Actually no. Doing maintenance on 100 different cars for 100 different owners, all of whom bring their cars in at different times on different days, is inherently more expensive than doing maintenance on 100 cars in a row. If you’re doing 100 cars in a row, you can set your auto shop up assembly line style and fix the whole lot of them with far fewer total man hours than if you were doing 100 different cars piecemeal.
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They’ve already been bailing. Some reports say the majority of drivers are thinking of quitting, and by one report up to 94% of drivers last less than a year. They are running on a Ponzi scheme of getting new drivers, but who knows how long that will last…
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The vast majority of Uber drivers actually leave the platform within a year and with a 4% retention rate things are not looking good at all.
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All the drivers are walking away…
Uber has a 4% retention rate.
The last couple drivers I had were laid off from regular jobs. If they landed another full-time job, they were going to be off Uber. I think that’s probably very common.
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maybe the question then is whether there’s enough slop in employment to keep the business going?
if enough people are able to get near instantaneous employment ( b/c no background checks) through ride “sharing” – and if they also able to keep unemployment benefits ( b/c “contractor” ) – with flexible hours ( so they can continue to look for work ) – then perhaps so.
unlike taxi drivers, i dont see uber drivers thinking it’s a life-time full-time job. ( which is also part of what seems to be lost in the the car / deprecation analysis. )
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I wish someone would join BoingBoing and tell us what Uber’s retention rate is, I can’t find it anywhere.
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When it goes public there will be a lot of sharp questions about when is it going to start making money, and lots of publicly available data to show how badly it’s doing.
“For 100 different owners” is irrelevant. “Different times on different days” is how time works. Every auto shop I’ve ever seen looks exactly like every other auto shop I’ve ever seen. There are no factories with 100 taxis on a conveyor belt waiting for an oil change, and if there were it would not make things less expensive. Cars don’t break down in predictable ways on a predictable schedule just because they’re owned by a corporation.
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The real savings is that cab company shops repair the cabs at cost, while Uber drivers have to pay retail. Likewise, cab companies can negotiate a better rate for insurance because of their size. One thing that Uber could do to mitigate that is do make partnerships with insurance and repair companies to give their drivers a significant discount. (Maybe they already do, I dunno.)
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Not sure… I think that Moore’s Law states that cars will shrink by a factor of 2 every year, and riders will have to shrink to keep pace. The problem of course, is the capacity to shed heat doesn’t go down as fast, so drivers and passengers alike will bake.
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I’m in downtown Vancouver and use a combination of Car2Go, Evo and Modo. I have no need for a meat puppet driver; I just (temporarily) need the machine.
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The article claims the only advantage cab companies have is they can buy/maintain cars at scale (so lower cost), but the big thing Uber has is the rating system and electronic hailing.
Do any taxi companies allow drivers to be individually rated and removed if they don’t perform? Anyone who’s had a McCarran airport driver ride in circles will speak to the utility of Uber’s rating system
Uber has actually made the cab market worse in a lot of smaller market cities. In a lot of those cities cabs were an option that basically worked well. Cleveland for example had reasonably clean cheap cabs that were readily available 24/7. The drivers were never going to get rich, but they got by. Now most of those companies are out of business (the best fares were picked off by the venture subsidized Ubers) and Uber can’t really fill the late night airport run market. So now prices are higher and availability is less, while the workers make less money.
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You’re looking at it from the perspective of the individual vehicles, not from the perspective of the shop owner. 100 individuals bringing in their cars separately represents hours and hours of your mechanics being paid to wait for a customer to show up. A company with a fleet of 100 vehicles that they want you to care for represents hundreds of guaranteed billable hours that, furthermore, you can schedule. That means you can give the company a fairly hefty discount.
ETA: and for scheduled preventative maintenance, yes you can do it assembly line fashion if you’re dealing with a hundred vehicles that can be brought in (by their drivers, organized by the company dispatcher) on a schedule. Again, you can offer a massive discount due to a higher ratio of billable to non-billable hours.
And as @Andrew_Glasgow points out, if the company is big enough they will own their own shop and can get their fleet repaired at cost.
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that’s okay. you forget that pot is legal in ten states now
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Armstrong invested in Uber nearly a decade ago indirectly through a venture capital fund, and he admitted he didn’t initially realize the ride-sharing company was part of the portfolio.
“Probably around ’08 or ’09, [Chris Sacca] left to start his own venture capital fund called Lowercase Capital,” Armstrong said. “And he called me and said, ‘Looking for investors. Would you invest?’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘This guy has a huge personality, but he’s also very smart and very well-connected. Why not?’ So I invested in Chris Sacca. I didn’t even know that he did Uber. I thought he was buying up a bunch of Twitter shares from employees or former employees and the biggest investment in Lowercase fund one was Uber.”
Armstrong’s initial investment in Lowercase Capital was $100,000. Ross Sorkin pressed Armstrong to reveal how much his investment was now worth, asking “What are we talking? Ballpark. … Ten, 20, 30, 40, $50 million?”
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Otherwise known as ‘making up a number’.
Sorry, I failed to include his very Trumpian response.
“It’s one of those. It’s a lot. It’s a lot."
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