4 Challenges Of Being A Full Time Rideshare Driver

Today, Jay from TheRideshareGuy.com is going to share with you four big challenges and four big drawbacks that he has run into driving full time with Uber and Lyft. At the end of the video, he shares some interesting pictures that are the payoff from putting in the hard hours now.

Take a look at Jay’s video, and read the video transcript below to see all the points he makes.

Driving for Uber and Lyft has a lot of great benefits like freedom and flexibility, good money, good stuff. But there is definitely some drawbacks. And let’s start looking at what are the drawbacks. And I’m going to suggest some solutions that I’ve used, which have really helped me out.

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Driving for Uber and Lyft causes wear and tear on your body

The first thing is, wear and tear on the body. I am six foot four, and sitting in a Toyota Prius 10 hours a day, six days a week, man. I get a sore back. There’s a couple of solutions to that. One is you can do a stretching exercise. Get out of your car every couple of hours and stretch your bones, stretch yourself out a little bit. Another thing you can do, is take some ibuprofen. Ibuprofen helps a lot. The other thing I do is I get, once a week, I get a massage. I got a wonderful woman named Alice just down the street, and man, it’s the best $60 I spend every single week to get her to loosen up my back and the rest of my body.

Full-time driving can be boring

I’ve been doing this for 22 months. I’ve done close to 15,000 trips. People get in the car, they ask me the same questions, “Hey how’s it going?” And, “Oh, I see you drive for both Uber and Lyft, what do you like better?” If you’ve driven at all, you know that question gets asked a lot. And the driving every day, so it’s monotonous. Let’s face it, we’re doing the same thing for 10 solid hours.

My solution to this is just shift your perspective. Change the way you’re thinking. Every job has repetitive tasks, and it gets boring. That’s just the nature of the game. I just try and keep myself entertained. I have conversation with my passengers. I try and learn something new. Just the other day I asked a woman what she did, and she was en embalmer. She’s an embalmer at a funeral home. So that led to a very interesting conversation. You can get some really cool stuff out of your passengers. Just keep in mind, every job gets boring. It’s okay to be bored.

Full-time rideshare drivers get traffic tickets!

There are nagging, unexpected expenses that come in the form of tickets. San Francisco sends them to you in the mail. There are all these horrible people that hide behind pillars, and they’re waiting for you to pull over into a taxi zone. And once you’re there for just the single second, they turn around and they click your picture. And then they send you a $110 ticket. Or the buses have cameras in San Francisco, they take your picture, and then they send you a $300 ticket. And I absolutely hate it.

The solutions are two things, first is don’t stop there. Call the passenger and say, “Can you meet me a little further down the street, because I can’t stop in a bus zone?” The second thing you can do is contest the tickets. So you can write just a few paragraphs and say, “Hey, someone swerved in front of me, so I pulled over. I was just gathering my thoughts before I left. I was only there for 10 seconds. This isn’t fair.” And about 60 to 70% of the time, they let you go, so you don’t have to pay the ticket.

The future is uncertain for full-time rideshare drivers

By far, and the final, and biggest challenge, is that this profession doesn’t look like it has a long future. It’s very uncertain. Everyone knows that rates are coming down. So, if I worked the kind of hours I work now, four years ago, I would have made like $200,000. But I wasn’t. And the bonuses keep coming down as well. Last year, I can make an easy $500 just driving 120 trips with Uber. Now, they’ve got beginning of the week bonuses, end of the week bonuses. Much less than $500.

With Lyft, I could have made $400 last year. Now I can only make $300. And there’s a lot of different restrictions. They’re improving their profitability by cutting down how much they’re paying the drivers. That’s just going to continue. Let’s assume that’s going to continue. And there’s these self driving cars that everyone’s writing about and talking about. When’s that going to happen? In two years? In three years? Four years? Ten years? Who knows?

But, the solution for this is create a Plan B. Have something else that you’re going to be doing. Now, I’m going to share with you some pictures here. My Plan B is creating a virtual business that I can operate from my laptop, through videos, through talking to people, so I can take myself and move over to South East Asia. That’s my Plan B.

And if you don’t have a Plan B, you’re on very, very shaky ground. Because, the future is so uncertain. Once you start to have a Plan B, you start to get excited about that. You have a newfound confidence that you didn’t have before, and it’s very exciting.

Those are my challenges. They may not be your challenges. You may have other challenges. But those are the ones that I have. And I hope some of the solutions I shared can be a benefit to you. If you like this video, go ahead and click that you liked it.

Yhis is Jay Cradeur. Thank you very much for your time. Be safe out there.

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