I used to fly into Pittsburg and take an Uber to my grandparents house 40 miles away. For years I could always get an Uber but then after the pandemic my trip was rejected so frequently that I had to start renting a car. So basically no one wanted the gig and Uber never told me my ride was unreasonable. Something changed in the algorithm to benefit drivers, Uber, or both, at the expense of the customer, and that info wasn’t made clear to the users.
I’m curious: would you have felt better if Uber had just rejected your ride request upfront (“Sorry, we can’t offer rides that far” or something)?
Or is this attitude of “hey, it’s a long shot, but let’s give it a try and see if anybody takes the job” closer to the attitude you’d like to see? If the latter, how would you communicate that to the users?
I had an occasion a long time ago where I needed to request an Uber for a ride similar to what you’re describing. At that time, apparently the driver didn’t find out the route until they’d committed to the ride. The guy swiped to say he’d picked me up, and more or less broke down in tears when he found out where I was needing to go. He lived 40 miles in the other direction, was going off shift, and would be driving the whole 90 miles home without any prayer of a passenger to cover the time or cost. In that case I ended up giving the guy a generous amount of cash to cover the imposition, but I couldn’t bring myself to use Uber for that route in the future.
Until recently, when I had to use Uber for that route again. This time it seemed like they’d gotten much better at accommodating drivers’ preference optionality: the guy who picked me up drove over 110mph all the way to the airport. Apparently when you drive like that, especially in an EV, the more miles the better…
He explained that he could dial into the app that he preferred longer trips and trips between areas that happened to be connected by this lawless highway.
> I had an occasion a long time ago where I needed to request an Uber for a ride similar to what you’re describing. At that time, apparently the driver didn’t find out the route until they’d committed to the ride.
> I considered about it for a minute, and then thought, why the hell not, and scheduled the ride. The worst case scenario in this situation is that no one would take the fare, and I would be no worse off than I already was. After a few seconds, I was matched with a car, and I went out to meet the driver.
> I had a suspicion that the app might not tell the driver exactly where I was going, so when the driver — Victor — pulled up, I double-checked with him.
> “I want to be absolutely clear what you’re getting into,” I told him. “I’m asking you to drive me to Ohio.”
> “The state?” he asked.
> “Yes.”
> He thought about it for a second, consulted his own Lyft app (which hadn’t, in fact, told him the destination, just that it was more than 30 minutes away), and then looked back to me, and sort of shrugged. “I like long trips. This could be fun.” Then he popped the trunk for my luggage.
Driving an EV at 110mph is going to sap the range horrendously. The power needed to overcome air resistance/drag is proportional to the cube of the speed.
It'll sap the range of any kind of vehicle, but refilling an EV is a whole lot cheaper, so higher speeds are more economic for an EV than a petrol car. (Assuming you don't reach the point of running out in the middle of a shift of course)
How's that? The increase in work required is the same, unless the ICE somehow gets more efficient at those speeds (in which case it's been geared pretty badly) the impact is going to be the same. If anything it'll be worse as an EV powertrain is efficient across a broad range of speeds whereas an ICE can only operate efficiently in a narrow rev range.
The EV is more efficient, but the energy density of the battery is much, much lower than gasoline. The ICE wastes most of its fuel energy as heat with a fraction going into actually providing drive. An EV being 99% efficient has its range being entirely dominated by air & rolling resistance, whereas for an ICE car the relative impact is lower.
> The ICE wastes most of its fuel energy as heat with a fraction going into actually providing drive.
But that fraction is constant however big the drag is. If there's twice as much drag etc. then you're going to burn twice as much fuel and your engine will run hotter, it's not like the heat is some fixed overhead.
I expect the service to tell me upfront if my request is not serviceable, and not push it on to drivers. Don’t advertise if you can’t deliver. And be fucking consistent.
Sounds like the issue is Uber was not willing to increase the price for that ride to what it should be (which, frankly, could be as much as double the per-mile or per-minute cost of a downtown trip, because of deadheading empty back to downtown, since usually drivers can only find customers in a core "downtown" or other key area(s), and then once they drive them out to the burbs, they are stuck deadheading empty back to the hot area.
I assure you if they had just offered a higher price, some driver would have taken it, assuming that price wasn't then too high for you to be OK with it.
A lot of companies actually underprice their stuff a little relative to the market to avoid outrage and accusations of gouging. It's easy to find these -- look for the shortages. Proper pricing prevents shortages, by definition. But people tend to get a lot more pissed off if once or twice a month, eggs cost $40/carton, than if once or twice a month, eggs have run out by the time they get to the store. The first feels like a human is out to get you, the second seems like a natural accident. Humans aren't rational economic actors.
Of course, this infuriates me as it does anyone with a semester of microeconomics.
I wonder if it may not be that humans are irrational actors so much that they have insufficient data and may not strictly speaking be optimizing for avoiding shortages.
I could see people being upset if they knew that eggs where out because some rich person bought a disproportionate number of them; it's just that normally they can't know.
I think that most people's preference for limited resources would be a low price with a limit on how many a person can purchase (which is what many stores do during shortages). It seems to me that people care more about making sure that everyone can get some eggs without being gouged than they care about avoiding shortages in aggregate.
