess cash isn't really a thing anymore in a lot of places.

Are those drivers driving for multiple services (uber, lyft, whatever) at the same time?

Many normal taxis drive also for Uber or Lyft as you need the license anyway over here. Not sure if you can be Uber AND Lyft at the same time.

Payment is preferably cash (I started wearing cash again with how the lovely cashless stuff is ramping up here in the EU), but I had all drivers so far who simply had this Square like device on their phone to take payments. So the driver runs around to let out the 'main' passenger, let's them walk off, runs around to open the van door and tell what the price is cash or tap your card. That is the most common. I see sometimes they charge similar to what the 'main passenger' pays and sometimes less.

In Vietnam, if you see a parked driver waiting for a call, you can show him your Grab (ie, Asian copy of Uber) price to go somewhere, then get the same ride for 80%.

Why would they mind more cash in their pocket?

A similar thing happened to me in South America while on vacation, I was looking to book an Uber but the taxi driver gave me a small discount to do it "on the side" and explained that he wouldn't see most of the money from Uber. As a passenger, the advantage of Uber is that if something happens, I have someone accountable: drive + car plate. But in reality I don't know if that works

The same thing happened to me in Bucharest. The driver would give me a discount if I canceled my Uber reservation and paid in cash.

That would be a hard NO from me. Mostly because I don't want to talk to someone for 75 minutes.

How does this compare to typical taxi corporations? In Europe at least, taxis are often organised into companies, with centralised bookings, and taxi drivers paying a cut to the corporation. Here the cut is, based on your numbers, 65%, which does seem very high, but then what do I know.

I believe taxi companies own the license (which is super expensive) as well as the car. They also pay maintenance and gas costs. So 35% cut to just drive equipment is not that bad. The issue with uber/lyft is that you also need to bring your vehicle, pay maintenance, gas, insurance and depreciation.

I think that poor guy made less than 15% (assuming an 80 cent per mile cost for the vehicle).

I believe in Europe taxi drivers typically cover these costs too. Not sure about licensing costs. In that regard, they are more like cooperatives rather than "companies with employees". But I don't know for sure - and probably varies by locale.

Looking at the financials of Lyft, based on what they report gross bookings are ~ 4.8B. 3B are driver earnings and 1.8B is the Lyft portion. So on average Lyft is getting 37%. Maybe they subsidize the shorter rides with the longer ones.

Lyft is software. Marginal cost is almost always close to zero for software but it hardly matters, software like that has high R&D + marketing costs. It's not like Lyft just magically appeared. Uber took many years to become profitable because their costs were so high, Lyft is probably the same.

I remember I ordered a taxi in Mexico and the driver had to pay freeway toll that was roughly equal to the ride price. I gave him cash for the toll.

$38/hr sounds pretty good to me though.

If you drove 50 miles in an hour, then likely $38 does not cover your car costs.

The IRS mileage cost of 0.70/mi is for a car in a situation that an Uber driver should never be in, that is, an average car with average fuel economy being professionally serviced and maintained, with average depreciation and interest rate. None of those should be the case for anyone driving Uber.

But that was the lure of ridesharing. Bring your own average car, no need to buy special equipment.

If you do have to buy a car just for uber, then you would have to consider the interest payments as additional cost (not just the depreciation of the equipment, which will be super brutal for a brand new car).

In any case, you are looking at something north of 50 cents per mile.

AAA has a nice breakdown: https://www.ace.aaa.com/automotive/advocacy/cost-of-driving....

Um, I think you're taking my comment reversed. Using a new car for Uber is what you should never do. You should be using the shittiest car possible. Buying a new car for Uber is not good. The cost per mile, as calculated by IRS, goes up with a new car because that cost includes depreciation and interest. The cost is not actually that high if your car is old.

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