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A study conducted by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research analysed revenue and costs for over 1100 Lyft and Uber drivers, with the conclusion that most earn below minimum wage for their state and about 30% actually lose money when all the costs of owning and operating their vehicles are taken into account.
"A Median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving, and incurs costs of $0.30 per mile", "On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour".
Because actual vehicle operating costs are significantly lower than the IRS allowance of $0.54/mile, many drivers report incomes that are substantially lower that their actual incomes, leading to a large pool of untaxed income (although it is small for each driver).
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MIT Study Shows How Much Driving for Uber or Lyft Sucks
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday March 03 2018, @04:53PM (2 children)
10 years old for a car isn't that old these days: lots of cars are at least that old, and still look great. Styling hasn't changed that much in the last 10-15 years; it's not like the 50s-70s where styling was changing fast and cars were falling apart in 50k miles. Now it's not unusual to see a nice Japanese car with 150k miles still driving like new. You can go buy a pretty nice 10yo car now for a few thousand dollars cash that still works great, and if you can do your own maintenance and repairs, it's really dirt cheap to operate a vehicle like that, as the parts are cheap (just don't buy a German car).
I do wonder, however, how many of these Uber/Lyft drivers are properly insured, and how many simply don't tell their insurance. Your probability of having a crash aren't all *that* high, so it's quite possible many are just skating by without their insurance companies agreeing to or knowing of their commercial usage.
As for being "objectionable", those customers should be using one of the higher-tier services like Uber Black. You're not guaranteed to get a really new car with the regular services.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @05:46PM (1 child)
There is a CPM calculator here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RjLsjD9JHDFyLw2J0HHE6_7dEyLuqn8K0E8U5vR-dRc [google.com] where you can crunch the numbers yourself.
But to your insurance question, Uber and Lyft have insurance for the drivers while on the clock. They are notorious for sticking drivers in three ways: First is that their coverage is contingent, which means that any accident results in cross-insurer arbitration and that can take forever. Second is that they only cover you when you are on the clock and it is your job to prove you were on the clock, which gives them the opportunity to weasel out of it. Third is the duty to mitigate, they argue that you should have avoided the route or done something different, such as not driven at all when waiting for a ride, etc.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 05 2018, @03:55PM
And Fourth, when/if your personal driving insurance catches a whiff that you're Uber/Lyft driving without having told them (which must occur in an accident), your coverage there - the one that having your vehicle licensed depends on - can be retroactively dropped from that point for failure to tell them you're operating your vehicle commercially which puts you in a different risk class.
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