[im_cynical]

I heard some economist call Uber "the greatest transfer of wealth in a very long time". What Uber is doing is taking investors money and subsidizing your Uber ride to a restaurant.

They are providing value and I'm a casual user myself. However the consumer price right now is arguably unsustainable against the stated quote above. To survive both of them are going to have to raise prices

[35787]

This is not true. Uber drivers make tons of money. I know because I was one. The press put a microscope on the subset of drivers who are stupid and can’t make money because they run their businesses poorly. The press is happy to let them tell their son stories but what they don’t mention is that those drivers refuse to drive anywhere outside their immediate area, they drive huge shitty cars that cost literally ten times more per mile to operate than a corolla or Prius, and various other things. There’s this myth floating around that Uber is a trap because the costs of running and maintaining a vehicle is difficult to quantify and all Uber drivers are uneducated people being taken advantage of. This is totally, completely untrue and seeing this myth/meme spread like cancer across the entire internet has opened my eyes to how something that is totally untrue can become widely and vehemently believed. It’s simply not true. I’ve given many thousands of rides. I know. I have a college education and the calculations solidly land within the region of very healthy profit no matter how pessimistic the maintenance projections are and no matter how wide the error margin is made. It’s. A. Fucking. Myth. I genuinely wonder if people will someday understand.

Anyway, drivers make more than enough. After glancing at Uber’s books, it looks like they spent literally a billion dollars on advertising. They also do a a lot of research. Uber could easily run its ride sharing service with room for profit if it wanted to cut back in other areas.

Ride sharing is totally economically viable as a business and it is better than traditional dispatch in almost every way. Companies like Uber aren’t going anywhere. To say that Uber is worthless is flat out wrong. Overvalued or levered or invested-in, yes maybe. But ride sharing is solid. The only thing that could change it is self driving cars.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

can’t make money because they run their businesses poorly

I don't have any data but this wouldn't surprise me in the least.

You're taking a bunch of people who really aren't that interested in running a business, just in making ends meet. It's not surprising that they won't do the kind of critical analysis that running a profitable business entails.

My first ever Uber ride was in an almost brand new BMW. Really nice car, but I have no idea how you can make money driving Uber with a vehicle that expensive. As a side gig for extra cash a couple hours a day in a high-density area? I can see that. But doing it full time with all the additional wear and tear on the vehicle? No way.

Judging from the comments I see on /r/freelance, I believe many freelancers/gig workers would prefer to be employees because they really don't enjoy doing the work that they are.

[cjarrett]

I’m gonna trust the multitudes if studies than someone telling the rest of his peers to be better.

[35787]

You should trust neither. You should think for yourself. Nobody seems to be able to do it anymore.

Look, you don’t need a paper or a PhD to understand this:

When I was driving, I got paid roughly 60c per mile and then got more for time, a one time fee and tips. But baseline 60c per mile. It costs 20c to 25c per mile to drive a Toyota Corolla. Yes, that includes all expenses. It’s the cost of insurance and gas and the cost of buying a new car when the old one is at end of life. Nobody is losing money doing this. It isn’t rocket science.

[Apocryphon]

Would you tell them to think for themselves even if they happened to be agreeing with you?

[35787]

There are so many layers of nuance that your comment glosses over that I find it hard to answer. It depends on why they agree with me. Do they agree with me because they were an Uber driver too? Because they did the math? Because they believe anything they read? In the context of agreeing with me, have they made it obvious whether or not they checked this conclusion On their own? Do they provide the reason they agree with me? Is this agreement a comment or simply an upvote? Be more specific.

[Gibbon1]

> The press put a microscope on the subset of drivers who are stupid and can’t make money because they run their businesses poorly.

Which very likely is the vast majority of drivers. Subtract those and we're back to ordinary cab, pizza delivery levels of service. Probably less.

[sokoloff]

I'm not convinced they'll need to raise prices in their core business. Looking at the Boston rates ( http://www.alvia.com/uber-city/uber-boston-2/ ), those seem very much sustainably profitable for drivers @70% share and Uber could surely run the platform for their cut of those figures.

To know whether they could fall back to "just" competing for riders and only operate their core business is something that is not determinable from their released financials. How much engineering is true R&D (self-driving and the like) vs what would be required to run their core ride hailing platform? How much of their marketing spend is in established cities ("Coca Cola" type ad spend) and how much is to launch new cities or incentives to balance the development of the 2-sided market in new cities ("priming the pump" type of spend)?

I think Uber is a constellation of [small] profit-making businesses (most cities that have reached scale) and [large] loss-making businesses (select geographies and R&D efforts).