Mexican taxi drivers beat up Uber with baseball bats. (Google translate) | Hacker News Reader

Mexican taxi drivers beat up Uber with baseball bats. (Google translate)

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49 pointsjmz7v11 comments

Well they pay for licenses, training, insurance and fee to the agency. No wonder they are frustrated that Uber drivers under banner of "hacking industry" avoid those laws and manage to charge customers less as their cost of running is mostly their time + petrol.

Nothing explains behavior like that, but for sure Uber is last company to feel sorry for.

I agree. This type of business isn't very transparent about how liability is transferred to the driver. All drivers "proper" uber and lyft are getting a raw deal. I feel exceptionally bad for the uber/lyft drivers, they are unwillingly turned into scabs and are under paid given the liability they have to incur. Not to mention some are embarrassingly inexperienced. I think the wrong windows are being smashed.

Well, not the company, but you should feel at least, sorry for the driver.

Uber's drivers also pay for licenses, insurance and fee, also, they pay their taxes; in every one of their rides a tax-deductable receipt is made and sent automatically to your email. Just try that with the taxi.

Also, the cars are better, the people are nicer, you don't have to carry cash to pay, and the fees are better. Here in Mexico the illegal taxis (pirate taxis) are a very serious crime. The government wouldn't have let Uber entering if they thought it would be like the illegal taxis. So, it's not as it's a dude with a car and that's it. It's regularized.

Having taken quite a few cabs in DF (lived in Roma for a couple months), the uber-bashing in this thread is perplexing. Cab drivers in DF routinely don't follow rules - they often share the same license amongst multiple people, they'll lie about knowing how to get to a place and take you on a merry-go ride where they stop to ask people for directions along the way, they'll go out of the way to extend your ride intentionally and cars will be completely devoid of seatbelts. The idea that Uber is line-stepping ignores the fact that everyone is already line-stepping but at least with Uber, you get a way better product. (Granted ideally you have a set of rules that get enforced and quality control that way but this just isn't the tempo of DF).

Headline should probably say 'smash Uber car with baseball bats.' At first I thought they were beating up drivers. Smashing up a car is still bad, but very different.

This is the same Mexico where teachers don't just have a title to their jobs, they can sell that title to someone else for cash money. And if they're not happy with education reforms, they'll just teach kids leftist chants all day instead of reading or arithmetic... to say nothing of the arson, or the mobs armed with baseball bats.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/ec...

Once upon a time there were actual heroes like Cesar Chavez, and today's thugs still trade on his good name. One of many reasons Mexico's economy isn't as good as the US economy...

It is said that the taxi's license plates cost up to $1 million pesos (about ~$65,000 USD) here in Mexico. What I didn't know was that that's the resale value, the price at which the government sells them is actually $1,000 USD ($15,000 pesos).

And yeah, the business is THAT good that some people are willing to pay those quantities. Before using Uber I read all those nasty stuff about the company and the rape thing, but at least here in Mexico, the drivers are very nice, the cars are 90% better than the taxis and it's cheaper.

It's not a big surprise that the taxi mafia is scared. And I think that speaks for itself.

Similar thing happened in the Netherlands a few days ago.

Please note that these people are driven by anger for being substituted for cheaper, hipper, faster and newer competitors. They play the taxi game by their own rules and for taxi drivers who have been into winning the game with so little hesitation for so long and literally get disrupted over night by these rule breakers, the result is agression against the disrupting force.

The disrupting force makes them loose their bread and nobody does anything against it. An entire market is being ripped open and this is what makes Uber so interesting. It is something which will completely change an entire industry which basically made money for a long time without any competitors of another level. I cannot wait until Uber starts the fight against public transportation.

Did you just move this to the business page?

Why stop at public transportation? They should just start building and maintaining roads. More people use those anyway.

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