'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels Uber is launching a month-long trial dubbed the "One Less Car" challenge to demonstrate people are better off using its app-hailed rides rather than each owning a personal vehicle. Handily, it would also demonstrate how Uber is better off if people use Uber more. What a twist. The trial will involve just 175 carefully …
... that some of us need to tow trailers, which raises an issue or two:
- I've never seen a taxi of any description with a tow ball, which knocks out both manually driven and driverless rides.
- As far as I know, nobody has yet come close to releasing a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space. It should be interesting to watch one try it, though .
Indeed, but nowadays most ideas, programs and concepts are considered for the ~80% of the population living in or near urban centers. Not having a car will never be practical for the exurban / rural / frequent distance travelers / those those amongst us who haul materials, but then again even EV's are a poor choice for most of these types of people because of range limitations.
Giving simplistic answers to complex systems usually leads to disbelief.
"but then again even EV's are a poor choice for most of these types of people because of range limitations."
You often go hundreds of miles in a day? Hauling a heavy trailer with an electric pickup is going to chew up range, but again, do that often? We my dad has horses, he had hay delivered as it was cheaper to buy a large amount in one go. To fetch it with his pickup would have taken a bunch of trips. To pickup a few bails was never an issue. To get to his day job and back he bought a Fiesta as the total cost of it was less than what it took to drive the truck every day. A vehicle good for towing is not cheap so if one has a lot of non-hauling miles to cover, an EV can be a good choice.
Why yes, yes I do. My commute is 165 miles round-trip, which thankfully I currently do not have to do myself via car.
EV trucks whilst towing only get 100 miles round trip on a modest surface based upon actual real-world tests and real owner feedback. Hills reduce that even more.
Again, don't think that your experience equates to everyone else's. Everyone lives a different life and therefore has different needs.
If it's that seldom, does owning a capable vehicle actually make economic sense? Owning a more economical vehicle for 99% of your use, and hiring maybe a hybrid SUV for those occasional long trips with luggage is perfectly sensible.
I think what they are trying to show is that many families with 2 or 3 vehicles could get by with "One Less", and potentially be better off. Mostly in denser urban areas, with good Uber coverage AND useful public transport. Even the ability to rent a car occasionally. My Sons are city dwellers. One owns a car that he leaves with the wife, and takes a train to work, they could afford 2 cars, but don't need a 2nd vehicle / expense. Other Son lives AND works central city, so public transport / Uber is all he actually needs, and doesn't actually own a car.
As others point out though, many of us don't live in that scenario. No Uber, and practically no Public transport in our small rural town. Others regularly DO tow heavy loads like horses / boats / portable machinery etc, so actually need a vehicle that can do it. But millions of people probably have more vehicle than they actually need.
Aaaand.. as quite the usual here, European arrogance in not understating the basic concept of POPULATION DENSITY when talking about U.S. infrastructure development.
For example, my own U.S. home county has a population density, based on the last census, of 78 people PER SQUARE MILE. Tell me smart guy, how do you create more than functional "basic infrastructure" and have it survive economically at 78 people per square mile?? And this isn't even the worst, most isolated area - I'm an 18 minute drive away from a small city, to which I drive to pick up a private/government cooperatively-run bus to commute to work. And I'm GRATEFUL for that, as other communities have even less density and therefore not even bus service because it wouldn't be able to support itself (too late: the bus company actually declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy 2 weeks ago, exactly proving my point!).
When you're packed shoulder to shoulder as you are in Europe, you have the number of paying customers needed to support public transportation. But that's not the web entire world and you need to curb your self-importance to understand what the rest of the world is like. I don't hear you guys criticize Canada or Australia as often as the U.S....
Ever notice that the issue is the car? Only the car, and only if it burns fossil fuels. Nevermind that the EV's tires, rubber, plastics, and even the very road it's driven on..... yep! From oil!
Maybe the issue is overpopulation in some areas and the sheer load of eight billion people on the planet?
> does owning a capable vehicle actually make economic sense?
This is just one of the factors. There is the related question: can I actually hire/rent a capable vehicle?
Try hiring a car that has:
a towbar - used regularly for the bike carrier and a couple of times a year for the trailer
A roof rack/box
Doesn’t prohibit pets
Can be taken to Europe.
The trouble is that many things are fine for those with simple lives, step out of line…
But a robo drop-side truck that brought you a metre of gravel without faffing about for 2 hours when you are busy, would be awesome.
a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space.
And would you pass that test Kemosabe?
Having watched Tesla parallel parking vids, it would certainly be entertaining. Would probably result in people testing the Tedsel's bullet resistant stainless skin in some states.
Are you honestly saying that you would actually like to use Uber (or another taxi firm) as your usual day to day transport if they would also tow your trailer?
As for a driverless car that can back a trailer - given that they have yet to reliably manage the basic driving skills (see just about any Register story on driverless cars) it is you can hardly be expecting the current ones to manage a feat that isn't even a compulsory part of the driver's test, even for Cabbies.
The number of people who "need to" tow trailers every day of their working life, that aren't provided for by their employer, etc. must be vanishingly small.
I would even hazard that 80-90% of personal "trucks" (as the US likes to call over-size cars with unsuitably tiny beds on them) aren't actually necessary.
There's no way they're ever going to target the towing market specifically, until there is no other choice for that market - even Tesla's attempt to do so was inherently misguided, focusing on pulling power alone and forgetting that the thing is unreasonably expensive, can't actually safely tow things (as you point out), doesn't work well offroad, and has the most pathetic rear bed already.
Technically you can have several parts per million of "fly" in your ointment, or even food, without ever having to do anything about it - and that's the case here.
Indeed. And the number is not "vanishingly small". Trailers are very common around these parts; I see them on the road pretty every day. And since I don't drive every day (sometimes I go a week or more without driving), that's mostly just around the neighborhood, walking the dog and the like.
GP is another person who refuses to believe his experience isn't universal. Sigh.
So - don't buy an inappropriate car. I don't think even the most devout EV-shouter or public transport enthusiast is saying that one solution fits all?
Well, some are, but they're daft. Ignore them. I've got an EV, a tow barge, some tractors. They're all 4-wheel vehicles, but only marginally interchangeable. Only the EV is remotely new, the rest are a sunk manufacturing cost and aren't costing the earth lot of diesel, since most miles are EV (solar). That's my solution. Choose your own?
The fly in the ointment I;ve found with Uber is that often the drivers accept the ride, then cancel it when they get a better offer from a different app like Lyft. At times I've found it unusable as multiple drivers accept then cancel the job. Or accept then just drive off to another job on another app.
"... a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space."
Parking is a very mechanistic process, far different from driving. A car can easily predict it's trajectory whether forward or reverse. I know that reversing a trailer or semi is very tricky, but if you always follow the exact same steps for the same outcome it can be easily automated. The major issue is probably that different trailers have different reversing characteristics, so the car would either need sensors on the trailer itself (making it far less flexible since effectively the trailer becomes part of the car and can't be swapped), or else the car needs to be pre-programmed with a variety of different trailer types/sizes, and that information needs to be entered to the car when the trailer is hitched.
I would guess that with this being an edge use case, so "nobody has yet come close to releasing a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space" is because no work has been done on the problem at all rather than because it is very technically difficult.
For liability reasons, I wouldn't want to be part of a firm that released an automated trailer-reversing system unless the trailer had at least a camera at the back, if not LIDAR. Yes, humans back trailers up with poor visibility all the time; but when it's a machine doing it, the lawsuits will come thick and fast if anything goes wrong.
I don't think pre-programming various trailer types is a useful approach either, except for specialized applications like, say, moving a standard set of trailers around a parking area. For the general case, the trailer's tongue length and wheelbase are critical factors, and there's simply too much variation.
I assume it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to come up with a trailer board like the light/numberplate boards that already exist, but fitted with the required sensors.
And aside from seeing where the trailer is going, it's pretty easy for a computer to work out the distance from pivot point to wheels of a trailer, and (with the right sightlines) how long it is. It's not like the program can't make any trial moves, or use feedback to correct mid-manoeuvre. As I noted above, these systems do actually exist, so we can say empirically that the problems are solvable. (Granted, the most common ones are for articulated lorries - aka semi-trucks - which are relatively standardised, but others exist too.)
The future of 'personal transport' is impersonal. Not necessarily a Uber or Waymo but a community-level model of personal transportation fit for purpose when needed.
As we all know, personal transport spends 90% of its time going nowhere. (And consumes most of its resources in manufacture.)
Fugg Ford. The future needs to be embraced.
"The future of 'personal transport' is impersonal."
So who cleans the puke out of the "impersonal transport" after a lager lout used the car the Saturday Night before the Sunday that your Wife uses it to surprise her sister at church three counties away?
How about the poor guy with a bad cat allergy needing to drive 100 miles in it immediately after the LOL took her 5 cats to the Vet (and back) in it?
I can go on and on. Cars are personal transport, regardless of you and your ilk's hopes for a dystopian future where we're all identical, with identical needs.
A few years ago, when Uber was quite new in the UK, journalists research showed that the vast majority of Uber drivers were claiming social security and not declaring their work for Uber. This meant that the public purse was subsidising cheaper fares. Uber didn't have to pay the drivers enough to live on because we were all paying some of their wages. I don't know if that is still the case but I haven't heard of a giant campaign to end it. So if we give up our cars and use Uber instead, the money we save on car ownership can be spent on tax increases to subsidise the additional drivers. I don't like this idea.
As a landlord, whose rents are subsidised by government, rather than ensuring good paying jobs for my tenants, I think this is wise and forward thinking policy.
90% of right thinking Uber users would agree that it is prudent for other taxpayers to subsidise their trips to the pub and curry deliveries.
Hopefully this wonderful state of affairs will last for always
"Nonsense. That was obviously untrue propaganda from the minicab cartels."
I must say I've heard the same from the leader of my local (UK) council - although it applied to the majority of taxi drivers, who operated clubs so that they shared taxis and the individuals worked 12 hours a week, which enabled them to claim "benefits" without doing an excess of work. it had the side effect that nobody took responsibility for the individual taxis, so they were routinely faulty. Since the council was both paying some of the handouts in relation to housing, and did taxi licencing they could see that this was going on, all entirely legally (apart from the faulty cabs).
A thousand dollars is nowhere close to enough.
I will own my own stuff and be happy.
My car is paid for, and has been for years. It's a PHEV, costs very little to drive, and I can keep stuff in it that I might need. If I'm going on a road trip, I can take hours to pack the car. I can get groceries, back up to my kitchen door, plug in, and unload.
No. I will own a car.
" If I'm going on a road trip, I can take hours to pack the car. I can get groceries, back up to my kitchen door, plug in, and unload."
If you have kids, that's hours every week too. Some coaches are charging parents a late fee if they don't pick up their kids on time after football/dance/club activities. How screwed would you be if you called for a robotaxi and had to sit in a queue for an hour? Do that a couple of times and I expect the person in charge will suggest your kids find something else.
Yup. The financial aspect of car ownership vs rental/rideshare/taxi is just one aspect, another is the impact NOT having your own vehicle ready and waiting at all times can have on your life.
I saw a similar article in the news recently from some group critical of private ownership because, to paraphrase, what's the point of owning your own car with all the environmental issues it brings, when all it does is sit parked outside home/work for 22 hours a day... Which is missing one of the key points of owning your own vehicle - it's the very fact that it IS parked up for the majority of the day which makes them so valuable to many of us, because being parked outside just waiting to be used means that, when we DO need to use it, no matter what the time is or where we need to drive to, it's there for us.
There is an addition. When away it doesn’t matter if I stay late or another day, as it doesn’t have to be returned by a specific date and time (with a full tank of fuel).
I have also been in the position where I have turned up to collect my car, only to be told they have no cars due to extensions, late returns…
It's a PHEV, costs very little to drive, and I can keep stuff in it that I might need.
I've a PHEV too. Really like it. There are some excellent pluses to having one.
But even if I were to run it purely in EV mode and only free- charge it at work and supermarkets, I will never make back the +15K it cost over the DERV version it replaced.
And certainly not during the time it's parked up just depreciating.
And I bought a shed to store my stuff.
>I will never make back the +15K it cost over
The good news is you may well do.
My Mitsi Outlander PHEV had saved me $21k on petrol vs the small petrol station wagon it replaced, by at the 100kkm point. It cost me ~$13k premium.
It is now at 170kkm, the battery is pretty sad, but currently it is averaging 5.1L/100km, well down on <2 it was managing at the 100kkm point, but still much better than an equivalent petrol suv. (but a little worse than a Toyota Aqua hybrid)
The other factor is that the petrol engine is still at perhaps 50kkm run time compared to a petrol car.
If I could buy new cells I would be happy as it's a piece of piss to replace them. But you can't. Bastards!
"A thousand dollars is nowhere close to enough."
Absolutely this. Any taxi service has the same operating cost as a private car owner, usually with extra insurance costs required, AND they have to make a profit on top. The general idea seems to be that I'm only using my private vehicle part of the time, and if multiple people can 'share' the time on one car, total ownership costs go down. This overlooks some important things: (1) most people want to use their cars at approximately the same times, so there is a hard limit to how many savings can be made if everyone is going to use their car exactly when they want to. (2) a big part of costs (especially of ICE cars) is fuel plus service on 'wear-and-tear' items, which increase with consumption and cannot therefore be 'shared'. (3) There is high value in starting your journey when you are ready to leave, not when your driver turns up.
Getting down to raw numbers, $1000/mth is $33/day. Only very light car users would be able to supplement their travels by uber and public transport for that little. In contrast, there are car subscription companies where for $1000/mth you get a brand new car every 2-3 years, with fully paid licensing, registration, insurance, service (including replacement vehicle), tyre replacement..... basically unless you have quite an expensive car, a newly bought car amortised over 5-6 years plus all fuel, services, taxes, insurances, tyres etc will cost less than $1000. Considerably less if you bought a 2-year old car second hand, or if you're keeping your car more than 6 years.
After a wreck totalled my car, I decided to go without, instead using public transit, Uber, car shares/rentals, walking, etc. I figured that the cost of even a used car would be enough to support quite a lot of the above, especially since I was already taking public transit a lot. While there is a definite decrease in the convenience of certain trips, I overall like not having to worry about vehicular upkeep. Obviously, not everyone lives in a city where my lifestyle is achievable, so my experience can't be universally replicated, and I have to wonder if the sort of people who can live car-free aren't already doing so. On the flip side, Uber is my transportation of last resort; public transit and my feet go most places locally that I care about, and car rental makes more sense for longer trips, so Uber hasn't gotten that much more out of me.
"On the rare occasions I need a car I just hire one which seems expensive up front, but in reality is way cheaper than running my own."
That. Oh so much.
Is a car convenient? Betcha! Especially since we have no car sharing close by.
A rental car to go on holidays would work, since you book that in advance and usually you can pick it up late in the evening without extra charges, so you can take all the time you need to pack.
There are occasions when I have to use the car, because the kids are too big for the bike trailer but not fit enough to bike to sports and back (especially back, they are knackered afterwards), and if we have a tight schedule public transport does not cut it. Also picking up a case of beer is inconvenient with the bike, or getting my wine cellar restocked. Though in the end, for the last two points, deliery would be an option (and likely cheaper than the car). And to get the kids to training and back, we have a ride share cab-like service that is really cheap (when you already have a ticket for public transport), only a quid to go around our small town, I'll give that one a try.
Now I need to convince my wife that we don't really need the car. I guess once it breaks there's no need to replace it. And buy that cargo bike. No need for an electric bike here, so it's only a grand (which we regularly pay for inspection and maintenance each year, easily).
Rental isn't always a viable or good option.
Around here, there's a single rental agency (the next-closest one is 80 miles away). They often don't have anything available. Public-transit options for getting to and from the rental agency are not great, with limited hours and a light service schedule. There's a single Lyft driver in the area,1 who is often not available; there are no Uber drivers. It's neither feasible nor safe for most people in the area to walk or bicycle to the rental agency.
The selection of vehicles available at rental agencies is often terrible. My wife and I used to rent fairly frequently (once a month or so, sometimes more), and we were always sad to do it. Here in the US, most agencies no longer offer hatchbacks or sedans, just stupid crossovers and SUVs, and they're the low-end fleet models which are unpleasant to use for long periods of time.2
We eventually switched to using our personal vehicles for those trips because even with a 14-hour drive it was better than flying and renting. Of course, flying still required 3 hours of driving and 3 hours of waiting at airports, so the difference was really 8 hours of driving — a small price to pay for having a quality vehicle to drive at our destination.
1I personally refuse to use Uber or Lyft, but I'm considering the general case here.
2I recall one particularly dreadful example, a Hyundai Santa Fe if memory serves, which had an astonishingly obnoxious touchscreen display in the middle of the dash with a backlight that did not dim with the instrument lights. It made driving at night exhausting and dangerous; I finally taped a couple of sheets of paper over it. Whoever designed that thing ought to be banned from working in the industry.
I have used rentals, and I never got the vehicle I requested. I was always 'upgraded' to a more expensive vehicle. On one occasion, a few days after booking I received an email stating that they were no longer able to provide a vehicle for me. No options for a different one at all, so I had to cancel my trip.
Car hire is all very well if you can find a reliable supplier, but at short notice, or during 'unsociable hours', it can be unrealistic.
> but at short notice, or during 'unsociable hours', it can be unrealistic.
Where “unsociable hours” really means any time the office is closed ie.outside of 8am-5pm Monday to Friday, and 9am to noon Saturday….
So to collect a vehicle generally means making arrangements to leave work early or be in late….
The economics have nearly always been against owning a car for the majority of the population, where it's parked somewhere for over 90% of the time. But it's perfectly understandable that we pay for the convenience of having one for when we need it, not least because we don't need to worry about a vehicle turning up when we need it. But long term the economics will favour mobility over vehicles as companies will get more value from their assets over time.
@Matthew Connaster – Depreciation is perfectly reasonable and should be included in the comparisons, it's how we account for the upfront cost of the purchase, not of a putative sale in the future.
Environmentally, ride hailing is a problem as it tends to mean two journeys for the vehicle to provide one for the passenger.
The economics have nearly always been against owning a car for the majority of the population, where it's parked somewhere for over 90% of the time.
In the US, even granting the concentration of population in urban areas, I doubt this is true. Care to cite some reputable sources?
"The economics have nearly always been against owning a car for the majority of the population, where it's parked somewhere for over 90% of the time. But it's perfectly understandable that we pay for the convenience of having one for when we need it,"
If you are very efficient with that 10% that your are using the car, that can make a difference too. I need to drop a package off at the post office so I've gone through the fridge and pantry to see if there is anything I might need from the grocery since it's close to the post office. Tomorrow I may not need to go anywhere at all since I've done everything I need to do today. I'm also self-employed and what I do has a field service aspect to it so I must have a car to get to job sites. I'll combine trips on those days as much as I can. I've gotten in the habit of putting things I need down in my shopping app on my phone as soon as I think of them. The objective is to make sure I don't forget I need something and have to make a dedicated trip.
"Obviously, not everyone lives in a city where my lifestyle is achievable,"
A lot of things have to be in place, but maybe it's an option. The local grocery for me is ~3mi away and it's 35c today. The roads suck and we get what I call "puncture weeds" that drop the absolute worst thorns for a bicycle tire to encounter. If I lived in a village with only a short walk to the high street and good links to go further, I'd still own a car but might drive a lot less.
"The only time I've used them is when a company was paying for my ride."
I was in a pinch once, but the Uber driver couldn't produce a commercial license with a passenger endorsement and commercial insurance so I just waited longer and paid a bit more for a proper taxi that had all of those things. Now I won't even bother.
Well, that's true. I can't judge mining coal or mucking out pigpens from experience, either. I'm pretty confident in my assessment of those things, though.
Here's a tip: people who think can generalize outside their immediate experience. Give it a try! (Thinking, I mean. One step at a time.)
Uber are a bunch of rule dodgers. All acropss the Midlands you see Ubers registered to Wolverhampton council, operating in other towns. In the past year, Wolverhampton issued 20,000 licences to out-of-town applicants. I suspect Wolverhampton have the cheapest fee for licences. Admittedly Wolverhampton council can't use location as grounds for refusing a private hire licence, under rules the government changed back in 2015. Another example of the Tories breaking something that previously worked.
I live in a small village with no facilities (apart from the pub). The nearest shops, doctors etc. are in the next village 2 miles away.. Due to illness my walking range is about 100 yards so if I need, say, to go to the doctor, I go in my car. Total vehicle miles = 4.
Alternatively I could get a taxi which would come from the nearest town 4 miles away, then cover the 2 miles to the doctor. If it's a quiet day they may hang around for the return trip, otherwise they would return to town and another taxi would come out later. So, at best, total vehicle miles = 12.
Conclusion: Giving up my car will reduce the number of vehicles on the road but will significantly increase the number of vehicle-miles covered which is the true measure for congestion and pollution.
Considering every step you've taken in life, every chance taken or ignored, all your destinies as one, all led to this moment, here today
Where you're too f-d to walk 100m and essentially totally stranded, marooned in the middle of nowhere.
It could have been some other way.
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What about "I don't want an EV because I've been using Li-Ion batteries for longer than you've been alive, I know their limitations and I also know that the vehicle will be scrapped at the point of cell death rather than replacing the pack thereby wiping out any ecological advantage it may have had to start with"?
EVs are a stop-gap; they always have been. Until there's a better way to store energy than secondary cells, electric cars will always be a compromise. All of this virtue signalling and guilt tripping is just one more form of tyranny.
What about that lie? It bears zero relation to reality. Loss of capacity is not linear. It declines asymptotically, so serious capacity loss is very rare in cars.
There are any number of cars driving around with batteries much older than you tinfoilhatters claim should exist. And battery replacements are a thing where (rarely) necessary. It's just fact-denial for loony ideological reasons.
Two more flat-out lies. There are plenty of 20 year old Priuses, and Priuses running around with >300k miles on the clock. (Also a bunch of other Toyota hybrids of the same age and mileages.) And 'pure EVs' have been around more than long enough 'for this to become obvious'. There are loads of Nissan Leafs on the roads which are way past the point the tinfoilhatters tell us they should have been scrapped. Hell, at this point there are plenty of second-gen-mainstream electric cars which are older than that. The simple fact is that it isn't the problem you nuts insisted it would be, but rather than admit that, you continue to tell lies that become ever more absurd as the evidence against them piles up.
$1000 is not much less than my average motoring costs for a year. I buy old or high milage small cars cheap that don't need too much fixing, get them through a once every two years TÜV inspection and then it's mostly tax, insurance and approx 40€ a month petrol. I'm no great mechanic but I can spot the usual signs and can wield a spanner when I have to so till now I've never needed to spend more than 200€ to get through a 2nd and sometimes even a 3rd inspection. I've also after four years of use sold a couple of (fully serviced by me and with new TÜV) cars for quite a bit more than I actually paid for them.
The majority of the state capital cities in Australia have reasonable public transport options (at least for the less peripheral suburbs) when compared with many similar cities in North America, I understand.
Brisbane has a fairly extensive integrated bus network but one of the ongoing problems, certainly from the time of COVID if not before, is the chronic shortage of drivers. Many drivers are well into their late sixties or seventies, likely answering this vocation after retirement (now 67 years in AU.)
In order to encourage the population back to public transport from October the bus fares will be essentially gratis our equivalent of an Oyster Card will be debited AUD 0.50 (~GBP 0.26, 26p, [half crown 2/6d in the old money for the faredge "reformers"]), and that charge is only to track use etc.
There is currently a brawl between two levels of government on whether there are enough buses (and by implication sufficient drivers) to handle even a 10% uptick in patronage.
Concurrently before the courts a seventy year old bus driver is facing dangerous driving charges after everyone was upset with his accidentally but unfortunately fatally running down a teenager. Notwithstanding the merits of crown's case this isn't likely to recruit more (older) drivers.
FWIW: most of Über et al. drivers in BNE appear to have "day" jobs and their driving gig is as much to meet their (new) vehicle's finance repayments as much as anything else. Perhaps they should be driving buses.
I was always of the understanding that all Über vehicles were owned by the contracting drivers.
If they were overwhelmingly successful in their stated aims of this program they would have to invest in acquiring a fleet (with or without [FSD] the need to employ drivers) which would also mean a large amount of capital sunk in a rapidly depreciating asset just like any other transport enterprise that they have often depreciatingly referred to as "so last century."
Finance, delusion, deceit, skulduggery, bubbles and other shenanigans are perennial.
Personally from the outset having scented the definite aroma of the less than honest and exploitative, I would never go anywhere near Über et al. Traditional taxis with their faults have always been reliable for me. The opinions of the taxi driver are far more amusing, and frequently well to the right of sanity than those of his modern competitor and therefore far more interesting. YMMV.
Only used Uber once, in New York (I'm a Brit and not a well travelled one) and he had never heard of "The Flat Iron" building. You would expect landmarks to be common knowledge amongst cabbies. I navigated for him using my phone and we had a nice chat and he didn't charge much. Would I chop my car in for an Uber? Hahahaha, good one Rodney.
$1000 a month to own a car? What a bunch or crap. It could cost that in like Manhattan wherer you may have to rent a very expensive space in a parking lot etc. If I lived in. a place like that, i would happily use the subways and walk.
My expenses are probably closer to $200 a month and that's including car repairs etc. Actual fuel costs are orobably under $75. (No I'm not doing $125 a month in reairs, i'm spltting the like $1000 or so in repairs, brakes, etc over a period of time and guesstimating. It might even be a high estimate since i've had the car 4 or 5 years.)
I do buy E85 -- 85% ethanol -- fuel for $2.40 a us gallon ($0.63 a liter) so that certainly helps. The 1.4L chevy cruze has fully ethanol compatible pumps and lines and turbos LOVE that ~105 octane!
I will use US units in my analysis since the amount offered is in US dollars and offered in US cities. A quick search confirmed my estimation of 15,000 US miles per year for vehicles on average in the US. A bit of math tells me this represents 80 cents per mile. Another quick search reveals the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows the maximum of 67 cents per mile for business use of a (passenger) vehicle for tax purposes. There seems to be a bit of over estimation.
"one less car"
I gave up at less (see icon)
The trial will involve just 175 carefully selected people in ...
What criteria? There's no point calling an UBER if you have a wheelchair or other awkward load .. and if they can take a wheelchair I believe there's a surcharge for the extra time involved (please correct me if I'm wrong)
> and if they can take a wheelchair I believe there's a surcharge for the extra time involved (please correct me if I'm wrong)
In much of the world that is illegal.
Ryanair even got slapped a few years ago for trying something similar.
Unless Uber is willing to station a driver outside my house every day, waiting for me to decide to go somewhere, and is willing to stay outside wherever I go until I'm ready to leave, nope. Uber is not better than owning a car.
I would be willing to pay 6 dollars a day (and that's a full 24 hours, not just 9-5) for the uber to park outside, plus 25 cents a mile traveled when I do go somewhere, but that's it. No, no takers? Because that's what it costs me now to maintain a car at home. 6 dollars a day for insurance, 15 cents a mile for fuel, 10 cents a mile wear and tear.
So lets see. The USA suffers from absolutely disasterous city planning which is based on almost complete reliance on cars outside older urban centers. The cities are planned wrong from the ground up, with separation of commercial and residential areas and a mandate for single-family homes on huge lots in suburbs rather than mixed-use communities with multi-family houses. If if you try to plan something else you will find your "freedom" to do so in USA immediately running into serious roadblocks.
The tech bros over at Uber are working at milking this poor planning to thier advantage to generate some actual profits. Thier deregulated taxis may be dangerous and expensive due to strategic price hikes - but, yes, give up your own vehicle to rely on ride-sharing which may not be avialable when you need it, especially in remote areas. If in fact if lots of people followed this ride-sharing shift combined with the use of the (non-existent) public transportation - then there would be less Uber drivers to be exploited.
In sum, it doesn't add up in the least and is just another techbro ploy to divert the salaries they are reducing though the "sharing economy" in to their own pockets for helicopter and private-jet commuting to their superyacht.
What is needed is a complete re-thinking of the city planing for new communities with a focus on public transport, biking, and enabling people to go about thier work and play without needing to climb in thier car every single time they leave the house. And think of all the water that could be saved for all those lawns.....
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