Real stories from Uber, Lyft and Sidecar drivers
Uber, Lyft and Sidecar comparison – for Drivers
So you think you have what it takes to be a driver?
Well, if you’re 21 with a clean car and record, you’re right!
But which service is the best? Or the best fit for you?
First, if you’re new to the world of on-demand ridesharing (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) they all basically work the same: with each, you use an app to sign in when you want to drive, then you get ride requests from people nearby who request them. You decide whether to accept, pick them up, take ‘em wherever and drop ‘em off. At the end you give each other star ratings and they pay you through the app. You get paid weekly via direct deposit and get a 1099 at the end of the year.
All right, boring stuff aside, let’s break down the differences between the three services: Uber, Lyft and Sidecar.
Culture, Pay, Demand, Fun, App, Extras.
Pay
This is the most important thing, right?
Uber
Uber generally makes the most financial sense overall and is a great place to start, though depending on your preferences it might not be as fun as Lyft or as convenient as Sidecar.
First, it gets you the most rides, and has the best incentives to start driving – currently if you sign up with a referral you’ll get a whopping $250 extra after your first 10 rides. Additionally, if you are a Lyft driver and sign up for Uber, you’ll currently get a whopping $500 extra after your first 20 rides. That’s potentially $750 extra on top of what you’d ordinarily make for a day’s work, though these incentives do fluctuate without notice based on their need for drivers.
Note that Uber is sticklers about referrals – you have to mention them when you first sign up, not later. You can use the box on the right to request one and we’ll send you one within 24 hours (they have to be sent manually through the Uber driver app).
So what will you earn once you driver for Uber? That depends on your city – they quote city averages from $19/hour (Chicago) to $32/hour (San Francisco); personally, I drive in LA and found my usual rate was a buck or two below the average, but I could be in a less-than-ideal neighborhood.
So you sign up and get approved for Uber. Congrats! You will be sent a bag of goodies including an air freshener, phone mount, and shockingly, a new iPhone 4 to run their software. While that sounds cool, don’t get excited – it’s locked to their apps and you can’t use it as your personal phone.
As an Uber driver who works nights, I typically do 3-4 rides an hour adding up to $20-25; fares vary on location time and distance but are, ballpark, a buck a minute. This varies significantly depending on what city you are in, though. You can also give out referral codes, which if people redeem will net you either $20 Uber credit or $5 cash (there’s different codes for each). Plus, remember that referral bonus? If you refer someone else, in addition to the $250 they get after 10 rides, you will also get an extra $250.
There’s one other slight wrinkle, called surge pricing. When demand is high in relative to the number of drivers on the road the fare adjusts to be a multiple of many times the usual one. This sounds like it’ll be a bonanza but in practice I didn’t find it to be much of one. The way it works is the Uber app shows a map of the city, and neighborhoods where surge pricing is in effect will be shown in red along with the range of rates of surge pricing, which can vary significantly within a neighborhood from 1.0x (normal rate) to 7.0x or more. However, you don’t know the multiplier you’ll get until a request comes in. Also, I find that when surge pricing is in effect people often opt not to take long rides, or will cancel them if a cab shows up, and the price can return to normal quickly. So sometimes I’ll see like “Surge pricing – 1.25x – 7.00x” in downtown LA, excitedly drive 10 minutes to get there, get a ride request for 1.5x that’s another five minutes away, pick them up and find they’re going less than a mile, and then the price settles back down – so overall I’ve just made my usual rate, really.
What’s the typical passenger like? It depends on the neighborhood, but in my experience Uber riders tend to be better-off white collar workers or club-goers. I find about half will talk to you, but half just use their phones, which I understand (how often I have done so in cabs) but can be boring. I always wondered whether taxi drivers wanted to talk or not and now I realize – almost always we do, because unless the passenger is super annoying (and not many are), it makes the job a lot more interesting.
In general, I find Uber riders cancel much more than for Lyft, which is very annoying if you’ve already left your spot and wasted time during which you could be picking up another ride. Uber says they charge a fee in some cases, but personally I’ve never gotten paid for one, unlike with Lyft which gives you $5.
One other point worth mentioning – for a company that provides free iPhones, their app is surprisingly bad. After you get a ride request, you can’t automatically navigate or call the customer without switching apps or using your personal phone, and the app can be slow – when switching back to it from the Maps app, it can sometimes take 30 seconds to resume. Also, if you’re using it for anything besides the Uber app and get a ride request, there’s no notification and you will miss it. Hopefully they will fix these issues in upcoming updates, or switch to just having an app you can put on your personal phone; it’s annoying juggling two phones in the car while you are driving.
Lyft
Lyft pays similar rates to Uber. However, they don’t have incentives for drivers who use referrals, though if you refer a new driver there is a bonus from $50-$250 depending on city after 50 rides, so definitely use our code to help support the site – the link is one right side of the screen.
One big difference with Lyft is that you can book your hours in advance and you’ll get an estimate of the hourly rate. You can also try to sign in during other hours (which is what I usually do), but once in awhile if there are a lot of drivers on the road you may be told to try again later. Overall, there isn’t as much demand or as consistent demand as there is for Uber, but it’s not too far off. If you cancel your hours less than 24 hours in advance or don’t sign in for them, it will affect your reliability rating and you won’t get first crack at them in the future.
Driving for Lyft is a bit more fun than driving for Uber. Maybe because I’m in the Lyft demographic as an artistic 20-something, I end up having a fun conversation with whoever’s in the car most of the time. Also, you feel free to play music in the car and be more casual in general.
Since it’s donation based you can get tips but in practice this doesn’t happen much. You’re probably more likely to get them if you have a really long ride or trick out your car or something, but usually people just donate the suggested amount.
The Lyft app is the best of any. You see a picture of the person you’re picking up, and can call or navigate to them with the touch of a button. Navigation uses whatever your preferred app is – I like Waze – in comparison to the Uber device’s reliance on Apple Maps. If you are sitting in your car texting while you wait for a request, you will also get a notification when a ride request comes in so you can switch to the Lyft app. The app also shows you where other drivers are, which can be useful if you see that there are less cars than usual in a popular neighborhood (though the maps are not always 100% accurate).
Recently, Lyft has announced “Happy Hour” – discounted rides when there are too many people driving for drivers to get frequent ride requests. The stated idea is that people will ride more, so you’ll make up the lower fares in an increased volume of them. In reality I’m skeptical – if people have someplace to go, they’ll open the app and get a ride regardless of whether it’s happy hour or not, especially since “happy hour” isn’t a defined part of the day they can plan around. I expect the result will be that people will stop driving once they see that they’ll be paid less for it, so normal rates will be restored more quickly. However, it could have a benefit if people start opening the Lyft app before they open Uber in order to check the rate, and end up ordering a Lyft even if it isn’t happy hour.
The other factor is the purple mustache and the fistbump, which many drivers and riders alike find awkward. A lot of people just don’t want to put a purple mustache on their car or be seen in one, but it has been effective branding and advertisement for them. Many drivers just put the purple mustache on their dashboard when they drive rather than leave it on their grill all the time. It’s nice not to have it on there when you’re doing personal stuff or have to worry about someone stealing it. Additionally, the instruction manual states that you’re not supposed to have the mustache on your car when driving over 40mph, which is ridiculous. Do they expect you to tell a driver that before you take them on a highway they’ll have to wait five minutes for you to remove the purple mustache from your car? I don’t get it.
Sidecar
Sidecar is actually my favorite service, so it’s unfortunate that nobody is really on it in LA. There’s not much sense in doing it full-time, because you just won’t earn much money. However, the ability to pick your destination and set your own rate makes it still worth having in your pocket.
Say I’m driving for one of the other services, and I do a few rides and end up 20 miles southwest of my house at the end of the night. I would love to get a ride going back Northeast to make money on the drive up. However, I don’t want to stay logged into Uber or Lyft and risk getting a request 10 minutes in the opposite direction for someone who wants to go farther away still.
With Sidecar, I can pick where I’m willing to pick up from and where I’m willing to take passengers. Now, since there aren’t that many riders so I’m pretty lucky to get one. However, to increase my chances, I can also set my rate to be cheaper, and make it more likely that riders interested in going where I’m going will pick me.
I haven’t taken many sidecar riders, but it’s culturally pretty neutral; if anything riders tend to be a little more on the hippie side of the spectrum.
The extra incentives for driving with Sidecar aren’t great ($50 after 50 rides). The app is decent – more functional than Uber’s, but less polished than Lyft’s. Support and vetting aren’t as comprehensive as the other services, and you get the sense that it’s all being done on a shoestring budget.
In a perfect world, everyday drivers would use Sidecar to fill their empty seats when they commute, etc – reducing traffic, providing cheap rides and offsetting the cost of driving. But right now, as a driver, it’s a bit hamstrung by the lack of riders.
One particular problem I’ve had is that there are so few requests (maybe 1 every 2 hours) that if I log in while driving back home, I will often forget that I am logged in on my phone and then wake up in the morning to find I missed two requests at 3am. As a result, my acceptance rate is now very low, which hurts my ability to get new requests. Sidecar has adapted to this problem by logging you out if you miss three requests, but I think they should go farther and check if you want to remain logged in if you haven’t used the app in an hour.
Double Dipping
The companies don’t mention it, but there is nothing preventing you from driving for multiple services at the same time, and a lot of drivers do it. Just sign in on your Uber phone and into Lyft on your personal phone, then as soon as you get a ride request sign out of the other one (with Lyft this will only work during hours you haven’t booked in advance). You can even triple-dip with Sidecar, though you need to be careful that the time to manage the apps doesn’t add to your response time. It’s a little more hassle, but it helps mitigate slow periods with one service where you might not get a request for a half hour.
Verdict: First, it’s worth signing up for all of the services; you lose nothing by doing so, and it’s good to have others to fall back on. Overall, Uber has the most reliable flow of customers, Lyft the most fun, and Sidecar the most convenient *if* you can get riders. If you’re new, I would start with Uber if I had to choose one just for practicality and then do Lyft next.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents; I’m sure other people have different experiences or if there’s something I haven’t thought of, let me know in the comments.
Well, if you’re 21 with a clean car and record, you’re right!
But which service is the best? Or the best fit for you?
First, if you’re new to the world of on-demand ridesharing (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) they all basically work the same: with each, you use an app to sign in when you want to drive, then you get ride requests from people nearby who request them. You decide whether to accept, pick them up, take ‘em wherever and drop ‘em off. At the end you give each other star ratings and they pay you through the app. You get paid weekly via direct deposit and get a 1099 at the end of the year.
All right, boring stuff aside, let’s break down the differences between the three services: Uber, Lyft and Sidecar.
Culture, Pay, Demand, Fun, App, Extras.
Pay
This is the most important thing, right?
Uber
Uber generally makes the most financial sense overall and is a great place to start, though depending on your preferences it might not be as fun as Lyft or as convenient as Sidecar.
First, it gets you the most rides, and has the best incentives to start driving – currently if you sign up with a referral you’ll get a whopping $250 extra after your first 10 rides. Additionally, if you are a Lyft driver and sign up for Uber, you’ll currently get a whopping $500 extra after your first 20 rides. That’s potentially $750 extra on top of what you’d ordinarily make for a day’s work, though these incentives do fluctuate without notice based on their need for drivers.
Note that Uber is sticklers about referrals – you have to mention them when you first sign up, not later. You can use the box on the right to request one and we’ll send you one within 24 hours (they have to be sent manually through the Uber driver app).
So what will you earn once you driver for Uber? That depends on your city – they quote city averages from $19/hour (Chicago) to $32/hour (San Francisco); personally, I drive in LA and found my usual rate was a buck or two below the average, but I could be in a less-than-ideal neighborhood.
So you sign up and get approved for Uber. Congrats! You will be sent a bag of goodies including an air freshener, phone mount, and shockingly, a new iPhone 4 to run their software. While that sounds cool, don’t get excited – it’s locked to their apps and you can’t use it as your personal phone.
As an Uber driver who works nights, I typically do 3-4 rides an hour adding up to $20-25; fares vary on location time and distance but are, ballpark, a buck a minute. This varies significantly depending on what city you are in, though. You can also give out referral codes, which if people redeem will net you either $20 Uber credit or $5 cash (there’s different codes for each). Plus, remember that referral bonus? If you refer someone else, in addition to the $250 they get after 10 rides, you will also get an extra $250.
There’s one other slight wrinkle, called surge pricing. When demand is high in relative to the number of drivers on the road the fare adjusts to be a multiple of many times the usual one. This sounds like it’ll be a bonanza but in practice I didn’t find it to be much of one. The way it works is the Uber app shows a map of the city, and neighborhoods where surge pricing is in effect will be shown in red along with the range of rates of surge pricing, which can vary significantly within a neighborhood from 1.0x (normal rate) to 7.0x or more. However, you don’t know the multiplier you’ll get until a request comes in. Also, I find that when surge pricing is in effect people often opt not to take long rides, or will cancel them if a cab shows up, and the price can return to normal quickly. So sometimes I’ll see like “Surge pricing – 1.25x – 7.00x” in downtown LA, excitedly drive 10 minutes to get there, get a ride request for 1.5x that’s another five minutes away, pick them up and find they’re going less than a mile, and then the price settles back down – so overall I’ve just made my usual rate, really.
What’s the typical passenger like? It depends on the neighborhood, but in my experience Uber riders tend to be better-off white collar workers or club-goers. I find about half will talk to you, but half just use their phones, which I understand (how often I have done so in cabs) but can be boring. I always wondered whether taxi drivers wanted to talk or not and now I realize – almost always we do, because unless the passenger is super annoying (and not many are), it makes the job a lot more interesting.
In general, I find Uber riders cancel much more than for Lyft, which is very annoying if you’ve already left your spot and wasted time during which you could be picking up another ride. Uber says they charge a fee in some cases, but personally I’ve never gotten paid for one, unlike with Lyft which gives you $5.
One other point worth mentioning – for a company that provides free iPhones, their app is surprisingly bad. After you get a ride request, you can’t automatically navigate or call the customer without switching apps or using your personal phone, and the app can be slow – when switching back to it from the Maps app, it can sometimes take 30 seconds to resume. Also, if you’re using it for anything besides the Uber app and get a ride request, there’s no notification and you will miss it. Hopefully they will fix these issues in upcoming updates, or switch to just having an app you can put on your personal phone; it’s annoying juggling two phones in the car while you are driving.
Lyft
Lyft pays similar rates to Uber. However, they don’t have incentives for drivers who use referrals, though if you refer a new driver there is a bonus from $50-$250 depending on city after 50 rides, so definitely use our code to help support the site – the link is one right side of the screen.
One big difference with Lyft is that you can book your hours in advance and you’ll get an estimate of the hourly rate. You can also try to sign in during other hours (which is what I usually do), but once in awhile if there are a lot of drivers on the road you may be told to try again later. Overall, there isn’t as much demand or as consistent demand as there is for Uber, but it’s not too far off. If you cancel your hours less than 24 hours in advance or don’t sign in for them, it will affect your reliability rating and you won’t get first crack at them in the future.
Driving for Lyft is a bit more fun than driving for Uber. Maybe because I’m in the Lyft demographic as an artistic 20-something, I end up having a fun conversation with whoever’s in the car most of the time. Also, you feel free to play music in the car and be more casual in general.
Since it’s donation based you can get tips but in practice this doesn’t happen much. You’re probably more likely to get them if you have a really long ride or trick out your car or something, but usually people just donate the suggested amount.
The Lyft app is the best of any. You see a picture of the person you’re picking up, and can call or navigate to them with the touch of a button. Navigation uses whatever your preferred app is – I like Waze – in comparison to the Uber device’s reliance on Apple Maps. If you are sitting in your car texting while you wait for a request, you will also get a notification when a ride request comes in so you can switch to the Lyft app. The app also shows you where other drivers are, which can be useful if you see that there are less cars than usual in a popular neighborhood (though the maps are not always 100% accurate).
Recently, Lyft has announced “Happy Hour” – discounted rides when there are too many people driving for drivers to get frequent ride requests. The stated idea is that people will ride more, so you’ll make up the lower fares in an increased volume of them. In reality I’m skeptical – if people have someplace to go, they’ll open the app and get a ride regardless of whether it’s happy hour or not, especially since “happy hour” isn’t a defined part of the day they can plan around. I expect the result will be that people will stop driving once they see that they’ll be paid less for it, so normal rates will be restored more quickly. However, it could have a benefit if people start opening the Lyft app before they open Uber in order to check the rate, and end up ordering a Lyft even if it isn’t happy hour.
The other factor is the purple mustache and the fistbump, which many drivers and riders alike find awkward. A lot of people just don’t want to put a purple mustache on their car or be seen in one, but it has been effective branding and advertisement for them. Many drivers just put the purple mustache on their dashboard when they drive rather than leave it on their grill all the time. It’s nice not to have it on there when you’re doing personal stuff or have to worry about someone stealing it. Additionally, the instruction manual states that you’re not supposed to have the mustache on your car when driving over 40mph, which is ridiculous. Do they expect you to tell a driver that before you take them on a highway they’ll have to wait five minutes for you to remove the purple mustache from your car? I don’t get it.
Sidecar
Sidecar is actually my favorite service, so it’s unfortunate that nobody is really on it in LA. There’s not much sense in doing it full-time, because you just won’t earn much money. However, the ability to pick your destination and set your own rate makes it still worth having in your pocket.
Say I’m driving for one of the other services, and I do a few rides and end up 20 miles southwest of my house at the end of the night. I would love to get a ride going back Northeast to make money on the drive up. However, I don’t want to stay logged into Uber or Lyft and risk getting a request 10 minutes in the opposite direction for someone who wants to go farther away still.
With Sidecar, I can pick where I’m willing to pick up from and where I’m willing to take passengers. Now, since there aren’t that many riders so I’m pretty lucky to get one. However, to increase my chances, I can also set my rate to be cheaper, and make it more likely that riders interested in going where I’m going will pick me.
I haven’t taken many sidecar riders, but it’s culturally pretty neutral; if anything riders tend to be a little more on the hippie side of the spectrum.
The extra incentives for driving with Sidecar aren’t great ($50 after 50 rides). The app is decent – more functional than Uber’s, but less polished than Lyft’s. Support and vetting aren’t as comprehensive as the other services, and you get the sense that it’s all being done on a shoestring budget.
In a perfect world, everyday drivers would use Sidecar to fill their empty seats when they commute, etc – reducing traffic, providing cheap rides and offsetting the cost of driving. But right now, as a driver, it’s a bit hamstrung by the lack of riders.
One particular problem I’ve had is that there are so few requests (maybe 1 every 2 hours) that if I log in while driving back home, I will often forget that I am logged in on my phone and then wake up in the morning to find I missed two requests at 3am. As a result, my acceptance rate is now very low, which hurts my ability to get new requests. Sidecar has adapted to this problem by logging you out if you miss three requests, but I think they should go farther and check if you want to remain logged in if you haven’t used the app in an hour.
Double Dipping
The companies don’t mention it, but there is nothing preventing you from driving for multiple services at the same time, and a lot of drivers do it. Just sign in on your Uber phone and into Lyft on your personal phone, then as soon as you get a ride request sign out of the other one (with Lyft this will only work during hours you haven’t booked in advance). You can even triple-dip with Sidecar, though you need to be careful that the time to manage the apps doesn’t add to your response time. It’s a little more hassle, but it helps mitigate slow periods with one service where you might not get a request for a half hour.
Verdict: First, it’s worth signing up for all of the services; you lose nothing by doing so, and it’s good to have others to fall back on. Overall, Uber has the most reliable flow of customers, Lyft the most fun, and Sidecar the most convenient *if* you can get riders. If you’re new, I would start with Uber if I had to choose one just for practicality and then do Lyft next.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents; I’m sure other people have different experiences or if there’s something I haven’t thought of, let me know in the comments.
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