[odammit]

I went carless about a year and a half ago in Los Angeles (wife still has a car) and it’s been awesome.

I had a ratty 2006 liberty. Going through my bank history and tabbing up costs for the previous years I figured if I spent $25 bucks a day on Uber I’d be saving money. (Actually I spend about $18 / day)

Things I took into account were:

- insurance

- gas

- parking tickets, garages and meters

- maintenance (something expensive broke every few months)

- Amex platinum gives a $200 credit / year for Uber

Qualitative-ish things:

- time saved not parking (some days I’d spend 45 minutes trying to find a spot in Venice)

- time saved not forgetting where my car was parked or walking a mile to it

- I do all of my emailing during my rides

- credit card points

I’ll hopefully never own a car again.

Edit: also, zero road rage

[nealmueller]

Hi there, Neal here. I authored this analysis. I like your analysis too. I suspect the Amex benefit will be a rounding error at most spend levels, but is a nice benefit. I suspect the "I do all of my emailing during my rides" is meaningful as it increases your productivity a lot or gives you time back to your friends a family a lot. You could add to your list the cost a burden of keeping a car clean. Uber forces you to not carry unnecessary things which makes your life, overall, simpler, which often leads to happiness.

[odammit]

Yes! The amex benefit equals a free days ride (ish) once a month.

Yeah the real benefit is not worry about all the worry, not dealing with all the details. Washing a car sucks. Pumping gas sucks. Changing a flat sucks.

[pdeuchler]

I don't mean to be a downer here but you're essentially saying that paying for someone else's asset depreciation costs is cheaper than paying for your own asset depreciation costs plus the remaining value on a car.

The reason it's more expensive to own a car is because you also own the asset. And sure, cars depreciate ridiculously fast and are horrible stores of value, but your solution is mostly saving money by offloading some risk to another party.

[nealmueller]

Yes, offloading risk. I hope Uber pays drivers enough to justify the added risk.

[odammit]

Hey downer, I was saving money on my shitmobile.

Could I buy another car and it cost me less a month to own, sure.

In reality, I spent about 5k on that crap bucket the last year I had it. What did I sell it for? 5k. Asset it was not.

[test525]

>The reason it's more expensive to own a car is because you also own the asset. And sure, cars depreciate ridiculously fast and are horrible stores of value, but your solution is mostly saving money by offloading some risk to another party.

This is not why there are savings. You are not offloading the risk of owning a car by using uber, you are allowing cars to be used more efficiently. Cars are expensive because they sit unused 95% of the time. The marginal cost of each ride is extremely high. By having one car and one driver do 100x the rides the marginal cost of each ride decreases substantially.