Speaking as a current Uber/Lyft driver, there are a number of attractive reasons to try driving for them - having absolute freedom to set your own hours, seeing all sorts of corners of your city, meeting cool people, and the fulfillment of being able to pay your way in life by directly helping folks get through their day instead of meeting metrics for a middle manager at some faceless corporation among them.  Driving because you think it'll be "a lucrative career" is *not* one of them, doubly so if you think you're going to do it by purchasing an inefficient and maintenance-heavy ICE Toyota Highlander in 2022 and somehow still owing more on it today than its MSRP.Driving all day at the bottom of the totem pole is indeed a tough gig, as the tone of this article gets across, but it falls on its face at actually presenting the correct data to explain why.  For all the numbers it throws out, a $60k/year job ain't awful on its face in most places, but the article utterly fails to quantify the unique expenses of the job that eat into that.  It comes so close, but without at least publishing the average number of *miles* driven for a driver to make that $5k per month and an average cost per mile of car expenses, it's impossible to put those earnings into the proper context.I drive in a different market, but fwiw, my numbers are 150-200 miles/day, and around $0.25 expense/mile in a cheap sedan, turning that $60k/yr into a much less comfortable $47k.  Liveable, but not by much.

Speaking as a current Uber/Lyft driver, there are a number of attractive reasons to try driving for them - having absolute freedom to set your own hours, seeing all sorts of corners of your city, meeting cool people, and the fulfillment of being able to pay your way in life by directly helping folks get through their day instead of meeting metrics for a middle manager at some faceless corporation among them.  Driving because you think it'll be "a lucrative career" is *not* one of them, doubly so if you think you're going to do it by purchasing an inefficient and maintenance-heavy ICE Toyota Highlander in 2022 and somehow still owing more on it today than its MSRP.Driving all day at the bottom of the totem pole is indeed a tough gig, as the tone of this article gets across, but it falls on its face at actually presenting the correct data to explain why.  For all the numbers it throws out, a $60k/year job ain't awful on its face in most places, but the article utterly fails to quantify the unique expenses of the job that eat into that.  It comes so close, but without at least publishing the average number of *miles* driven for a driver to make that $5k per month and an average cost per mile of car expenses, it's impossible to put those earnings into the proper context.I drive in a different market, but fwiw, my numbers are 150-200 miles/day, and around $0.25 expense/mile in a cheap sedan, turning that $60k/yr into a much less comfortable $47k.  Liveable, but not by much.

user
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assistant