How Uber Makes Its Drivers Pay

Have a look at the loss that drivers incurred driving for Uber!  No wonder drivers are scamming Uber by posting a pic of an expensive car and then driving a wreck with the excuse that their car is in the shop...  Aivars Lode

Uber lost $5.24 billion in the second quarter this year and seems to have no clear path to profitability. But even that loss is understated, because a substantial part of the expense is not included in Uber’s income statement and is instead pushed onto drivers: the wear and tear the job puts on their cars.

Most Uber drivers seem unaware of how their job costs them when it comes to the value of their cars. We spoke with more than 50 Uber drivers in Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Charleston, S.C., in recent weeks and asked them to tell us their revenues and costs. The revenue—the payments Uber made to them—are recorded in detail, but the costs aren’t as clear. The drivers all included gasoline. Some noted the price of water or candy for riders, and a few included maintenance—but only one detailed the loss in value of the car he was driving, and even then only after we inquired about it specifically.

That driver has an accounting background and wanted to make a little extra money over the holidays. He drove a few-years-old Mercedes M Class SUV, which was worth about $20,000 when he began driving for Uber. He kept meticulous records of his total costs, which he netted out against income. He drove for Uber for a couple of months.

When he stopped driving, he had made about $5,000, but the value of his SUV had dropped from $20,000 to about $15,000. Reviewing his records, the driver found that at least 80% of the miles he drove during that period were for Uber, making about $4,000 of the decline in value attributable to his work for the firm. He was going to have to pay for two service visits, higher insurance rates, and new tires sooner than if he hadn’t been an Uber driver—which all added up to somewhere north of $3,000 in additional costs. In short, he was worse off financially than when he started.

Why solar, wind and EVs will be the death of the petroleum industry

The amount of energy transferred by electric motors to the wheels is definitely more efficient as you are not losing a lot of energy as heat, which is the case with petrol motors.The issue I have is that the cost to develop and maintain petrol alternatives means a very long term cost justification. For example, when I looked at Tesla's solar roof for our home the cost was 150K versus 15K for a normal roof. They had a chart showing that it started paying back after 30 years by getting rebates from the government and selling some power back into the network. 

Maybe you can skew the numbers one way or another to justify it but if you don’t have the whole picture of total cost to develop, maintain and dispose of electric car batteries then it is not an accurate comparison.Do I think that electric vehicles will ultimately win? Yes I do... but it will likely be subsidized to get there...... Aivars Lode

A stunning new report from French-based global banking group BNP Paribas signals the death toll for the petrol industry – a mixture of solar, wind and electric vehicles can deliver more than six times the “mobility” returns on each dollar invested than oil.

The report, entitled “Wells, Wires and Wheels”, has been described as “seismic” by the likes of solar pioneer and entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett because he says it demonstrates the huge capital efficiency of wind and solar and EVs over the petroleum industry.

This is because of the low costs of renewables, but also because of the huge losses sustained by petrol and diesel in transportation of the fuel, in refining, and mostly in losses through the engine (most of the energy is lost through heat).

The actual amount of energy delivered to actually move the car or other forms of transport is vastly inferior than renewables and EVs. So much so that the report suggests that the case for renewables and EVs over petroleum investments is “irresistible”.

“We calculate that to get the same amount of mobility from gasoline as from new renewables in tandem with EVs over the next 25 years would cost 6.2x-7x more,” says the report, written by respected analyst Mark Lewis.

“Indeed, even if we add in the cost of building new network infrastructure to cope with all the new wind and/or solar capacity implied by replacing gasoline with renewables and EVs, the economics of renewables still crush those of oil.

“Extrapolating total expenditure on gasoline in 2018 for the next 25 years would see $US25 trillion spent on mobility, whereas we estimate the cost of new renewables projects complete with the enhanced network infrastructure required to match the 2018 level of mobility provided by gasoline every year for the next 25 years at only $US4.6 trillion to $US5.2trillion.”