• SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    82·
    10 days ago

    Twelve bucks? That’s … Probably not a livable wage with cost of operating a vehicle. Let’s assume you do four of those in an hour for 8 hours, that’s 32 jobs a day, grossing 8 hours a day for $384/day and just under 100k/y… But you have overhead. You have to pay for the vehicle and it’s operating and insurance costs, and your own operating costs and insurance. If you live in any sort of American wider metro, 100k alone isn’t cutting it.

    So let’s say you drive 6 miles per $12 on average. Operating a new car for a business is about $0.76/mile, so you subtract $4.56 of your $12 right off the bat, leaving you with $7.44/job.

    That doesn’t include accidents or your tax, either. Let’s assume you get in one medium accident a year and you have minimal insurance. You pay out of pocket for your own repairs glhf.

    Now you also pay 15.3% tax on your earnings because you aren’t an employee and Uber says to go fuck yourself. So on your 100k a year, you pay another $15,275 in tax.

    That leaves you $46,625/year, driving full time.

    If you bought the car on a loan, you make negative money.

    If you get in an accident, you make negative money.

    For full time.

    Enjoy.

    Good luck eating or paying 36k a year for an apartment.

    • deft@lemmy.wtf
      2·
      10 days ago

      Those numbers aren’t accurate. Used to have to Uber to a job 10 minutes up the road and after talking to a few guys they made about $20 off me.

      From my understanding Uber is basically 15-20 an hour in my area at least. That’s a pretty typical wage. Can’t speak for everywhere though.

      • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        21·
        10 days ago

        Okay, I’ll try to do this an easier calculation using $20/job instead of $12/job

        $20/7miles (include in-between jobs distance, 7mi is average total real per-job) = $2.86/mi(gross) - $0.76/mi (operating) = $2.10/mile (subtotal), subtracting another 15.8% of gross from subtotal ($0.44/mi) = $1.66/mi (net)

        So if you drive (7miles x 4 jobs) = 28 miles hourly, you make 28 x $1.66 = $48.48/hour, which is significantly better. But keep in mind, you’re still fucking your vehicle driving 28mi/h and so another 58k miles a year commercially with thousands of people fucking up your shit.

        That’s $96,678.40net/year with a $40,000 every ~ 4 years (250k mi sell point) (you might make an extra 10k on the sale!) (let’s call it $30k every 4 years, so -$7,500/year, assuming you have no payments and bought outright), and an accelerated degradation and depreciation of your vehicle, assuming you drive 40hrs/w and are basically nonstop driving jobs.

        In short, ($12 -> $20)/7miles makes a big difference at scale. Takes it from making peanuts and scraping by if you aren’t too unlucky, to actually looking like you can save if you don’t get superfucked by something.

        However, if you were saying $15-20 per hour TOTAL revenue, that’s a very different equation.

        Honestly, 97k/year is probably top end. Ah I just realized I didn’t include tips. I don’t know how tips work in that company, but I seem to remember some of those companies just stealing them.

        I’ll be honest, if you couldn’t tell, I’m pretty biased against that whole delivery/courier/driver industry and cautious about people thinking it’s viable. That stuff is always a trap. Otherwise, Uber would just make people actually employees and absorb costs rather than passing it to the employee worker. Taxis had it figured out, and even then it wasn’t great. And semi trucking can be viable, but that’s a WHOOOLLLE different series and scale and severity of traps. Super predatory stuff.

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
          2·
          10 days ago

          Lets look at if from another angle. Uber/Lyft have deals with rental agencies that rent the cars to people just to drive in their area. They turn enough profit doing that that they find it worthwhile (retirees I’ve had) and they put 0 wear and tear on their own car.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      1·
      10 days ago

      Uber drivers I take to tell me that even if you make money driving, you lose it all in the wear and tear on your vehicle when you sell it.