8 ms·
Dara Khosrowshahi had a stint driving for Uber and delivering for Uber Eats
- user3939382 3y agoMy suspicion, which some drivers have anecdotally confirmed, is that the income is outpaced by the depreciation on the cars. Uber’s real business appears to be financing on the cars.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoUber is a way for unsophisticated drivers to convert vehicle depreciation to immediate income at a poor conversion rate, under the guise of a sustainable taxi platform.
- throwaway2990 3y agoI just use Uber to order a taxi. Not randoms.
- moomoo11 3y agoI spoke to a driver and he said he leases car for $2xx a month. He drives 10+ hours a day and had like 60k trips completed. I'm sure he is doing okay.
- 13of40 3y agoThat's still just pushing the cost onto someone else, isn't it? City driving for 10 hours a day is going to put 3 or 4 times as many miles on the car as the leasing company estimates. Unless they've accommodated for that in the contract they're going to get a worn out piece of junk at the end that they can't resell.
- bombcar 3y agoThe trick is if you can do short trips, you can get in under the lease amount of miles even though the hours would be massively high. It's rare, but it can happen.
- amdolan 3y agoWhat a world where we’re optimizing for to pass the fucking over to someone else, and the major benefactor is harvesting at scale.
- hedora 3y agoRemember Uber’s vehicle lease program? They brought the fucking over and being fucked over steps in-house, but outsourced the middlemen. Amazing!
- alphabettsy 3y agoThis isn’t happening for any rideshare driver. I can’t imagine a scenario where you drive 8 hours a day and don’t exceed the normal 10-15k mile/yr lease. The average person can barely stay under the 15k.
- thfuran 3y agoThat's not how leases work. There's a mileage limit in the lease and if it's exceeded, the lessee is the one who gets screwed with fees.
- burkaman 3y agoIf he's been working 10+ hours a day for years then I don't think he is doing ok. That is a difficult life.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoI still don't get this argument. The amount of depreciation that comes from miles is quite small. Suppose you've driven your Prius for Uber for a few years. The bluebook on a 2010 Prius with 156,000 miles (the expected number for a 13 year old car) is ~$4000. If driving for Uber instead caused you to have 500,000 miles on it the bluebook value would be ~$2500, so the extra miles reduced the car's value by ~$1500. By contrast, at 50 MPG and $3/gallon the extra 344,000 miles would have cost you >$20,000 in gas. When you already have the car as a sunk cost because you need one for yourself, the depreciation is almost completely irrelevant unless you're doing something ridiculous like selling the car when it still has significant market value left.
- BrentOzar 3y ago> If driving for Uber instead caused you to have 500,000 miles on it Try to find a 2010 Prius with over 300,000 miles. There are only a handful in the US because they fall apart long before 500,000 miles. Depreciation isn't just about the car's value - it's also about the amount of mechanical work you have to put in for the suspension, tires, brakes, etc during the time that it goes from 150,000 miles to 500,000 miles. My mom's 2010-era Prius is a good example. The dash displays failed at around 100,000 miles, and she bought a new car rather than pay $2,500 to have the dash pulled out and display replaced.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> Try to find a 2010 Prius with over 300,000 miles. This isn't hard to find when they're used for car service. They're harder to find on the used market because the people who put >300,000 miles on a car don't generally sell them while they still run. > Depreciation isn't just about the car's value Depreciation is just about the car's value. Repairs aren't depreciation. And many of the people who drive as an occupation learn to repair their own vehicles, so they have lower repair costs than other people.
- mlyle 3y agoThe point that he's making is that your figure includes survival bias-- you're looking only at the cars that "make it" rather than are scrapped before this point. And you're also ignoring that upkeep and maintenance isn't linear with mileage. A big fraction of things that we consider depreciated to zero are still worth something. A big fraction fail before the point where we would do that. A big fraction incur larger operating costs later in their lifetime.
- searealist 3y agoThis appears like a clever thing to say, but it just isn't true, and it's easy to verify.
- metabagel 3y agoHow?
- Guvante 3y agoAssuming you buy a cheap Corolla that lasts 200k miles without major repairs you are looking at $0.125/mi, gas at $4/gal and 32mi/gal is the same putting you at $0.25/mi. Given Uber pays $0.63/mi you are giving up half of your income to your car. When people say that you are paying in depreciation they are talking about more expensive cars. A $60k car that can go 150k miles and a 24 mi/gal fuel economy turns it into a $0.56/mi cost.
- thfuran 3y agoNo major repairs and no routine maintenance?
- Guvante 3y ago200k miles is what $1k in maintenance? I was listing it but it was a rounding error. I felt like 200k is also before major repairs for the types of vehicle you would want for this. If you had $9k repairs and $1k of maintenance it would be 0.05/mi of cost but the former seems padded for a $20k vehicle.
- thfuran 3y ago1k for 200,00 miles? I think you'd probably spend more than that on just tires, and that's not counting the oil changes, probably multiple brake replacements, and likely a few belts and some struts.
- wayeq 3y agoin other words, it's a comment on the internet
- soared 3y ago> ... once I saw what I believe was a lack of quality with the product as it related to delivering, then I bought a Tesla, and I started driving as well. Oh boy, no wonder the ceo needed to drive for uber to understand the plight of the average man.
- TMWNN 3y agoThere is no shortage of Uber/Lyft drivers driving Teslas. I've ridden in Teslas two rides in a row.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIn all seriousness it makes a lot of sense. If you drive 8 hours a day you could easily be paying $500/month for gas, which is the car payment on a used Tesla. Which you would then own after a few years and still not be paying for gas.
- Arainach 3y agoThat's not true at all. A 3-4 year old Tesla goes for approximately 35,000. A 6 year loan at 6.7% is a payment of $600 a month, and by the time you're done paying you'll need to start over because your vehicle will be too old for Uber - assuming you haven't already had to spend tens of thousands more replacing the batteries.
- hrrsn 3y agoIn either case they'll still be spending tens of thousands on a vehicle (and dealing with the depreciation), but I'd imagine the fuel saving calculations pay off a lot quicker for a taxi than they would for most people. As an aside, locally the Model 3 starts at around $35k USD after rebates. <2 year old used models are around the $23k USD mark. We have a /lot/ of Teslas running around as Ubers now.
- Arainach 3y ago
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoI order food from DoorDash a few times a week. Everyonce in a while, I get a promo from Uber Eats and decide to try it out. Always a terrible experience. DoorDash is crushing Uber Eats. The delivery from doordash is always on time, and the food is usually as the driver picked it up. Most of the time from Uber Eats the food shows up half open. Also, theres nothing revolutionary about a CEO evaluating their own product
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThese anecdotes vary, as one would expect, by geography.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoNot really, I order enough and have for years that I have a huge sample size (100+ orders across NYC and socal)
- alphabettsy 3y agoGood things you’re not a statistician /s
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoI am a statistician, work in ML research
- tstrimple 3y ago[flagged]
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agowhatever dude
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- sharkweek 3y ago> When Wired's editor at large, Steven Levy, asked him to estimate the cost of a 2.95-mile Uber ride in New York City, Khosrowshahi ventured "20 bucks" — less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver. “I mean it’s one banana, Micheal, what could it cost… $10?”
- paulgb 3y agoTo be fair, prices fluctuate a lot based on time of day. Just checked the price of a 2.7 mile ride to a restaurant I like in Brooklyn and an UberX is $17.90.
- saghm 3y agoMentioning Brooklyn is also a good segue into the ambiguity of a ride "in New York City"; I suspect that even at the same time the price of a ride will vary by borough (or even neighborhood within a borough). The price of a ride from lower to upper Manhattan will presumably be different than the same distance in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens (although we can all probably agree that no reasonable person would interpret the question as being about Staten Island...)
- bmitc 3y agoYea, but that's their system. If you can't predict the price of a ride because it changes minute by minute, then that's not exactly great.
- cyberlurker 3y agoNot great for who?
- divbzero 3y agoYes, I agree with this completely. Depending on the time and day, a price could be wildly off even compared to the exact same route a month earlier.
- saghm 3y agoThis is the opposite of that joke though. Sure, both demonstrate rich people being out of touch with regular life, but the real life version is even more depression than the joke from the show; things being cheaper than a rich person expects wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but even a billionaire CEO thinking that the cost of a common service (from their own company!) is too high is a pretty clear sign that common people will struggle be able to afford things.
- tennisflyi 3y agoThere is always a stark disconnect from the top and the people at the bottom or those who actually use the app. Also, never had a problem with either DoorDash or Uber with food delivers. > Uber's CEO says his time delivering food for his company revealed a "lack of quality" with its product from a driver's perspective. Yes, everything is really nice and works great when you don't actually use the thing. I can't even find the words... > "It wasn't a pleasant all-hands with the company, but it set a tone, and we set that expectation — we started celebrating employees going out there delivering, employees driving," he said. "It is a point of pride for employees now — when they drive they get a little badge on their corporate profile, etc." God forbid you be an everyman. Edit: I've now read it and removed "I haven't read the article but".
- frognumber 3y agoThe pet peeves (https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-worst-passengers-rude-no-tip-stop-drive-thru-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-worst-passenger...) bug me: 1) Tipping shouldn't happen. There should be a fair salary. Tipping was introduced in 2017, and Uber is trying to make it more common. If drivers should be paid more, it should raise fares and incomes. 2) Arriving late should be okay. Passengers should be charged for it at a rate fair to the driver. Especially arriving at an airport after a 16+ hour flight, I'm glad to pay a driver to wait. A lot of this feels like misaligned incentives.
- 22c 3y agoI disagree with tipping culture in general (ie. always expected to tip because they're not paid enough) but for an exceptional driver I'm happy to throw a tip their way. Some drivers are really knowledgable and will happily give tips on where to go for dinner, what to do and see around, places to avoid etc. and I think a bit of monetary recognition (if you can afford it) is a good thing.
- etchalon 3y agoYou can't "disagree" with tipping culture where it exists. It exists. The driver's compensation is based on the assumption people will tip.
- Retric 3y agoSure you can, opting out of tipping changes the equilibrium. Tipping restaurants seems deeply ingrained in American culture, but chipping at the edges is how you get real change. Tipping isn’t a neutral activity, it actively supports exploitive work environments. I actively boycott such businesses, but even just scaling down tips is a positive change.
- etchalon 3y agoOpting out of tipping doesn't change anything but people's opinion of you.
- duxup 3y agoSo what exactly did they change? The article says they had an unpleasant meeting… It’s not clear to me that this story actually changed anything for the drivers… and the CEO doesn’t even know their pricing, makes me wonder how much he drove at all.
- charcircuit 3y agoUber's pricing is algorithmic and New York is on the exact opposite side of the country.
- hedora 3y agoAlso, the CEO’s estimate is closer to the current realtime price than the author’s price is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- milkytron 3y ago> "It wasn't a pleasant all-hands with the company, but it set a tone, and we set that expectation — we started celebrating employees going out there delivering, employees driving," he said. "It is a point of pride for employees now — when they drive they get a little badge on their corporate profile, etc." Oh sweet. A badge on a corporate profile
- polski-g 3y ago[flagged]
- bombcar 3y agoI need to talk to you about your flair. I mean profile badges.
- crazygringo 3y agoI mean, don't think that doesn't get noticed at promotion time, depending on your manager and your role.
- rmason 3y agoThis summer I had the chance to experience Uber in Europe as well as at home in Michigan. In Michigan the app might ask you to walk across the street as a convenience to the driver. It's rare but it happens. But in Europe it might ask you to walk over a mile! I was careful (or so I thought) to find a place that made sense for the driver. But Uber wouldn't agree even if it meant getting picked up at a bus stop where by the time I arrived was already gone. I was always charged as the at fault party. In Poland and the Czech Republic Uber was super cheap and I had some amazing conversations with the drivers but never knew if getting picked up would go smoothly or not.
- FireBeyond 3y agoIn Australia last week, over a dozen Uber rides over the course of a week and every single one had at least one driver cancelation, and many had 3+.
- hedora 3y agoIn the US, at least, they used to penalize drivers for ghosting, but the courts ruled they would have to give them employee benefits if they had rules like that. I’d happily pay 2x for a service where drivers got health care, pto, retirement benefits, etc, but had to pass a driving test and were fired for repeatedly failing to pick up accepted fares.
- brendamn 3y agoIt’s been a few years since my last US visit, but my experience has been that Uber (and Lyft) are much better in the States than Uber in Australia. Frequent cancellations, or a driver just not moving until you cancel the ride, is a major issue in Melbourne. Airport pickup is now basically no different than getting a taxi from the taxi rank. UberEats drivers will often just leave food at a different house on our street, or not at all, even though there is no issue with how our house is marked on maps. There is no quality control with Uber Comfort; 90% of the time it’ll be the same thrashed Camry being used for UberX. I could go on. We’ve stopped using UberEats as a bunch of restaurants we like have alternative options, but I’m surprised the taxi industry here haven’t gotten their game together. At least among my social group, which are moderate Uber users, the sentiment towards Uber (and the available clones, ie Didi) is negative and if there was any decent competition then we’d all switch in a heartbeat.
- throwaway128128 3y agoWhy's he harping on quality? It's just too damn expensive. Taxis are much cheaper than Ubers at SeaTac now!
- hrrsn 3y agoCompetition working as intended
- hedora 3y agoTaxis are also higher quality. The last time I hailed an Uber/Lyft, I had to wait 10 minutes for the driver to ghost me (get on with it, already!), and then immediately stepped into a cab in the line in front of my hotel.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoAnd Sound Transit is cheaper still.
- TuringNYC 3y agoThe CEO should have just set up a "Suggestions Box" or "Comment Hotline" and very real issues would have been collected, probably along with junk. Hire a firm to sift thru it, possibly match it against accounts for verification of issues, and you'd have an awesome list for a Product Manager to prioritize. I'll tell you some real issues. When living overseas, I didnt drive for 3 full years, just Uber'ed everywhere. These were work-paid and I tipped generously. I took thousands of trips. Then boom mysteriously they wouldnt let me add credit cards one day. I tried a bunch of credit cards, no luck. No recourse, no help from customer service, nothing. No error code, no next step. Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem. Then, when I returned to the US years later, still out of luck. Still no resolution from Uber. I switched here to Lyft. How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?
- bmitc 3y agoI think these companies are just fundamentally not profitable, and they have zero incentives to care, even less than the systems they tried to replace. My DoorDash account is now flagged because a driver delivered to a completely different house, and I had the gall to report it as not delivered. I even texted the driver after they sent a picture (which verifies it as not my house), but they didn't respond. Now, my DoorDash account has all sorts of weird things happen to it, as if my account is a fraud account, even though their own systems verify my report. The GPS coordinates associated with the delivery email also show it was at a completely different address. The DoorDash support just ended tha chat when I chatted in about the subsequent issues. These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.
- gumballindie 3y agoEvery driver i speak with complains about the large fees. Clients complain about driver quality issues. To me the reason uber sucks is clear. They alienated good drivers through excessive commissions. Lower them so better drivers not just desperate can provide their services.
- ultra_nick 3y agoIs it common for CEOs not to use their own products?
- Barrin92 3y ago>When Wired's editor at large, Steven Levy, asked him to estimate the cost of a 2.95-mile Uber ride in New York City, Khosrowshahi ventured "20 bucks" — less than half the actual price of $51.69 I don't use ridesharing apps, is that just an exceptional price because it's NYC? There's no way I'd pay 50 bucks for what is a 15 minute bike ride, who can afford this?
- thebears5454 3y agoUber is a Company and the CEO are getting roasted in this comments, but I wish more company leader ship could actually use the products. It is aggravating when you can tell the company just has no idea how their customers use their service
- dreamcompiler 3y agoThe Uber bubble is over. Uber is now just as expensive and almost as crappy as taxis used to be. We had a great, cheap cab service for about 10 years subsidized by dumb VCs, so thanks very much dumb VCs! But that was unsustainable so it's over now. Fortunately the old-fashioned taxis improved a little bit because of the competition, so the current situation is slightly better than before Uber started. I'm grateful to Uber for that.
- eestrada 3y ago> Uber's CEO says his time delivering food for his company revealed a "lack of quality" with its product from a driver's perspective. Dogfooding can't ever stop. "Why is our product terrible?" Because you stopped dogfooding it, or maybe you never did to begin with.
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/bYVkY https://archive.is/bYVkY