My takeaway from this Vox post:
Lyft says its drivers can make $35 an hour. I spent a week driving to see if that’s true.
My first day as a Lyft driver
wasn't going well. After dropping off a passenger in Arlington,
Virginia, I forgot to tap the "drop off" button in the Lyft app to
indicate that the trip was over.
I didn't discover my mistake until 90 minutes later. As a result, the
customer got a nasty surprise: a $44 bill for a ride that should have
cost about $7 (a Lyft administrator corrected the charge a few hours
later, after I pointed out the problem). This was bad for me too,
because during those 90 minutes I couldn't pick up a new passenger.
Oh, and I had one other problem: the woman had left her keys in my car.
Lyft drivers
don't have access to the full names or phone numbers of passengers, but
I was able to figure out my passenger's work number based on where I
had dropped her off. By the time I called her, it was 5:30 on a Monday
afternoon. After four hours on the clock, I had gotten only three
customers. And now, instead of picking up customers during the busy
rush-hour period, I had to drive back out to Arlington in
bumper-to-bumper traffic to drop off the keys.
My experience left me skeptical that drivers will be able to make anywhere close to $30 per hour
I would pick up two more passengers before finally calling it a night
around 7:30 pm. All told, I spent five and a half hours on the clock
and made $48. That's less than Washington DC's minimum wage — even
before you subtract money for gas.
Things got better later in the week. I wound up working 50 hours,
earning almost $600 in fares. And I actually made a lot more than that.
Lyft paid me $1,500 (which I'll be donating to DC Central Kitchen)
under a program that guaranteed drivers would make $30 per hour if they
worked 50 hours. In other words, Lyft paid me more than $2 for every
dollar in revenue I generated for them.
That absurdly generous compensation, funded by millions in venture capital, is part of Lyft's strategy to expand its roster of drivers in order to better compete with Uber.
Obviously, these deals can't last, and my experience left me skeptical
that drivers will be able to make anywhere close to $30 per hour without
them....MUCH MORE
Nor did I get one of those famous Lyft mustaches for my car. My mentor
told me that the giant pink mustaches on the front of the car were being
phased out. He had a smaller and more tasteful pink mustache on his
dashboard, but I didn't even get one of those.
