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Life as an Uber Driver

And Why I'll Never Do It Again

By Oluf MarshallPublished 6 years ago 13 min read
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The Uber Rider App (Stock Photo)

Uber has undoubtedly changed the way we get around. Nobody would have thought five years ago that it would become a common occurrence for us to hail a minicab by the click of a smartphone screen and not have to ask the driver to take you via a cash machine en route to your destination. Without a doubt, Uber is a cheap and highly convenient way to get around. Back in the day, I sometimes waited up to 15 minutes at Edinburgh's Taxi ranks trying to get a ride home in the pouring rain. Those days are over now that we hit our screens and boom!—a ride in five minutes that's a lot cheaper than any of the local private hire or black cab firms.

I drove for Uber for around six months. Yesterday was my last day. In this post, I will share with you my experience as a driver and why I will never do it again.

To any readers elsewhere in the world, you have to keep in mind that Uber is heavily regulated here. You can't just have a car and away you go. You first need to apply for a Private Hire Car license from your local council. This is basically the same as a Taxi driver's badge but will only allow you to drive cars that are licensed to pick up passengers with an advanced booking—i.e., through Uber's app. The whole process for me took about three months as if, like me you were born abroad and had lived in another country, you have to provide criminal background checks from those countries. This has been something of a response to the child grooming scandal that hit the Yorkshire town of Rotherham over a period of nearly 20 years.

After I had my license from Edinburgh city council, it was a visit to Uber's Greenlight Hub to get signed up. The sign-up process was pretty quick. It took around 30 minutes where they just explained the basics of how to use the app, etc. After we were finished, I enquired about car rental, which was when I started to see how amateur these people are. For those unfamiliar with the system here, Uber has the legal status of a taxi firm and as such have to abide by taxi firm rules and regulations. Part of this means that all Uber cars need to be licensed by the city council which usually involves a £550 fee, an inspection where the car needs to be in almost factory condition, a three-month wait, and finally having to pay around £4000 for insurance. As a result of this, a lot of businesses have been set up where you can rent a car for Uber use (or any minicab firm), and you'll pay a weekly rate which covers your insurance.

I enquired at the desk about car rental. The guy who had just signed me up told me, "Go look on Gumtree." I asked if he had the names of anyone I could rent from. "I'm sorry we don't have that here." Yes, that's right. Uber doesn't have the names of any rental companies you can use! What they did do, however, was give me a web link to a site called "Uberfinder." I had a look on this website and texted a guy about a Skoda Octavia he had for rent. In broken English, he explained that he had a BMW 320i. I went along to look at this car, and instantly alarm bells rang in my head. The guy said the car wasn't his and it belonged to a friend. Secondly, the car didn't have the official Private Hire plates, the Private Hire Stickers, or any of the signage that is needed. I politely declined the £180 a week offer.

All Private Hire Cars, including Uber, must display these signs on each front passenger door. (Stock Photo)

All PHV cars must also display these plates on the front and rear (Stock Photo)

Soon I found a car which, due to my age, cost me £270 a week to rent. This was when I started to realize what a mistake I'd made.

I got the car signed up and registered on my Uber Driver app and hit the road on a Saturday night. Edinburgh was naturally incredibly busy, and there were price surges everywhere. After 20 minutes, I had no trip requests. I drove around for nearly 3 hours and didn't get a single trip. I tried to contact Uber through the app as I assumed there must be a problem with my app, but there was no phone number to call! All they had was a bunch of cryptic FAQs within the help section of the app which you'd have to wait up to three days for a response. I explained to them several times that I wasn't getting trip requests and that my car wasn't even showing up on the rider app, but the responses I got were, "Thank you for your patience. There is no problem. Drive to a surging area." I explained that this wasn't working and they told me the same thing again. It wasn't until about three days later they realized there was a problem and it was sorted. Now I could finally start.

So I had my first trips. Went okay, pretty sound people. It was also quite a lot of fun driving around drunk people at night and getting to chat with random strangers was always something I enjoyed. I worked the star-rating system pretty quickly, but I was kind of annoyed how as drivers we have to rate our passengers the second the trip ends, whereas a passenger can do it up to a week later. There was, however, a much more looming problem. For some trips, I was getting a payout of £3 for a trip that would take me 15 minutes to complete if you include driving and dropping off the passenger. That is, of course after Uber's quite frankly unreasonable 25 percent cut of every trip you take. I found myself having to work over 15 hours just to break even and pay off the vehicle rent along with other costs. With this on top of my day job, I was finding myself under too much pressure and not to mention risking my wellbeing. I ended up giving the car back after two weeks. Fortunately, I had managed to make some reasonable profit from this little stint.

Later, I managed to find a Skoda to rent which cost me £200 a week. This was a more reasonable price to pay. On this occasion, I found it much easier to work with my day job as I didn't have to do insane hours to break even and I was now making pretty good money, but still not nearly enough for what it's worth. Once again, though, I had some great customers. A drunk man knighted me "Sir Taxi Driver and his noble steed Skoda Octavia 06" while his girlfriend awkwardly chuckled. After dropping these two off, I relapsed into laughter. I enjoyed driving around tourists and getting to tell them about what was great in Edinburgh and hearing about their life stories. I had drag queens giving me an insight to their shows, tourists marveling at buildings which are normal to me and, of course, the more awkward conversations passengers have about incest and whose Dad they felt would be better in bed!

I started to get the feeling that Uber doesn't care for their drivers and have little faith in them. During the time I drove, we were allowed to put six destination trips in the app per day. This meant we could request trips going in the direction of home or to the kid's school at a certain time of day or night. Uber reduced the number to two per day as they believed that too many of us were using the destinations too much. I also bought up concerns about Uber's 25 percent cut; this fell on deaf ears constantly.

Another issue I had was the unprofessionalism of the Greenlight Hub staff. Uber's so-called Greenlight Hub appears to be empty most of the day. The staff there work from around 10-12, take an hour for lunch, and they are in the office until 4 each day. All they seem to do is sign up a few drivers and get paid ridiculous amounts of money of my extreme grafting. I asked the guy who ran the Hub why there wasn't a dedicated support phone-number we could call, and my response was, "We can't have that, because we'd be inundated with phone-calls 24/7." Roughly translated into rational English that would read: "I can't be arsed to listen to you moaning, so we don't have a support line. Fuck off and make me some money."

One of my major issues came with some drunk girls who got into a Prius I was renting one night. Not only do they slam the doors at full pelt and start laughing and joking about how they may have just damaged the car, but as I'm driving they start taking Snapchats of me whilst I'm driving and climbing around the car and putting their phones on my dashboard to play music as I'm trying to pay attention to the road. After I dropped these yobs off, I reported them to Uber, and I got a response which said, "We'll deal with it." I asked them, "I want to know what action is being taken." Uber responded telling me, "That's against our privacy policy." I was utterly livid. Some drunken teenagers potentially damaged a car I was renting (thankfully they didn't) but also put my safety at risk, and I was to be kept in the dark over what action the company would take. Undoubtedly they won't have taken any action at all and maybe just sent the girl a text saying, "Behave when you're in an Uber."

I fell out with Uber quite dramatically over my car. I had gotten my car licensed by the council at great expense. I had planned to get the car to pay for itself in a sense. I had all the right documentation, I added my car to the app, and I got a message from Uber approving everything. I switched to go online and was met with a message reading. "Your car is not accepted in Edinburgh." This I found bizarre as I was able to add to the app with no issues whatsoever and my vehicle had been on the accepted list and was not on the non-accepted vehicles list. I messaged tech-support three times, and it was nearly five days until they responded. Uber told me I would not be allowed to use my car because it was supposedly too compact. I was furious because it had been on the accepted vehicles list and I was able to add it into the app. When I explained to them how much it had cost me, Uber's representative on the phone told me the following.

"Go visit a debt counselor."

"Sell your car."

"Go see a psychiatrist."

I was so utterly infuriated I hung the phone up. A representative of a billion-dollar corporation actually told me to visit a debt counselor. I asked Uber for an apology much later. Uber's representative told me they weren't going to apologize because, "As far as we are concerned, we did the right thing." Now like I mentioned, getting your car licensed is not cheap. You'd think that a billion-dollar corporation which has received countless negative publicity since it came into being would do something decent and refund me as I was misled and given the assumption I would be able to work in my car. No such thing! I asked them to show a little human decency, but when I was on the phone to this advisor from Uber, she told me in a robotic fashion that sounded like she was reading from a script, "We aren't in any position to do that."

All in all, I feel that this is the most important aspect of Uber that needs to be taken into account. In the UK, at least 70 percent of Uber drivers are from immigrant backgrounds. Many of these migrants are from deprived African or Asian backgrounds, and some of them are relatively new arrivals to the UK from what I discovered. Uber sells these people a dream of "working when you want." "No bosses pushing you around." The reality is very different. Uber completely abandon you once you have been signed up. After five years, Uber has only recently given drivers an insurance policy that covers only sick/maternity pay. They only did this in response to a court ruling against them, in which Uber was told that their drivers should be classed as employees rather than self-employed small business owners which the company tried to claim in court. This claim was thrown out the window for the simple reason that Uber penalize drivers for not taking enough trips, drivers can only work and pick up passengers on Uber's terms, and Uber set the fares and of course takes 25 percentof all the money they earn.

I met one driver. We'll call him Bogdan, a driver from Romania. This, of course, is not his real name. Bogdan is a driver in Bristol. He talked about how Uber had recommended that he buy a Mercedes for £30k and use that to be an Uber Executive driver after being told he'll make money back in no time. Bogdan told us how this was the biggest mistake he made. Bogdan was getting maybe one or two Uber Executive trips per day and as a result, was having to operate the basic Uber X service in his all-leather interior Mercedes with a £30k value. Bogdan was driving home drunken teenagers who vomited in his car for trips that he would get a £5 payout for. As a result, he had to take up work with a local minicab firm to supplement his work with Uber. Another driver, Ismail—again, not his real name—was a driver in Edinburgh. Ismail, unlike Bogdan, was renting his car. Ismail was working for Uber seven days per week. It would take him three days of major grafting to pay off the vehicle rent, and the rest would be meager profits for hours being worked. The poor man was being worked to death and was utterly miserable. This is the case with many Uber drivers operating in cities outside of London. Uber like to claim that all drivers are happy people.

My final verdict is this. The Uber model just cannot adapt to the highly regulated market in the UK. Uber still can't accept that they are legally a taxi company over here and as a result, it's been difficult to adapt with the exception of London. To most signing up as drivers, it's just not financially viable. Uber works so well in America because for a lot of drivers, it is simply a side-gig and in many American states and cities where Uber operates, they do not have the strict laws that restrict Uber operations as we do in the UK. One thing that is for sure is that Uber is a highly unethical company that gives an illusion of happy drivers getting a great deal. This may be the case in London where drivers are making a lot of money, but not so much in Edinburgh. My only regret in stopping driving is the people. The people of Edinburgh are the salt of the Earth (with the exception of the 1 out of 10!), and I enjoyed driving them around. To anyone of my former passengers reading this, I thank you for making my time more bearable as a driver, and I'm sorry I won't be able to drive you anymore. It's been an honor to serve you, and I would continue if Uber treated other drivers and me with a bit of human decency.

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About the Creator

Oluf Marshall

Storyteller and Commentator based in the beautiful county of East Lothian - Scotland. Here you'll find a collection of fictional stories and my commentary on various issues.

https://twitter.com/marshtheman93

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