Uber Inconsistent: My Difficulties Driving With Uber

Without a definitive plan for my life the idea of setting my own hours and making a little money on the side sounded like a great idea, I just did not have a vehicle new enough to qualify for being a rideshare driver. So I ignored it, until recently when I did get a new-ish car that was new enough to qualify and my excuses for not trying out a rideshare disappeared.

So a couple weeks ago I got off of my butt and signed up with Uber. After putting in all my documentation, setting up commercial insurance on my car (just in case!), getting some useful additional stuff like a multi-device USB phone charger and a dashcam (partly for my own peace of mind) I was ready to drive for Uber. Or was I? Day after day I had some documentation issue, particularly with my profile picture. What should have been laughably simple to take and upload with Uber's own application proved much more irritating. In frustration I took a very mediocre picture with my phone's camera outside the uber app and uploaded that instead, and finally it liked it. I don't know why.

What was more irritating however was the sign-up bonus that Uber advertises. Something along the lines of "sign-up now and you could make hundreds of dollars with Uber" or "up to $1000 bonus for signing-up with Uber." Obviously I didn't expect the amount to be huge but I did some research and found that the sign-up bonus for Uber in my area was around $300, not bad I thought, but how do I get it? Well to get the sign-up bonus for Uber you have to sign-up with a referral, it is not (as far as I can tell) awarded to everyone who signs up, just if you use a referral. No problem, I got a referral code from an Uber youtuber, piece-of-cake I thought, but I wanted to double check.

So I message Uber's help about the bonus and first I am told that it is a $350 guarantee for 50 rides. Well, I thought to myself, that is not a bonus. A rideshare guarantee only assures you that in x number of rides you will make x amount. If you do not make the listed amount the rideshare pays you the difference between what you made and what is guaranteed. So if you made $310 in 50 rides you would be paid the difference, $40. If you made $351, oops you get nothing. So I pushed back a little and kept asking and was told instead that the referral bonus in my area was $370 for 50 rides. Now we are getting somewhere, that means I would likely make an average of three hundred and fifty bucks in fifty rides and then I'd double that with the bonus, sweet!

Except that's where Uber's inconsistency comes in. Just yesterday I finished my first twenty rides, well on my way to that fifty ride bonus and surprise I get a bonus in my earnings, but it's just $150. I get a message from Uber saying something along the lines of: "congratulations you completed your 20 rides and earned your $150 bonus, yay!" Except that wasn't what I had been told just six days earlier. Two messages to Uber just returned a very formulaic "we're sorry the amount was a surprise to you, here's what happened; referral amounts differ by city, the amount is dependent on the invitee's location, the amount in your location is $150." Twice I got almost the exact same response and I don't yet know what I'll hear the third time or if there's any point continuing. I was told a completely different number last week and now this.

While I am not exactly going to hate on an extra hundred and fifty bucks in my pocket it bothers me that this silicon valley tech company cannot manage a consistent response, transparency or clarity. It should not be this difficult to get a straight and reliable response to a very basic inquiry. If I have this much trouble dealing with a sign-up bonus from Uber what am I going to do if something more complicated comes up?

It would be one thing if the money were better, then the difficulties would be easily outweighed. But it's not. I saw a banner the other day promising that a new driver was guaranteed to earn $1,000 in 150 rides and I thought to myself, what a lame promise. Just in my first few days driving I calculated an average of about $7 per ride. Some were less, some were more but about $7 was average, at least in my area. If the numbers elsewhere hold anywhere near similar with between five and eight dollars per ride then the guarantee is entirely safe for Uber and really does little to nothing for the driver. Think about it, at $7 per ride that is $350 for 50 rides, and $1,050 for 150 rides, fifty dollars more than the guarantee meaning the driver gets nothing extra. But hey you might say, isn't that still decent pay for the work? Well maybe. In about four hours I averaged $35, and nothing reliably in tips. I've been tipped twice so far in four days driving for a total of $5. Now I did earn notably more the 3rd and 4th of July but those were essentially holiday days with surge pricing, but an average day last month the average was $35 for four hours work. Before gas, food and other expenses that was close to $9 an hour. Which wouldn't be terrible if that's what you were making working retail or food service where your costs are relatively low, but that is before gas and other expenses. Just filling my tank from a bit below half (about two days driving) cost me some $36, or roughly half what I earned driving for Uber.

 Now there are some things Uber does that can help, one of the costs was the distance it took to drive back home from wherever my Uber trips had taken me and Uber does give drivers two destination trips a day. These are requests for a pickup going near where you want to go. You could ostensibly use this to get into the area where you plan to work and then back out of it again at the end of the day. However I found myself sitting in a hot car in the city for half an hour waiting for a destination trip that didn't appear and I haven't really used it much since. Particularly for someone driving part time and not full time it is not easy to take advantage of reliable trips into a dense locale for morning rush-hour and then back out again eight hours later with a full day of driving in between. While driving one's own hours there is a cost for getting to and leaving the more effective work areas.

Which leaves the surge pricing thing. Now apart from this being hugely unreliable and difficult to take advantage of unless you happen to be in the area of the surge when it happens, this also means driving some of the worst conditions. Dense rush-hour traffic, bad weather, odd hours. Taking advantage of the surge is hardly an easy or reliable thing to do from what I can see. While driving just four hours during the 4th of July netted me around $66, close to double what I did on an average day the week before, that involved driving some of the worst traffic, the most ridiculous wait-times and re-routes that I have ever had to deal with, and if I managed that for eight hours that would still leave me with a quarter of my earnings out in gas. Which is all before the cost of the vehicle ($18,000), maintenance (who knows how much $$$) and insurance (~$2000/yr). Yet what is worse than all that is an inability to get a simple response from Uber about a sign-up bonus! 

Without anything better to do at the moment it seems like I am going to be stuck with this for a while. However I honestly have to say that my first few weeks driving with Uber have been markedly underwhelming and troubling.