Uber Strikes Deal To Lower The Cost Of Car Ownership For Drivers | Hacker News Reader

Uber Strikes Deal To Lower The Cost Of Car Ownership For Drivers

techcrunch.com

23 pointsleeskye16 comments

Great! Let's encourage drivers who can't afford a car to take out (in effect) a huge loan on an expensive car that they couldn't otherwise obtain, then make their more-affordable repayments conditional on working as a reduced-rights contractor for us. So this is basically indentured service then?

I think we've already seen something like this in practice. One missing piece: let's make money by betting that these drivers won't be able to pay the loans.

The difference between this and a mortgage for a house is that the value of the collateral will decrease over time, even in the best case.

If there becomes excess supply of drivers and vehicles, not improbable.

How is this different from a loan to start any business?

Um, in many many ways. It's probably easier to compare it to something similar, e.g. An ordinary car lease. Here, you have all the advantages/disadvantages of a leasing agreement, but you're now tied to work as a contractor to Uber, who have no obligations to you. No guarantee of work, no certainty of income, few benefits. Meanwhile, should you stop working for them or if business is not good, suddenly you are on the hook for a lease that you can no longer afford.

You have just described Addison Lee in the UK: http://www.addisonlee.com/

Can anyone explain to me what is so attractive about Uber?

To me, Uber is just taxi with smart phones. My opinion is that is that Uber is avoiding a lot of the bureaucracy and fees that real taxi companies are paying for their rights and things such as insurance. I always figured that once the taxi companies figure out the convenience of smart phones they will start to integrate that technology more aggressively and be able to fight Uber back.

But there must be something I'm not seeing.

> "The $258 million is an 86 percent chunk of Google Ventures’ $300 million dollar a year fund..."

That's a lot of money, and that's a large part of Google Ventures fund. What are they seeing that I'm not seeing? Is there a future vision of Uber that's going over my head?

Convenience and reliability. Lots of people have stories of cabs never showing up, or taking forever, or barking and grumbling when offered a credit card as payment. Particularly if you're in a hurry, paying with a credit card also seems to take a lifetime – at least with cabs that use the paper carbon copy method (which they do here in Seattle).

Uber experience: you open the app and see on a map where all the cars are. It tells you exactly how many minutes the closest cab will take to arrive. When you arrive at your destination, you just hop out. The app knows what credit cards your account has on file and will just charge the one marked as the default or the one you've selected. There's no tipping. If you're in a hurry, not having to wait around to sort out the payment is a big deal.

I've never had an Uber not arrive or arrive exceptionally late; when I've had a less than stellar experience, customer service has been extremely responsive and offers refunds. On a recent trip, the driver made a poor route choice just because there ended up being a bunch of construction downtown, so it ended up taking longer than it could have. Customer service adjusted my fare to what it would have been had we taken the optimal route.

My guess is they're pitching themselves to investors as a logistics company with far larger aspiration than just replacing taxi's. They want to replace Fedex too. It's the only way to justify their valuation. A lot is possible once you have a network of locked-in, under-employed workers available at the push of a button. Point-to-point deliveries are a lot harder to pull off than the old hub and spoke model, but Uber have put a lot of the foundation in place to move into other types of point-to-point deliveries.

"Kalanick said drivers could expect to save anywhere from $100 to $200 on monthly payments, depending on the make and model of the car they’re buying."

I'm not from the US, so don't have an idea of car ownership costs, but is this that big a deal?

It's a little difficult to say for sure, there's not enough information in the article to judge (e.g. No info on lease length) Since it is in effect a structured loan, any advantage is better expressed in terms of interest rate improvements over a non-Uber lease.

Yes, because that what we need - more cars, more traffic, more pollution and more health problems.

While adding more Uber drivers does directly increase the number of cars on the road, that growth could be offsetted (not sure about the actual numbers) by people deciding they can rely on mass transit + Uber instead of driving a car.

Or it just means that there are more Uber drivers and less taxi drivers.

When it includes Palm Springs I'll apply.

Sounds a lot like Share-Cropping.

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