

Uber Strikes Deal To Lower The Cost Of Car Ownership For Drivers - leeskye
http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/24/uber-driver-car-financing/

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joosters
Great! Let's encourage drivers who can't afford a car to take out (in effect)
a huge loan on an expensive car that they couldn't otherwise obtain, then make
their more-affordable repayments conditional on working as a reduced-rights
contractor for us. So this is basically indentured service then?

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mixedbit
I think we've already seen something like this in practice. One missing piece:
let's make money by betting that these drivers won't be able to pay the loans.

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S4M
The difference between this and a mortgage for a house is that the value of
the collateral _will_ decrease over time, even in the best case.

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darkzeroman
Can anyone explain to me what is so attractive about Uber?

To me, Uber is just taxi with smart phones. My opinion is that is that Uber is
avoiding a lot of the bureaucracy and fees that real taxi companies are paying
for their rights and things such as insurance. I always figured that once the
taxi companies figure out the convenience of smart phones they will start to
integrate that technology more aggressively and be able to fight Uber back.

But there must be something I'm not seeing.

> "The $258 million is an 86 percent chunk of Google Ventures’ $300 million
> dollar a year fund..."

That's a lot of money, and that's a large part of Google Ventures fund. What
are they seeing that I'm not seeing? Is there a future vision of Uber that's
going over my head?

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exogen
Convenience and reliability. Lots of people have stories of cabs never showing
up, or taking forever, or barking and grumbling when offered a credit card as
payment. Particularly if you're in a hurry, paying with a credit card also
seems to take a lifetime – at least with cabs that use the paper carbon copy
method (which they do here in Seattle).

Uber experience: you open the app and see on a map where all the cars are. It
tells you _exactly_ how many minutes the closest cab will take to arrive. When
you arrive at your destination, you just hop out. The app knows what credit
cards your account has on file and will just charge the one marked as the
default or the one you've selected. There's no tipping. If you're in a hurry,
not having to wait around to sort out the payment is a big deal.

I've never had an Uber not arrive or arrive exceptionally late; when I've had
a less than stellar experience, customer service has been extremely responsive
and offers refunds. On a recent trip, the driver made a poor route choice just
because there ended up being a bunch of construction downtown, so it ended up
taking longer than it could have. Customer service adjusted my fare to what it
would have been had we taken the optimal route.

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r0h1n
_" Kalanick said drivers could expect to save anywhere from $100 to $200 on
monthly payments, depending on the make and model of the car they’re buying."_

I'm not from the US, so don't have an idea of car ownership costs, but is this
that big a deal?

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joosters
It's a little difficult to say for sure, there's not enough information in the
article to judge (e.g. No info on lease length) Since it is in effect a
structured loan, any advantage is better expressed in terms of interest rate
improvements over a non-Uber lease.

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savszymura
Yes, because that what we need - more cars, more traffic, more pollution and
more health problems.

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jaredsohn
While adding more Uber drivers does directly increase the number of cars on
the road, that growth could be offsetted (not sure about the actual numbers)
by people deciding they can rely on mass transit + Uber instead of driving a
car.

Or it just means that there are more Uber drivers and less taxi drivers.

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carlosrt
When it includes Palm Springs I'll apply.

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somberi
Sounds a lot like Share-Cropping.

