$1600 for driving a round trip 600 miles is good money though, even if you aren’t being paid for the 300 mile drive home.
anything which looks at what drivers make in different areas? if you’re in Suburb McSuburbia where everyone has their own car, I doubt you’ll make all that much.
Obviously not, if some of them are getting little to nothing(and for some, less than nothing).
Of course people should be free to make their own bad decisions (within reason). That has nothing to do with whether something is actually in their best interests.
Keep in mind how complex these decisions are. I could see myself deciding “I need the Uber cash THIS MONTH, even if it means more repairs a year from now (when I’ll have more income).”
Actually, in my case it’d be “…and I’ll just run my car into the ground a lot sooner without paying for repairs on it.” (We’ve always had Toyotas… that we’d love to get rid of, but they just won’t die.)
Ooh, new idea: How about “Beater Uber”? I’d call them for a cheaper ride… maybe I can pull my rusty old “Beat up by a big truck” Corolla out of hibernation.
It is easy to say that if you are someone who is confident that at the beginning of each month they will continue to have electricity, running water, and be able to pay for food. If you are faced with a.) spending a night driving for a hundred bucks or b.) going without electricity until your next paycheck, then driving is in your best interests. You are saying “let them eat cake” here.
My brother tried driving for Uber “full time” for about a month keeping very detailed records.
His findings were: location, location, location AND time of day, time of day, time of day.
He says that anyone who just goes out and drives 10 hours or so a day will certainly LOSE money.
My brother now knows exactly when to go out and where to go to pick up well paying fares. He admits that these times of the day and good locations are limited and certainly don’t add up to the kind of pay one could get working at a full time job with a good salary, but for the 20 or so hours he works, he makes pretty good money on a per hour basis.
These surveys on what “average” Uber drivers make are garbage. Many of the drivers in the survey are clueless about planning the right time to go out and finding the right location to wait at so , of course, they don’t make any money. If it were easy money, “everyone” would be doing it.
How many Uber drivers do you think that actually applies to? Possibly a few Uber drivers are in such a precarious position. I doubt most are. Because, you know, they can afford to have a car.
Once again, whether someone does something has been demonstrated not to be closely connected to whether that is a rational economic decision. That is a fact.
PS. You may be so poor you have to live on a diet of Ramen noodles. That doesn’t mean that living on Ramen noodles is good for you.
The fact that you have to postulate such an extreme situation to justify driving for Uber demonstrates the weakness of your position.
That is not an extreme position–that is the exact position that my Ubering cousin that I mentioned is in. I don’t know how much she makes in her normal daily job, but it is well below $10.00 per hour–that $100 that she can make per night on Friday and Saturday nights driving people back and forth from clubs is more than she makes per day at work. And yes, that extra money makes the difference between having bills paid and not having bills paid. If you don’t believe that kind of thing is common in the US, then there are two ivory tower denizens here on the dope.
I suspect the discrepancies (between studies & studies vs. claimed by drivers) come from the difficulty of calculating the expense of car ownership & maintenance. If you are using a car you already own, the cost of the car probably shouldn’t be included. But there is still some additional depreciation because of increased mileage on the car which should be included. And some people specifically buy a car suitable for Uber/Lyft, which may be an additional expense that should be factored in. Maintenance & repair are largely statistical - car with more mileage is more likely to have increased repair costs, but it’s not a certainty. It’s impossible to say whether the expensive repair you had to do was because of the additional Uber driving, or would have been necessary anyway if you’d just used your car to commute.
I’ve seen people keep a money-losing business in operation for years before they put 2 and 2 (or 2 and minus 3) together that it was costing them money and they’d never have enough customers to make the payments (or, worse, that more customers meant more losses). People will take out loans against the business’ assets, refinance their house, and at the same time tweak the opening hours, buy some new equipment, add new product lines, etc. Often it’s easier for an accountant (or another outsider) to detect the money pit.
A full-time Uber/Lyft driver may neglect to account for the depreciation and maintenance of their car for a year or two, and think it all works out because they can pay their household bills with the revenue. But I think they’d do the math at least when the car becomes unusable and they have to look at shelling out money replacing it. At that point, they’d also have enough experience to know the tricks of the trade and what their maximum income will be if they keep doing it.
A part-time driver with a day-time job, yeah, I can imagine they can keep losing money for a longer time without realising it.
Which is not to say that they all lose money, obviously. Just that I’m sure some do and aren’t aware of it.
Sure, but was giving him that prize money a rational decision? 
I note a lot of the people saying they’re making good money are only driving part time. It’s quite possible that someone driving only, say, 10 hours a week could be making dramatically more on an hourly basis than someone who’s trying to put in 40 or more hours, simply because the 10 hour person can pick the best 10 hours in the week to work.
It’s all very well saying that people who are losing money, or barely scraping even, just aren’t picking the good hours, but there’s only one (say) Friday night a week.
Yes, the mistake is in acting like this is a career and not something you do in your spare time for some extra cash. You might as well complain about the poor wages you are paid for selling on EBay.
I track actual miles driven, not just miles with someone in the back seat. At $0.545 a mile, I’m still clearing about $16 an hour.
Nissan Rouge. And I catch an occasional surge. I live on the west side of Houston and will sometimes drive down into the Galleria area if I don’t have a ride heading that way. I’ll catch more surges that way.
Right now, the rodeo is going on and that part of town stays brown on the map for quite a while each day. Good money to be made.
And I’ll also second the idea that driving smart is a lot better than just driving. Big sources for easy rides in Houston are the Galleria and downtown. In addition, I signed up for UberEats, which means I make food pickups at restaurants and deliver to homes. Same pay as having a body in the back seat and it keeps me rolling “on the meter” more. Otherwise, I’ll go find a parking lot in the Galleria, turn off the car, read my Kindle and wait for a ride. I don’t cruise the streets waiting for one.
Never heard of it. Did you make-up that name?