I think this is definitely true.

You even see it with people getting paid out mileage for work things. They think that if they get $60 to drive somewhere but they only paid $35 for gas that they're getting a free $25. They don't think at all about wear and tear on a car.

I got out the blue book and calculated the depreciation I was causing to my car. I was shocked how much it was eating into what I made. How many people are actually going to do that?

The key is to get a used Subaru or Toyota truck for like $2k. Those things last forever. But that's not going to fly with Uber or Lyft. Should work fine for delivery.

Disclaimer: I work at a delivery startup

I don't know how everyone else does it, but we pay for mileage separate from a per delivery/time rate.

Some of our drivers are surprisingly savvy and keep very detailed logs. We don't have particularly high turnover either. Generally if someone works with us for more than a week or two they stick around.

I agree completely with the depreciation and people not being aware how much it affects their pay.

I got an $8 ride across town in a ~3 year old X5 the other night. It was about 25 mins of total time to him being dispatched to me and then me being dropped off, add in the time it takes him to get to his next pickup, there is no way that is a profitable ride for him.

blackize, are you able to speak generally about the profit margins that the industry is making? It seems like to me the margins have to be razor-thin, but there was something like 100mm in VC going into these companies in the last month, so there is clearly some big math being done.

Can confirm driving uber is like a minimum wage deal, but worse. The company's **** and treats the drivers like garbage. I'd rather work fast food tbh.

i imagine some amount of uber drivers realize they're draining value out of their cars, but rather than do a straight trade of their cars for cash they accept a quicker depreciation in exchange for getting to keep their cars and have the freedom a car affords.

I mean, they could probably get loans against the worth of their cars, but that comes with all sorts of jacked up interest rates and strings.

Generally speaking the industry is not profitable and cost varies significantly. For example eBay when they were still in the space and google are burning something like $20 per delivery just in fulfillment.

Without considering things like engineering salaries margins can be pretty good at 40 to 50%

The delivering and transport industry are going to change soon anyway.

Wait till we have self driving cars, trucks and delivery vehicles.

I would think that it would be risky to start a delivery business, when computer driven vehicles are hitting the streets and a lot can happen in 3 years.

Another two industries that will hit the dust thanks to computers and programmers.

computer programmers: ruining your job due to our laziness since 1990

Who takes **** out of computer driven delivery vehicles?

Not only that but the software will just provide an API for the driverless entities.

I'm convinced Uber just wants driverless cars.

Cops will be like who the **** do I give speeding tickets to?

angled ramps and tiny parachutes, duh

If uber wants to pay that low and drivers are willing to drive for that price, then yay more power to the consumers! Personally if I ever was an uber driver, I would only drive during surge spikes. That's where the money is at.

On the off chance that you have to take a taxi over an uber, you should ask the driver how they feel about uber. Taxi drivers get all burt hurt and salty about Uber. And for some reason they get so insulted when you want to pay by credit card. What's up with that?

I use Uber quite a bit.

Everyone I've ridden with has claimed to do this for a year or more. Most don't have a real job. They claim to make good money, which they should if they plan to live in L.A.

Uber gives them a no-questions loan to buy a new car.

Drivers don't make much more on surges than regular fair. All of them tell me how to game out of paying surge fairs, but I never really care since I use Uber when I need to get somewhere stat. The gold standard is getting an airport pass.

My average fair is about $10. The most I've paid is $25, which was from downtown L.A. to Pasadena on a 1.8x surge. I've paid $15 to get to Beverly Hills, which isn't that bad.

I can tell you in the area I live in driving uber is absolute ****. Most other drivers I've talked to feel the same way. They're probably terrified of dropping below a 4.9 rating and getting randomly dropped to say anything negative about Uber.

After gas I don't see any way anyone could make consistently more than 12/hr with full time type of work hours.

Uber has awful business practices which I'm not interested in supporting. I'm moving out of the suburbs soon so we'll see how long that lasts. They are pretty horrible though so I'm not thinking it's going to change.

Taxi cartels have even worse business practices though at least around here.

Uber just opened an office in Pittsburgh to try and hire all the CMU people to build driverless cars. That's definitely their goal.

Judging by how horrific the user experience is for a driver on their software, i'd say they're a decade off being able to make the car come to your location. Most of the time the app would send me way off from where I was supposed to go and people are never where they're supposed to be to begin with.

Removing the human element from the cars would make those problems way worse unless they make radical changes and judging from my few brief interactions with higherups they're just generally clueless.

Oh and i'd love to see a self driving program deal with a belligerent drunk guy who tells it to pick him up from vagueish location like a bar "on main street" and having it try to find a spot to safely pick up and then actually finding the guy. Haha. Oh my god.

Driverless cars are probably years away regardless.

I'm guessing if we can do driverless cars, we can do driverless cars guided by GPS location.

That's what I'm saying though, we can't even guide a driver to an accurate GPS location yet. At least uber can't.

from a regulatory standpoint you mean or?

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/may...lf-driving-ca/

http://www.dw.de/daimler-launches-se...ada/a-18430979