FarePilot: One of the Best Rideshare Driver Apps Ever?

There a lot of apps out there that are trying to be driver tools to help us do certain aspects of driving, things like track your miles, or earnings, or monitoring where surge is, but one of the cooler apps I’ve seen is called FarePilot.

FarePilot’s interesting because it’s one of the first apps out there that tries to be like a third party heat map for drivers, in giving us leads on where to find our next ride. I’ve been using it here in San Francisco, in the Bay area, for when I get rides that take me out of areas that I’m familiar with.

This video was created by Christian from The Rideshare Guy. Take a look at his video and scroll to the video transcript to read all of the points he makes in the video.

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FarePilot answers a crucial question: Where should I go next to get a good ride?

On my own, I’m a pretty experienced driver. I know where to go for rides. If you’re in a busy city, you’re probably not going to use FarePilot for all the time, but when it’s really valuable for me is when I get taken to the suburbs, say, during the middle of the day, and I don’t know where to go next, and I’m forced to look at driving all the way back to where it’s busiest, and that’s a lot of wasted money in gas, depreciation, tires. It’s also a lot of wasted time just to have to dead head back.

FarePilot has been really useful for me because it’s gotten smart at figuring out where rides are coming from at any given point in time, in predictive analytic kind of style. I’m going to show you how to use these hotspots and analyze where to find your next ride.

How FarePilot works

When you open the FarePilot screen, you’re going to start on the Hotspots tab, and this is where you’re going to do most of the stuff in the app.

Real briefly, there’s also an Event section that FarePilot’s working on that will help you find events in the future. It’ll list out concerts and all that fun stuff, how many people are expected to be there, so it’s going to help you plan in advance where to go for rides, maybe where a surge could be.

Also, an Offers section. There’s cargo. There’s some guy selling a book, never heard of him before, The Rideshare Guy. We got TransferWise, which is good for transferring money, I bet.

Then, under the Account section, there’s all this fun stuff, Privacy, Policy, Terms and Conditions.

Let’s take a look at some of these hotspots. FarePilot is selling itself as an app that will find you rides using AI and machine learning, and I’m going to be real honest. When I first heard that, I wasn’t sure if they really were doing that or if it was just the buzz of the times, but after using it a little bit, I was able to see how machine learning could benefit me as a driver.

Using FarePilot to find hot spots

Let’s see what kind of hotspots are around me. Right now, the app is thinking, “Where should Christian go to find a ride at 1:22 PM on a Friday in Berkeley?” Right away, it actually put a hotspot right next to my house, and that’s for good reason because I live next to a BART station. Then, between the BART station, there’s also a fairly popular grocery store, and then, between those two things, there are some restaurants, a couple of places to hang out. Downtown Berkeley, there’s a BART station there. There’s a bunch of college students.

This is actually a really great place to drive if you’re trying to get your Uber Quest or a bunch of really fast trips, not so great if you want high margin, profitable trips though. I don’t know if I would choose this hotspot, but I can say that I know there are things down here where there will be business here. There’s the Rare Barrel. There’s a couple of wine tasting places. The East Bay and San Francisco, we’ve got these industrial hangout spots, and I know there’s a bunch of places where people work down here.

This actually could be a pretty good spot because I bet you the people who are down here are going to go kind of far because they’re probably visiting or they’re leaving work from their office, and they have to go a pretty decent distance. I think I’d navigate to this one.

FarePilot is useful when you’re familiar with the area you’re in

All right. Let’s use Santa Barbara as an example here. Let’s say we just got a long ride. It took us to Montecito, which is near Santa Barbara. We don’t know where we are. We’re up in the hills. I don’t know. Maybe we can drive Oprah to her secret mansion in Montecito, and now we don’t know where we are, and all we know is where Oprah lives. Where are we going to find our next ride, or where can we go?

We’re going to load up some hotspots here. Let’s see what FarePilot thinks is the best place to go in Montecito, California, at 1:47 PM on a Friday.

For the record, Oprah doesn’t live there, so don’t go online being weird.

This place right here, there’s a bunch of apartments over here. I used to drive in Santa Barbara, so I know this. There’s a resort-looking thing. I did used to get a lot of rides going to that place. I didn’t really get many leaving there, but it would probably be a good place to go. I’d probably choose this place, which is just a small commercial district where you got a bank, a little grocery store. There’s a bunch of restaurants. There’s places to park, could just relax. A lot of times, after a long ride that takes me to the middle of nowhere, I actually just want to go find a place to use the restroom or hang out and cool down for a minute. I’d definitely, almost certainly just go here.

My own experiences using FarePilot

About a month ago, I got a ride that took me from the center of San Francisco, was on 2.2 surge. Anyways, long distance ride, took me to suburbs, was worth $50. It was pretty good. The problem I faced was that I could either wait around a place I didn’t know very well to get a ride that may not necessarily take me back to the city, or I could have gone on the highway, logged off, and just hightailed it back up to San Francisco where it’s busy again. W

This was my first time testing FarePilot. I loaded up the app, and I told myself that if it didn’t work, I was just going to delete it, and then I decided to navigate to this hotspot in downtown San Mateo. I clicked on it and hit directions, and I started navigating out of this area I didn’t know, which was in a dark neighborhood, trying to find a ride.

I set my destination filter towards San Francisco, and right as I’m getting closer to it, you can see here, I just get a nice, little Uber request. It’s right out of the center of the hotspot. I was pretty impressed with this, especially since I had my destination filter on. Yeah, the passenger’s 4.2, but whatever. I just took the ride. The passenger was fine. I even got a tip out of it. Honestly, this worked really well, and getting me back to the city, making sure I got paid, I didn’t waste time. It was good.

Final thoughts on FarePilot and how to download the app

If you want to download it, just click here to get FarePilot. on one of these bumpers. Overall, great tool. I recommend, again, using it for whenever you need to find rides. It’s best in my experience used when you’re in a unfamiliar territory or when it’s the middle of the day and things are getting pretty slow or even on the weekends where there’s a million drivers out and we’re all competing for rides against 1,000 drivers. That’s a really good time to use it. Basically, when it’s slow, FarePilot’s really useful.

Until next time, make sure you like, comment, subscribe, turn on notifications, keep your eyes on the road, your hands on the wheel, and your wheels on the asphalt.

 

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