Reply to I am a DC uberX driver since 2013 and have SEEN IT ALL...so please, AMA

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Reply to "I am a DC uberX driver since 2013 and have SEEN IT ALL...so please, AMA"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What happened that the rates from your money making heyday dropped? Why is it less lucrative? Gas prices? More drivers to compete with? [/quote]

In 2011 & 2012 uber existed exclusively in DC as a black car service.  Limo companies would contract with uber to use their Towncars and Suburbans so folks could request them thru the app just the same as now.  Average ride cost was around $40-$50.  Lyft got fired up in DC as an outlaw operation in August 2013, using everyday folks in their personal automobiles to give rides.  Average ride cost for lyfts was right around $20, ~$2.50/mile. Uber answered the next month with uberX at about exactly the same rates and used brute force and cash money to crush Lyft out of the game.  UberX heavily recruited already experienced Lyft drivers with cash offers of up to $2k to come give 100 rides with uberX in fall 2013.  I took this offer.   That was a $20 bonus on every ride given + whatever the fares ended up being.  I hammered out all 100 rides over five days and cleared $4k. Uber took a huge chunk of Lyft's early ridership too with lots of free ride offers.  Marketshare for Uber over Lyft is right around 85:15 in DC, and has been steady there for a while. Surge pricing came along right before the holidays and I remember one Friday night during Christmas party season where I had a string of about fifteen rides in a row that were all $50+, with a few over $100.  It was REALLY EASY money.  But quickly drivers got over-saturated once word spread, and thru 2014 the guaranteed money dropped to nothing.   With all these now available drivers this set off an almost 2-year price-cutting war between uber and lyft, dropping rates to the current $1.02/mile + 17¢/minute.  Great for riders, but it crushed a lot of drivers out of the game to go get a real job.  I work the math in my head as I'm driving as $1.40/mile in the city and $1.20/mile on the highway.  And I have to be milking surge constantly to make it worth my time.

Gas has been so cheap lately that I just stick to one rule: always buy in Virginia.  I get about 30 mpg cruising easy around town, so it's not a huge cost factor.

Driver over-saturation comes and goes.  A TON of people try it out for a single day to see what it's like then may never give another ride again, and some will drive just a single ride per month in order to stay active in the system as a "just-in-case" they need to go hustle a few hundred dollars in a hurry.  As you may have noticed lately, there are LOTS of new-to-America immigrant drivers doing this now who speak little to no English and are very tentative drivers.  I know because I check for the black&yellow TNC tag on every one I see out.  These drivers follow uber's every command and end up doing endless POOL rides for 10+ hours a day and end up netting ~50¢/mile which is basically driving for free after expenses and taxes.  You could honestly call this situation the new-age human slavery of being a servant robot in America.  Uber got some of these folks on the hook really good by suckering them into a sham of a lease deal back when rates were higher.  After the most recent rate drop these folks are now a literal slave to their own leased car.[/quote]

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