Dennis RomeroYet another analysis of Uber's driver pay shows that it would take a lot of trips to make anywhere near the kind of annual income the company says that its so-called partners can earn.
You've seen the Facebook ads that claim Uber drivers can make $60,000 a year and more. The personal finance site NerdWallet recently analyzed data from SherpaShare users and concluded you'd have to do a lot of driving to reach that kind of income.
In L.A. you'd have to make 7.40 paid Uber trips a week just break even on car ownership costs, the site said:
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To make $50,000 a year in Los Angeles, you'd have to perform 67.48 trips each week, says NerdWallet. For $75,000, it's 101.21 trips. And for $100,000, it's 134.95 trips.
Think about it. Even 67 trips is nearly 10 trips a day, 7 days a week. And “a growing number of its drivers are part-time,” says Forbes.
That said, the numbers for ride-share competitors Lyft (82.96 trips for $50,000, 124.44 for $75,000, and 165.93 for $100,000) and Sidecar (68.00 for $50,000, 102.00 for $75,000 and 136.00 for $100,000) are even worse.
The analysis points to the folly of dreaming of big money driving your car for a living, although part-time work might make sense for some.
The magazine Car and Driver recently took a $490,215 Rolls-Royce Phantom to the streets of San Francisco and picked up some Uber riders.
Credit: Uber
In 11 hours of work the writer picked up 16 fares for net earnings of … $124.48, or $11.31 an hour.
The magazine calculated that, even if the writer had hustled a little more, it would have taken 365 nights of work to earn less than $60,000 a year.
NerdWallet concludes that making a living driving for any of these companies “ain't easy.”
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