[calvinbhai]

Subprime leasing programs.

Initially the lease looks very attractive, because you get a swanky new car, combined with bonuses and stuff that you get as a new driver.

Few months in, the incentive turns into a shackle. You start realizing that incentives are dwindling and the monthly payments are eating into most of your Uber earnings, which was masked by higher new driver incentives initially.

At this point, loss aversion kicks in, and forces the driver to drive crazy number of hours every day, just to make a decent profit over operating costs and the monthly due for the car.

With more such drivers in the market, and an ever dipping price for rides, $/Mile reduces.

That's the incentive.

update: If you think Uber/Lyft in the US is bad, talk to Uber/Ola drivers in India. Many of them are sleep deprived and driving, to make ends meet. And often barely earn enough to justify the costs.

[robgurley]

Ding ding.

I've started seeing "buy here pay here" auto dealerships use "Uber-ready" as a marketing message on their most expensive cars (and subsequently most insane leasing arrangements).

It's a smart selling point, because you're overcoming peoples' general aversion to spending $$$ on luxuries for themselves by allowing them to justify the nice-car purchase as a business investment. Sure man, you really NEED that F150 to ferry drunk kids around a five block radius from Duke.

[CodeWriter23]

If you’re going to do this, I recommend renting weekly through the Lyft/Hertz or Uber/Enterprise route. It costs more per week, but both networks have a quota where free rent kicks in. But you’ll have to drive superhuman hours and only for the one network to hit the quota.

[s73v3r_]

Its for that reason that, unless you really, really need a car, I would suggest not doing that. If you want to have any kind of a life outside of driving, then you're likely not going to make the high quotas.

[oasisbob]

Yeah, Ubers in India are ridiculously cheap.

One of the strangest experiences I had in an India Uber was the driver getting pulled over and borrowing 100₹ from me so he could pay the bribe. "If you don't do this, things will be very bad for me"

[criddell]

The last time I was in Las Vegas, we used Lyft to get around and the one driver we talked to quite a bit told us the car he was driving belonged to Lyft. I think that makes a lot more sense than using a car you own.