have been an uber driver. full time for over a year, over 5000 rides with a 4.7 rating. listen to the voice of experience here: don't do it.
* insurance is a nightmare.
as previous poster suggested, you MUST have a specific policy that covers rideshare. yes, uber carries coverage while you're on your way to a pickup or while you have someone in the car, but it covers only the PASSENGER and anybody you hit, NOT YOU. if you have a shiny new car, you could get into a wreck which your insurance company will refuse to cover, and even if uber covers your liability, you could still be left with a totaled car and a big outstanding loan.
uber claims there is a collision policy that would cover you, but that's only if your personal insurance has such coverage, and denies your claim, and it has a $1000 deductible (meaning that's what you have to pay out of pocket to get your car fixed), and the message boards are replete with stories of people not getting paid for months.
if you do not get a rideshare policy (when i priced geico, it was 3x more expensive than my regular coverage, and i don't qualify for USAA coverage), if your insurance company finds out, they will drop you like a hot potato. when you open a claim with geico, they ask if the car has ever been used for ridesharing, and they will deny your claim and dump you if you answer yes, even you weren't ridesharing at the time of your accident.
* you are only paid for loaded miles.
that is, if you're sitting at home and you get a pickup that's 5 miles away, you get no pay for that.
* taxes are stupid.
so, yes, you can deduct all the mileage (in 2016, 54c per mile), including your miles going to pickups and going back from the middle of nowhere where the customer got out back to the world where you can get new trips.
uber doesn't tell you this or report that mileage for you; you have to keep track of it yourself. (i used onenote on my cell phone and my car's trip counter - zero when i started, when i was done, the amount on the dial was what i recorded.) uber only reports the number of miles you get paid for.
but on the tax form, it's not a regular 1099 like you understand it. they issue a 1099K, and if you just blindly use it, you'll wind up paying more tax than you owe, because they report the amount of money you "earned" before they take their cut, so you have to manually deduct their cut too, or you wind up paying taxes on their money.
they do not explain this. you just have to figure it out for yourself. they just say "consult a tax professional," without providing guidance about what the numbers they provide actually represent so you can talk to one competently.
* you can be deactivated (fired) at any time for any or no reason.
and you have no recourse. often, they won't even tell you why. you just find out they've shut you off.
* body fluids are a thing, and if they don't belong to you, your children, or your significant other, they are disgusting.
people can and do vomit and have sex in the back of your car. this is not an appropriate forum for the disgusting stories, but i have many.
* they can and do cut fares (meaning YOUR PAY) at any time, without notice and without recourse.
* they can and do change the "contract" at any time, without recourse. if you don't agree to whatever their new terms are, you can't drive.
* in certain markets, it's actually mathematically impossible to make a taxable profit. i'll use detroit as an example.
you only make money when you're moving. even though the pay is 15 cents per minute, that's only $9 per hour. you spend 20 minutes going through the taco bell drive-thru at the customer's request? you get $3 and if you're lucky, a taco. usually instead you wind up with the taco strewn across the back seat, and you get to clean it up later.
you make 70 cents per mile. if you're doing highway driving, say 60 mph (to keep the math easy), that same 20 minutes driving would get you $14. but you NEVER spend 20 minutes on the highway. it's all short hop stuff from the local university to the bar and back. unless you get lucky and get an airport trip, but nobody flies on saturday.
but let's say you drive for a full hour at 60 mph. you "earn" $42 for the mileage, plus $9 for the time, for a total of $51 in that hour. yay. except uber takes 25% off the top, so that cuts it to $38.25.
the IRS rate for mileage is 54 cents a mile, and is actually a pretty good index of gas plus maintenance and depreciation costs, so we'll use it. you went, say, 5 miles to the pickup and 60 miles on the trip, for a mileage deduction of $35.10.
$38.25 - $35.10 = $3.15 net profit for an hour's driving on the freeway. yeah, thanks.
but you never get a run like that. in my 5000 rides, i might have had three trips that were that long.
much more commonly, it's short hop stuff where you arrive, the destination is wrong (can be off by blocks or miles) meaning more unpaid driving, they get in and you get a minimum fare where you don't make any money.
* the stated cancellation fees, if your market has one, are bogus.
our example of detroit has a $5 cancellation fee, but there are all kinds of situations where you don't get it. like if the customer complains. or if it's their first time cancelling. or if you select the wrong cancellation reason. and many markets (such as dallas, my own) do not have cancellation fees at all.
so, say you drive to the pickup point, call the customer three times, message them twice, and they don't answer and don't show up because they got distracted by friends or pretty girls (or they passed out, yes, had it happen) in the bar. you don't get paid for that.
* the customers are frequently jerks and will do anything they can to abuse you.
whether it's demanding that you wait for them while they get their food at taco bell, to not being at the pickup point, to getting into the car straight out of the swimming pool (meaning they get your back seat wet and make your car smell like chlorine), to changing clothes for work in your car (i once had a stripper do this on the way to the club -- she got glitter everywhere and seeing her naked was not worth the effort i had to go to to clean it), to having sex in your car, you will get one discourteous, entitled jerk after another. on multiple occasions, i had jerks try to deliberately blow my stereo. (once, when i ended the ride and ejected them from the car, i had to call the police to actually remove them. while i was waiting for the cops, i got video of them trying to use car keys to damage my upholstery.)
my all-time favorite were the ones who wanted to overload my car: my car seats four plus the driver. just four. the uberX service maxes at four people and says so right in the app (which nobody ever reads). people forever tried to get me to stuff as many as six into my VW Jetta, and they would get personally abusive and racially insensitive when i refused simply as a matter of safety. smart people ride with seat belts, and i only had four. sure, i could cancel the ride, but i didn't get paid for the trip over there, and there's no cancellation fee, so i had to eat it.
and from a liability perspective, there is no reason you should ever allow an overload: if the stupid adults fail to wear their seat belt and you have an accident, that's on them. but if you allow an overload and someone is injured because they have no seat belt, that's on you, and no insurance will cover that.
* uber oversaturates the market with drivers.
this means that you're not only dealing with idiot customers, but there are too many drivers to go around relative to the number of rides.
* their guarantees are meaningless.
here's a favorite: uber once wanted to make sure there were plenty of drivers available for the armed forces bowl, held at amon carter stadium (at texas christian university) in fort worth, texas, just a few minutes by car from my house.
so, the guarantee was something like $30 per hour in gross fares, for something like eight hours during the day (four hours before the game, four hours after).
the catch was that you had to have a minimum acceptance rate -- a value which is calculated by an opaque formula, and which you can't see -- and you must have a minimum number of rides per hour.
magically, every time i tried one of these guarantees, i fell below either the acceptance rate or minimum rides per hour, because idiot customers no-showed and i cancelled, or there were so many drivers that there were not enough rides to go around. so i got to sit in my car all day two days before christmas and get nothing.
and of course, the guarantee is per hour before uber's cut, so they're really only offering $22.50 per hour. and if you earn more than $22.50/hour through rides (hardee har har), uber pays you nothing but that. if you "qualify," uber only pays you the difference between what you earned and the $22.50 figure.
* you will beat the heck out of your car.
i did 200 miles on a slow day, and it was all stop and go in-city driving to and from bars. brakes, shocks, oil changes, all that.
also, you'll be on the hook for any cleaning supplies you need. customer stains your car? maybe you'll get a cleaning fee ... maybe not. even if you do, uber decides what it is, not you. i once had somebody vomit in the car and it cost $200 to have it professionally cleaned. uber decided "$50 is about right for that amount of damage," apparently because it wasn't a big enough urp. so that's all they paid; i had to eat the rest.
so, if you can find an upside that outweighs all that, go for it. for my part, i quit and got a job with a courier company hauling inter-office mail and airplane parts. the airplane parts don't get body fluids on my back seat, and they smell a lot better, too.
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