I don't know why every one is so down on uber. My friend makes makes $15,000 driving for Uber. She has sex with the clients in the back seat. She then sends the pictures and the bill to their place of work.
Uber bros kill car leasing program after losing nine grand per vehicle
Uber is killing off its car leasing program after being whacked with huge losses in the division. The dial-a-ride broker will drop its Uber Xchange leasing program after it was found that the project was blowing as much as $9,000 per car, The Register understands. Launched in 2015, Uber Xchange lets Uber drivers who don't …
COMMENTS
-
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 12:12 GMT paulf
Re: Overestimating resale values
This has been in the media recently as these PCP and PCH deals have been flagged up by financial regulators as an area of growing concern: Car finance deals: Do they spell trouble?
From that article: "Here is a fascinating conundrum: The price of new cars has gone up significantly in the last five years, yet they have become cheaper to drive.
The answer lies in the creative genius not of the car designers, but the financial engineers who invented a new way to borrow money."
Sub-prime mortgages offered a new way to borrow money and look how that worked out when the house of cards came tumbling down so those opening sentences should strike fear into anyone who remembers the crash of 2007!
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 12:43 GMT Charlie Clark
Sales to rental / leasing operations is a keystone of the car makers business not least because losses incurred helped reduce the tax bill. That said, the reason US car sales are down recently is mainly due to a reduction in these kind of sales.
Uber loves to burn money so $ 9000 a car doesn't seem that bad and to pretend that they've only just realised what the full cost is sounds like complete bullshit. I suspect the decision is more related into not looking like an employer after all car deals are extremely common employee perks with attendant tax rules.
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 04:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
There was am interesting program on TV a few days ago
on how the inflation earnings projections peddled by Uber which then failed to materialise were leading to muliple cases of suicides of Uber drivers in India who had been conned into entering into this scheme and found themselves in escalating inescable debt liabilities.
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 06:39 GMT Dan 55
Re: There was am interesting program on TV a few days ago
Why were you downvoted for this?
Uber themselves offered cars on the never never then lowered driver payments (i.e. wages) so it was impossible for them to pay the cars off.
Result: Drivers saddled with debt.
Kind of a big deal in India when you look at people's average income.
Uber are cunts. All of them.
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 09:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: There was am interesting program on TV a few days ago
"Uber themselves offered cars on the never never then lowered driver payments (i.e. wages) so it was impossible for them to pay the cars off."
Not quite. Uber kept employing (in the most nebulous sense) more and more drivers in a given area so the average income of the drivers fell below the amount required to pay the monthly car hire purchase bills.
Uber obviously knew full well what they were doing and so they were either indifferent to their drivers plight or - tinfoil hat on - it was a malicious act in because someone in Uber India had some backhanders going on with the car leasing companies with regards to repossesing the vehicles. But as we know, there's almost no corruption in India, absolutely not, its a real straight up country. Yessir.
-
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 09:27 GMT Peter2
Re: No word on
Neither is running a taxi service, but they're losing billions doing that, too.
Which AFAIK is because Uber charges less to the customer than it pays to the taxi operator to drive down prices.
As soon as Uber gets beaten into following laws where they operate, and stops charging less than it costs to run the service then their prices go up to that of the competition, and they get obliteriated by that competition.
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 11:16 GMT P. Lee
Re: No word on
>As soon as Uber gets beaten into following laws where they operate, and stops charging less than it costs to run the service then their prices go up to that of the competition, and they get obliteriated by that competition.
Here's the problem with Cloud services. The name is everything and its winner-take-all. How does a new taxi service get noticed in the huge morass of app-store applications presented on a small screen. Once the competition is gone, you squash all future competition by the threat of price reduction, using past profits to fund the loss. We need competitive markets, not free-at-all-cost markets. With an application-based services, not even geographically local competition has much of a chance of succeeding.
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 13:12 GMT Peter2
Re: No word on
Here's the problem with Cloud services. The name is everything and its winner-take-all. How does a new taxi service get noticed
Google -> "Taxi in "$location".
Doing that in a moderate sized town resulted in a websites for two established companies that both offer an app download, online booking, corporate accounts and a telephone number if you just want to ring them and book.
I can fully beleive that some people will struggle with that, but it's hardly winner takes all otherwise the competition wouldn't exist.
-
-
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 09:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: No word on
The drivers can't get a loan through traditional means. The drivers make very little money. The drivers are in a very competitive marketplace. The drivers are part of the gig economy and are often desperate and often 1st gen immigrants.
These aren't the people who normally get a good credit score and so lending them tens of thousands of dollars so that you can screw them over is likely to result in more than average default and bankruptcy. You can't then add more to the loans of the good credit loanees as that would create an unsustainable amount of debt for them as well causing more of the same until your hole business model implodes (as it has done).
Would have taken some basic economics to realise that this would be a failure before it was even rolled out.
-
Friday 11th August 2017 08:48 GMT David Roberts
Re: No word on
Replying to my own post but have just been reading in Private Eye that the Personal Contract Plan market for cars is showing signs of repeating the sub-prime mortgage crash including the bundling of loans for resale as derivatives.
Second hand car prices expected to tank as the 3 year loans come to an end and the cars are effectively dumped on a shrinking market. Which in turn tracks the property price crash with sub-prime mortgages.
Mostly (informed) speculation at the moment but this could be a pointer.
-
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 09:20 GMT Chris G
Basic business plan needed?
The more (mostly bad, alright, all bad) things I hear about Uber the more amazed I am at their apparent market valuation.
The only thing they seem to have done on the plus side of business is come up with a useable app.
Otherwise, the whole thing seems to have been put together without the simplest of business plans or even an understanding of how businee really works.
Even basic research shoud have revealed how well or not a car leasing plan would function, it's not as if such a thing is a new business model is it?
If I were on the board at Uber I would seel out as quickly as possible, stick the money in an offshore account and sod off rapidly before there is no money.
Regarding backseat sex; I worked as a cabbie in the '80s for 6 months and going by the offers even I got, there is likely a market for an UberSex app, but please do a bit of market research and make a business plan first.
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 11:04 GMT Cuddles
Thought to be?
"the hit was thought to be around $500 per car. When the true toll was calculated"
Do they not have accountants? It should be fairly easy to know how much you paid out compared to how much you have coming back in. Was the $500 actually a prediction that turned out to be flawed, or did they really somehow manage to run the scheme for two years before anyone bothered to look at the actual cost?
-
Thursday 10th August 2017 12:26 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Thought to be?
Considering the US obsession with "fiduciary duty" and the misapprehension that it means profits at all costs, the Uber style financial model and apparent lack of financial acumen makes me wonder just how many more fools (VCs) remain to be parted from their money. Is it an especially elaborate pyramid scheme?
I can understand the predatory if legally dubious concept of running at a loss to kill the competition, but surely it's a tad risky to do that on a world wide basis rather than sticking to your home market to prove the concept first.
-
-