I question the authenticity of the $3.37 number when I see that the paper this article references was published by an organization funded by these bodies:
Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, BP, ClearPath Foundation, Conoco Phillips, Duke Energy, Electricité de France, EnBW, ENGIE, ENI, Eversource, Exelon Corporation, ExxonMobil, Gas Natural Fenosa, GE, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, Inc., Iberdrola, IHI Corporation, EDPC J-Power, Kiewit Energy Group Inc., National Grid, Norwegian Ministries, PSEG, Southern Company, Swedish Energy Agency, Toyota Motor Corporation, TransCanada Corporation
I think Uber/Lyft economics are problematic, but these guys have pretty solid incentives to make Uber/Lyft look unviable.
Instead of giving in to a gut reaction, you should read the paper. All research must get funding in one way or another. If you exclude research due to funding sources and potential conflicts of interest, you wouldn't be left with much.
This study only confirms the unspoken word for many years.
Looks like these ride-sharing services are a race to the bottom, the only ones that are better off are the users.
Another conflict of interest worth examining is that of readers of these studies. Is it in your interest to discount or promote the study? Does your lifestyle, paycheck, politics or identity (as in identity politics) bias your read?
What would a rejection of business models such as Uber's mean to SV, it's means of wealth, it's self-image?
> “The companies are losing money. The businesses are being subsidized by [venture capital] money … And the drivers are essentially subsidizing it by working for very low wages.”
Last time I pointed that out I was downvoted for some unknown reason.
My neighbor was talking about buying a new car to drive for lyft/uber and I was like "the trick is to tear up somebody else's car." We'll see if he heeds my advice though I kind of doubt it since he has an MBA and I'm just the resident slacker who happens to know the business.
It was never designed to be sustainable. Why does nobody get that yet?
The only reason Uber and Lyft work is that there are a ton of people with limited job skills, who have time on their hands, are short on cash, and need to spend their extra time trying to make money. Sure, there may be "bored people" who do this because they're retired or whatever, but that's a tiny minority. Most people do not become part-time cab drivers because it's more fun than what they would normally do with their free time.
A significant amount of our economy is dependent on people having two or three or four jobs, and a lot of those people live in or very near to cities, and have cars. If wages improve across the board, or people move farther away from cities, or people get rid of their cars, ride-sharing is screwed. Much of the "gig economy" is dependent on similar conditions. If we had better access to jobs and a living wage, a lot fewer people would be "gigging" to get by.
Another reason (there's probably dozens) why the gig economy is incentivised today are things like rising health care costs, rising cost of housing, rising cost of education, and lack of availability to retirement or pensions. We all know we're supposed to save, but it's harder and harder to save. So people have to pick up gigs.
My partner is a teacher and gets paid well for her position, but she still has to Airbnb out a room in her home because the insurance, taxes, and mortgage are absolutely insane. If she makes it to 25 years or whatever it is without killing herself from stress, maybe she can finally retire. Except, oh wait, the state isn't funding the teachers' pensions and will run out of money in eight years! Fun.
Point is, the gig economy is here because almost every strata of people below "upper-middle-class" have been getting slowly screwed for decades. It's not designed to give people a working income. It's designed to fit into the cracks in the system - and the cracks keep getting bigger.
Your comment made me remember that Richard Stallman calls Uber for Guber (Refering to Goober; another word for a peanut), because they pay peanuts to their drivers.
This is similar to how the huge army of people stuffing DVDs into envelopes at Netflix is going away. It might be slow, but I don't think there will be tons of people watching DVDs from them in 2030...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business-still-a...
The recent internal Uber study found that long-term drivers learn how to optimize their rides for the highest fares. So there are significant differences between what the median driver makes and what the "pro" Uber drivers make.
For every one who makes it there's probably (wild guess) ten that lose money after working a few shifts and never turn on the app again -- most people are like "I can sit my ass on the couch and not make money plus not waste my gas making billionaires even richer."
Like all things there's a learning curve before you can consistently turn a decent profit too.
As a former pizza delivery guy, this seems odd to me. Before expenses, I’d make between 12 and 20 an hour depending on the night. The car I drove then had a KBB value of less than $3000 and it would have been eligible to use as an Uber. I just don’t see how you could possibly have such high levels of expenses unless you were paying like $600 a month for your car.
I ran these numbers when I had access to the data. Varies by region but this number is still much too low. Even if 30c/mile in costs is correct the hourly is still way off
Lyft rents out cars on a weekly basis. If a driver completes enough rides they don't have to pay a rental fee. Rental includes maintenance and driver only pays for gas.
That is much simpler to calculate. Someone should do the math on that.
I drove for Uber part-time last year in Canada and made less than $3 an hour on paper at tax time.
However, this is highly misleading simply because I was able to deduct fixed "business expenses" that I would have spent anyways to own a car. Insurance, parking, licensing, registration, and finance interest, were all things that I would have spent anyways in the exact same amounts even if I only drove the car for personal use.
In addition, cars are considered to depreciate 30% every year by the CRA (Canadian IRS). This is obviously nonsense; cars depreciate based on kms driven and I did not drive nearly enough kms to reach 30%. So this is not a real expense either, but one I can deduct nonetheless.
So, really, I was subsidizing my expensive car ownership tax-free. The real rate after adjusting for those fake "expenses" was around minimum wage which is fair considering it's a better job than flipping burgers.
This seems rather low. Granted it's been almost two years since I drove for (primarily lyft) and I was making 50k/year for about 70h work a week. And also I gave myself about 6 weeks of vacation over that year and half.
I was very curious about this and I did some math and I think it is probably correct. I struggled to see how or why any driver would do this, and figured I must be missing something. I decided to find out for myself with my own car, which is fully electric. I thought if I wasn't paying for fuel that maybe there was some profit here. No, there isn't. When you take out maintenance, depreciation, time, fuel - I'm actually surprised that there is $3.37 left over. The only thing that it offers is cash now for an asset you are currently sitting on. But you are trading that, and your time for the cash now. It is incredibly sad that this is the current state of affairs - it would be wonderful to offer a supply side force to improve the conditions for the drivers.
I have always thought Uber drivers are either mispricing their vehicle cost, or doing some sort of tax optimisation.
If you have a nice car that you only drive a little bit on the weekend, so that most of the cost is in the fixed stuff (age based depreciation (a 5 years old Porsche with 0 mile is still 5 years old), insurance, parking etc), and the tax man let you allocate cost based on miles driven (I am not based in the US), then Uberring where you "try to get business" by driving up and down a highway would be great.
I guess what makes driving different than other low-wage jobs is that it’s a relatively easy job to obtain if you already have the vehicle: you don’t have to do a bunch of interviews, you don’t need a huge amount of ability, you can start making money pretty much immediately. Having a reliable income can be important (as opposed to jobs that limit your hours, etc.).
Of course, it’s obviously a terrible wage. Anecdotally, the drivers I’ve encountered were all doing it for extra side income and not as a main job.
This doesn't surprise me at all and it's because of hidden costs incurred by the driver, combined with an implicit bidding system that drives down wages.
Hidden costs:
1. Vehicle wear and tear (cars cost you money when you drive them)
2. Vehicle depreciation (cars cost you money even when you aren't driving them)
3. Interest and fees associated with auto loans and leases
4. Insurance premiums
5. Gas
6. Unexpected/unplanned for tax bills
But the feedback you're getting about your income is just the dollar figure that shows up in your account, which is vastly higher than the true amount you could reasonably keep as profit. It makes $10 feel like $100.
Combine that with the implicit bidding system. And by this I mean, market forces will naturally saturate Uber and Lyft with drivers until the price falls low enough that drivers won't accept it. And because of the factors I listed above, that natural price point is practically guaranteed to be well below minimum wage.
The whole setup is just beautifully engineered to trick poor people into thinking this can be a career. I've often thought about which is worse, this or Herbalife. I think Uber and Lyft might impact more people than Herbalife, and generally those people start with less, so I might give it to Uber and Lyft.
Actually, it's also a profession that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities, so I'd definitely give the title to Uber/Lyft over Herbalife.
The insurance point deserves further discussion - in many states your normal coverage is voided by driving for profit. So if you get into an accident where they can prove you were working, you aren't going to get anything. I know many people who are driving for Uber and Lyft and have no idea about this
I drove a cab for beer money back in college, and a year or so ago, I had an interesting discussion with a cab medallion owner, after some typical uber driver cut us off. He thought it was a suckers' game where it looked like you were making money - until you had your first breakdown and you had no money and no income. He was pretty confident the average cab driver couldn't plan for this, and the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards. For him, breakdowns weren't an issue because he still had the old Crown Victoria.
He also said "they're all from turnip town" which I thought was hilarious.
I had a driver once mention a promotion uber was running for their drivers if you hit "X rides' in a certain time period you'd receive a $Y cash bonus - the catch was the system made it extremely difficult but not impossible to achieve the goal through subtle gamification techniques.
Big picture tech/gamification has reached a point where oversight/legislation of some sort is long overdue. No restrictions + profit motive with our current understanding of human psychology and dopamine triggers is a recipe for a bad time.
To add in to that, Uber itself seems to offer a lot of "helpful" services for their drivers, such as the cellphone they provide that only runs the driver app and nothing else, that uber charges $10 a week to lose.
I agree that market forces push down the prices below minimum wage. I don't think that itself is necessarily a bad thing. For one this labor is relies on a skill that most people (in US at least) already can do, so is almost unskilled labor. And unemployed people who can't find a minimum-wage job (which may be limited especially in places that set high minimum wages) are actually able to earn something. Plus these low salaries do help lower transportation costs for Uber/Lyft users.
But what I don't like is how Uber/Lyft market themselves into tricking poor people that this can be a worthwhile career, especially when all these hidden costs are not clearly communicated to drivers.
I think the solution relies in potential drivers becoming aware about these hidden costs.
Subsidized public transportation is nearly essentially for a world-class city, but it anchors the value of a ride in people's minds, which is brutal for the private transportation market. My own labor is valued at a lot more than $12 per hour, but I don't even blink at getting in the car for 20 minutes for $4 - if anything, Lyft and Uber start to look expensive in comparison to the local metro.
> Drivers earn a median of 59 cents per mile while incurring a median cost of 30 cents per mile, the report said, adding that for nearly a third of drivers, the costs are ultimately higher than the revenue.
> The paper reported the average driver profit to be $661 per month.
This headline is a confusing a statement based on what the paper says. The paper[1] claims "Results show that per
hour worked, median profit from driving is $3.37/hour before taxes". The profit has subtracted from it amortized losses associated with vehicle wear and tear/deprecation. This makes sense knowing the nature of the business, but if a Domino's delivery driver, who similarly uses his own car for the job, says to you that is hourly wage is $9, would you assume that he was subtracting out vehicle deprecation?
I'd guess 90% of the Uber/Lyft miles driven are done by 5% of the drivers.
The median driver is probably someone halfassing it like I did. Trying it occasionally for an hour or two, without much of a plan. Seeing what it's like.
But hey, they are free to choose their own times and rides. You surely cannot put a price on Freedom. You get screwed a bit, well a lot but it is all for the greater good.
Remember that the median driver drives very few rides.
The median ride is driven by someone who does it more or less for a living, and who makes a lot more money than this.
Also remember that this single fact was cherry picked from the report to make a good headline, not to give the best understanding of the situation as w hole.
If people truly were making $3.37/hour full-time I think you would see very few drivers; it's grossly misleading to assume so many people aren't capable of managing finances. It looks like the full paper itself is currently embargoed so it's hard to examine the methodology. However, just looking at the math (assuming I did it right) it seems the conclusion are misleading (the numbers themselves indicate they probably just sampled all ride-share drivers throughout the US rather than full-time ones):
revenue: $0.59/mile
cost: $0.3/mile
monthly profit: $661
Average fuel consumption is ~26.4 mpg so let's round to 25mpg
Average fuel cost: $2.5/gallon
Average number of working days/month: 21.75
Average number of weekend days/month: 8.65
0.59 * x - 0.3 * x = 661
0.29 * x = 661
x = 2279 miles
2279 miles/22 days = 103 miles.
2279 miles/8.65 days = 263 miles
2279 miles * 0.59 = $1344/month in income or $16128/year.
2279 miles * 0.3 = $683/month in expenses ($273/month in insurance, maintenance & repairs, $273/month in fuel, & $136/month in depreciation).
. Average fuel price is $2.5.
Where it gets tricky is we don't have data on the average speed of an Uber driver & whether the 103 miles includes driving around waiting for rides. Let's assume a conservative average speed of 40mph.
The faster you drive the less you work so if my average speed of 40mph is too conservative, then the average driver drives even less. It seems like this builds an average profile of a driver is one who picks up a rider or 2 on their way to/from their main job & then picks up some extra cash driving a bit on the weekend. The average driver probably doesn't consider Uber as their sole source of income but rather as extra income their making when they otherwise wouldn't be doing anything. Now of course that's probably less money per hour than they could pick up from picking up additional hours somewhere or even something like Task Rabbit. However the average Uber driver probably sees it as more reliable in terms of total revenue than Task Rabbit, it requires minimal effort, & it has extreme time flexibility that a second job wouldn't (just turn on the app whenever you want to make money).
Anecdotally the full time drivers I've asked in LA & the Bay Area told me they're pulling in 60-120k depending on how many hours they put in & the area they drive in. I didn't know this but apparently Uber & Lyft offer a lot of incentive programs that only the most active drivers can t take advantage of that significantly bumps your income (trips/day, trips/week, miles driven, etc). If you're not doing it full time then you're not getting these bonuses which is going to further impact your $/mile (of course I suspect the fares & costs are higher in these areas too). Since 40% of your cost is fuel consumption, drivers doing this full-time are going to prefer fuel-efficient, cheap cars than the average driver doing this on the side. This is obviously a more complete picture than the misleading news reporting might indicate.
*EDIT: As another comment pointed out, the cost numbers are artificially inflated. They're attributing to the entire cost of insurance to driving whereas from the model above the average driver already has a car. Thus they need to actually use the fractional increase in the more expensive insurance they need for the ride share vs what they would get otherwise. I suspect the same problem applies for depreciation where they're not using the fractional increase of depreciation cost due to driving more but just the overall vehicle depreciation which was going to happen anyway. Even the full time drivers probably would have bought vehicles anyway so the depreciation & insurance cost isn't reflective of that anyway.
TLDR: The main problem of the "study" can be summed up as follows: they take income from those who do it occasionally & subtract the costs of the ones who do it full time. Given the threat ride sharing poses to personal car ownership, it's not surprising such a misleading study is sponsored by people who would be impacted by reduced car ownership.
[+] [-] davebryand|8 years ago|reply
Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, BP, ClearPath Foundation, Conoco Phillips, Duke Energy, Electricité de France, EnBW, ENGIE, ENI, Eversource, Exelon Corporation, ExxonMobil, Gas Natural Fenosa, GE, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, Inc., Iberdrola, IHI Corporation, EDPC J-Power, Kiewit Energy Group Inc., National Grid, Norwegian Ministries, PSEG, Southern Company, Swedish Energy Agency, Toyota Motor Corporation, TransCanada Corporation
I think Uber/Lyft economics are problematic, but these guys have pretty solid incentives to make Uber/Lyft look unviable.
http://ceepr.mit.edu/support/associates
[+] [-] Clanan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarforgotpwd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermonsson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elmar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eevilspock|8 years ago|reply
What would a rejection of business models such as Uber's mean to SV, it's means of wealth, it's self-image?
[+] [-] UncleEntity|8 years ago|reply
Last time I pointed that out I was downvoted for some unknown reason.
My neighbor was talking about buying a new car to drive for lyft/uber and I was like "the trick is to tear up somebody else's car." We'll see if he heeds my advice though I kind of doubt it since he has an MBA and I'm just the resident slacker who happens to know the business.
[+] [-] astrodust|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
The only reason Uber and Lyft work is that there are a ton of people with limited job skills, who have time on their hands, are short on cash, and need to spend their extra time trying to make money. Sure, there may be "bored people" who do this because they're retired or whatever, but that's a tiny minority. Most people do not become part-time cab drivers because it's more fun than what they would normally do with their free time.
A significant amount of our economy is dependent on people having two or three or four jobs, and a lot of those people live in or very near to cities, and have cars. If wages improve across the board, or people move farther away from cities, or people get rid of their cars, ride-sharing is screwed. Much of the "gig economy" is dependent on similar conditions. If we had better access to jobs and a living wage, a lot fewer people would be "gigging" to get by.
Another reason (there's probably dozens) why the gig economy is incentivised today are things like rising health care costs, rising cost of housing, rising cost of education, and lack of availability to retirement or pensions. We all know we're supposed to save, but it's harder and harder to save. So people have to pick up gigs.
My partner is a teacher and gets paid well for her position, but she still has to Airbnb out a room in her home because the insurance, taxes, and mortgage are absolutely insane. If she makes it to 25 years or whatever it is without killing herself from stress, maybe she can finally retire. Except, oh wait, the state isn't funding the teachers' pensions and will run out of money in eight years! Fun.
Point is, the gig economy is here because almost every strata of people below "upper-middle-class" have been getting slowly screwed for decades. It's not designed to give people a working income. It's designed to fit into the cracks in the system - and the cracks keep getting bigger.
[+] [-] procinct|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kawsper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotSammyHagar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxharris|8 years ago|reply
This is similar to how the huge army of people stuffing DVDs into envelopes at Netflix is going away. It might be slow, but I don't think there will be tons of people watching DVDs from them in 2030... https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business-still-a...
[+] [-] cm2012|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trendia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleEntity|8 years ago|reply
Like all things there's a learning curve before you can consistently turn a decent profit too.
[+] [-] jrs95|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaylyfty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerkeslager|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msoad|8 years ago|reply
That is much simpler to calculate. Someone should do the math on that.
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aianus|8 years ago|reply
However, this is highly misleading simply because I was able to deduct fixed "business expenses" that I would have spent anyways to own a car. Insurance, parking, licensing, registration, and finance interest, were all things that I would have spent anyways in the exact same amounts even if I only drove the car for personal use.
In addition, cars are considered to depreciate 30% every year by the CRA (Canadian IRS). This is obviously nonsense; cars depreciate based on kms driven and I did not drive nearly enough kms to reach 30%. So this is not a real expense either, but one I can deduct nonetheless.
So, really, I was subsidizing my expensive car ownership tax-free. The real rate after adjusting for those fake "expenses" was around minimum wage which is fair considering it's a better job than flipping burgers.
[+] [-] sfarnan|8 years ago|reply
My expenses were $400 a week, including car depreciation. I was leasing the car from Uber which is ridiculously expensive unless you do 60+ hours.
If you live with 8 other people and pay $500 month in rent, then you can make good money.
In cities that aren't SF or NYC it isn't worth it. In LA, it's 30% less income than in SF!
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eh78ssxv2f|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hndamien|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resalisbury|8 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/StephenZoepf/status/970754550968676352/p...
He also admits to using "donated" labor from students. $0 is even less than $3.37 ;)
[+] [-] felixk42|8 years ago|reply
I have always thought Uber drivers are either mispricing their vehicle cost, or doing some sort of tax optimisation.
If you have a nice car that you only drive a little bit on the weekend, so that most of the cost is in the fixed stuff (age based depreciation (a 5 years old Porsche with 0 mile is still 5 years old), insurance, parking etc), and the tax man let you allocate cost based on miles driven (I am not based in the US), then Uberring where you "try to get business" by driving up and down a highway would be great.
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
Of course, it’s obviously a terrible wage. Anecdotally, the drivers I’ve encountered were all doing it for extra side income and not as a main job.
[+] [-] snakeboy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0255|8 years ago|reply
Hidden costs:
1. Vehicle wear and tear (cars cost you money when you drive them)
2. Vehicle depreciation (cars cost you money even when you aren't driving them)
3. Interest and fees associated with auto loans and leases
4. Insurance premiums
5. Gas
6. Unexpected/unplanned for tax bills
But the feedback you're getting about your income is just the dollar figure that shows up in your account, which is vastly higher than the true amount you could reasonably keep as profit. It makes $10 feel like $100.
Combine that with the implicit bidding system. And by this I mean, market forces will naturally saturate Uber and Lyft with drivers until the price falls low enough that drivers won't accept it. And because of the factors I listed above, that natural price point is practically guaranteed to be well below minimum wage.
The whole setup is just beautifully engineered to trick poor people into thinking this can be a career. I've often thought about which is worse, this or Herbalife. I think Uber and Lyft might impact more people than Herbalife, and generally those people start with less, so I might give it to Uber and Lyft.
Actually, it's also a profession that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities, so I'd definitely give the title to Uber/Lyft over Herbalife.
[+] [-] astronautjones|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flomo|8 years ago|reply
He also said "they're all from turnip town" which I thought was hilarious.
[+] [-] dpweb|8 years ago|reply
And a little humiliating. I’m old, and with drunk kids being a little condecending, plus seemed like my car smelled like booze for days!
But, how low it pays and it shocks me there are ALOT of people with free time willing to work for sub minimum wage.
[+] [-] HNthrow22|8 years ago|reply
Big picture tech/gamification has reached a point where oversight/legislation of some sort is long overdue. No restrictions + profit motive with our current understanding of human psychology and dopamine triggers is a recipe for a bad time.
[+] [-] Sam-C|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|8 years ago|reply
But what I don't like is how Uber/Lyft market themselves into tricking poor people that this can be a worthwhile career, especially when all these hidden costs are not clearly communicated to drivers.
I think the solution relies in potential drivers becoming aware about these hidden costs.
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|8 years ago|reply
With Uber and Lyft, once the self driving cars start working it will truly displace all the drivers. So perhaps they are just pawns in this endgame.
[+] [-] bsimpson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thegabez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clanan|8 years ago|reply
> The paper reported the average driver profit to be $661 per month.
The posted $3.37 number is before taxes!
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
[1] PDF: http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005-Brief.pdf
[+] [-] BurningFrog|8 years ago|reply
I'd guess 90% of the Uber/Lyft miles driven are done by 5% of the drivers.
The median driver is probably someone halfassing it like I did. Trying it occasionally for an hour or two, without much of a plan. Seeing what it's like.
[+] [-] zouhair|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|8 years ago|reply
Remember that the median driver drives very few rides.
The median ride is driven by someone who does it more or less for a living, and who makes a lot more money than this.
Also remember that this single fact was cherry picked from the report to make a good headline, not to give the best understanding of the situation as w hole.
[+] [-] bbd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlovich123|8 years ago|reply
revenue: $0.59/mile cost: $0.3/mile monthly profit: $661 Average fuel consumption is ~26.4 mpg so let's round to 25mpg Average fuel cost: $2.5/gallon Average number of working days/month: 21.75 Average number of weekend days/month: 8.65
0.59 * x - 0.3 * x = 661 0.29 * x = 661
x = 2279 miles
2279 miles/22 days = 103 miles. 2279 miles/8.65 days = 263 miles 2279 miles * 0.59 = $1344/month in income or $16128/year. 2279 miles * 0.3 = $683/month in expenses ($273/month in insurance, maintenance & repairs, $273/month in fuel, & $136/month in depreciation). . Average fuel price is $2.5.
2279 miles/25mpg = ~91 gallons. 91 gallons * 2.5 = 227/month in fuel.
Where it gets tricky is we don't have data on the average speed of an Uber driver & whether the 103 miles includes driving around waiting for rides. Let's assume a conservative average speed of 40mph.
103 miles/day / 40 mph = 2.5 hours/working day/month. 263 miles/day / 40 mph = 6.575 hours/weekend/month.
The faster you drive the less you work so if my average speed of 40mph is too conservative, then the average driver drives even less. It seems like this builds an average profile of a driver is one who picks up a rider or 2 on their way to/from their main job & then picks up some extra cash driving a bit on the weekend. The average driver probably doesn't consider Uber as their sole source of income but rather as extra income their making when they otherwise wouldn't be doing anything. Now of course that's probably less money per hour than they could pick up from picking up additional hours somewhere or even something like Task Rabbit. However the average Uber driver probably sees it as more reliable in terms of total revenue than Task Rabbit, it requires minimal effort, & it has extreme time flexibility that a second job wouldn't (just turn on the app whenever you want to make money).
Anecdotally the full time drivers I've asked in LA & the Bay Area told me they're pulling in 60-120k depending on how many hours they put in & the area they drive in. I didn't know this but apparently Uber & Lyft offer a lot of incentive programs that only the most active drivers can t take advantage of that significantly bumps your income (trips/day, trips/week, miles driven, etc). If you're not doing it full time then you're not getting these bonuses which is going to further impact your $/mile (of course I suspect the fares & costs are higher in these areas too). Since 40% of your cost is fuel consumption, drivers doing this full-time are going to prefer fuel-efficient, cheap cars than the average driver doing this on the side. This is obviously a more complete picture than the misleading news reporting might indicate.
*EDIT: As another comment pointed out, the cost numbers are artificially inflated. They're attributing to the entire cost of insurance to driving whereas from the model above the average driver already has a car. Thus they need to actually use the fractional increase in the more expensive insurance they need for the ride share vs what they would get otherwise. I suspect the same problem applies for depreciation where they're not using the fractional increase of depreciation cost due to driving more but just the overall vehicle depreciation which was going to happen anyway. Even the full time drivers probably would have bought vehicles anyway so the depreciation & insurance cost isn't reflective of that anyway.
TLDR: The main problem of the "study" can be summed up as follows: they take income from those who do it occasionally & subtract the costs of the ones who do it full time. Given the threat ride sharing poses to personal car ownership, it's not surprising such a misleading study is sponsored by people who would be impacted by reduced car ownership.